The WNBA and a one-man sports round table
An unfortunate strike against the WNBA is that it was originally owned by, still partly owned by, and rests entirely today in the shadow of the NBA.The National Basketball Association clearly has had a pointed growth strategy, and it's one I question. They place their men's basketball franchises in North America’s largest markets, then, after that, seem to favor secondary cities that boast no other major professional sports teams. You will find no top-tier professional basketball in Pittsburgh, Kansas City, St. Louis, Baltimore, San Diego, or Cincinnati, collectively home of 13 sports franchises, but you will in Sacramento, Memphis, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Orlando, Portland, and Oklahoma City. There’s no major football, baseball, or hockey in any of these latter seven towns, but because the NBA believed (and still believes, in the case of applicable cities) in pairing men’s and women’s pro teams together by city (and even by nickname-- i.e., the Timberwolves/Lynx of Minnesota, the Suns/Mercury of Phoenix), that leaves at least a dozen major American cities without top-of-the-line pro basketball of any kind. It also leaves the women’s game relegated to a summer activity, and to second-tier status seemingly by its construction. They have an NBA one-off logo, but they are Robin to the NBA's Batman.
Take St. Louis as the perfect example of a deprived city. This past winter, the National Football League’s Rams split for Los Angeles, where team owner Stan Kroenke can now shop more conveniently at Rodeo Drive toupee shops. That leaves MLB’s Cardinals and the NHL’s Blues as the two STL franchises. The Gateway City is 47% African-American, and the WNBA is predominately African-American, but between the two local sports teams, there is currently only one African-American athlete, and believe it or not, he’s a hockey player-- and also, technically, Canadian. We know the NBA holds a grudge against the city ever since the NBA/ABA merger of 1976, when it got swindled fair and square in a business deal by the Silna brothers, Ozzie and Daniel, who owned the ABA’s Spirits of St. Louis. In return for folding their ABA team, the league has paid the brothers a percentage of league TV revenue in perpetuity that has now surpassed $200 million.
St. Louis should be considered an extraordinary, untapped market for women’s basketball. Kansas City needs a team too. Taxpayers there foot the bill for the $276 million Sprint Center, hoping to lure either an NHL or NBA team. Eleven years later, they have neither. No major sports league has tapped adequately into the potential for a cross-state rivalry between nearly-equal-size Missouri cities that produced what was then the most-watched World Series (most total households) in baseball history in 1985. The Midwest has been hugely supportive of women’s college basketball. Not far up the road from Kansas City here in Des Moines, girls’ high school basketball draws even in attendance with boys’ at the state level. Popular and successful collegiate women’s programs dot the Big 12 Conference.
The WNBA might actually become profitable if the Association stopped treating it as simply an advertising extension of their priority product-- men's basketball, if they stop simply placing their teams in arenas that basketball fans too often can’t be troubled to return to for summer outings after the NBA season concludes. Now they even have a television deal that puts the men's summer league games on ESPN in seasonal competition with the WNBA. I have one of the games on right now in the background. It's between the junior Celtics and the junior Cavaliers.
It frustrates me personally when I see the powerful cultural impact the WNBA is capable of having. I want in! Minnesota Lynx players, an overwhelming majority of which are African-American, sported t-shirts during their pre-game warm-ups Monday night that displayed solidarity with recent police shooting victims Alton Sterling and Philando Castile-- as well as the Dallas Police Department, incidentally. Their collective statement caused four off-duty police officers on private security detail to walk off the job at Minneapolis' Target Center-- part of the bizarre ritual American police have now developed pitting supporters of the policies of law enforcement by fear, misinformation, and murder against supporters of actual policing.
If the NBA had any foresight, they would re-locate their less-than-lucrative women’s basketball teams to cities that are the most-starved for basketball. They've already folded teams in the following NBA cities: Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Houston, Sacramento, Detroit, Orlando, Miami, and Portland, but then they expand or relocate to more NBA cities: Chicago, San Antonio, Atlanta, Dallas, and Indianapolis.
Instead of offsetting the teams against NBA big brother franchises and forcing fans inside during North America's warm summer months, move the games into the winter, basketball’s natural habitat, and pair them instead, perhaps, with hockey teams in cities that don’t share their arenas with NBA teams-- the aforementioned Blues, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Ottawa Senators, the Montreal Canadians, the Vancouver Canucks. Drop teams in some of those towns that the NBA has abandoned-- Kansas City, Cincinnati, Baltimore. Put a team in San Diego so that year-round warm weather sports fans in that locale have something to do between the end of the Chargers season at New Years, and the Padres’ home opener in April. How in the world do multicultural, progressive cities like Kansas City and San Diego not have women’s basketball? Does this make any sense? Who’s running this league? The answer to that is: some of the same people that made the business deal with the Silna brothers.
I would buy an entirely-new wardrobe of clothing supporting a WNBA team in St. Louis. Let’s bring the ABA-inspired multi-colored basketball back to St. Louis, and bring back the ABA team name, as well-- The Spirits of St. Louis. The Spirits live again, but this time, featuring chicks.
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The National League loses the All-Star Game again. What is it about the "This Time it Counts"-World Series home field concept that NL field managers still don't understand after 13 years? Forty-two-year-old novelty Mets pitcher Bartolo Colon is named to the team by his own manager with a 7-4 record, 65 strikeouts, a 3.28 ERA, and a 1.22 WHIP. The Cardinals' Carlos "Tsunami" Martinez stays home with an 8-6 record, 91 strikeouts, a 2.85 ERA, and a 1.16 WHIP. Ye there's no controversy. Little Pedro is not even a choice as an injury replacement. San Diego's Will Myers gets the start at designated hitter (in a National League city, huh?), his manager admits, because the game is in San Diego. Good Lord. The fans make the dumb decision of making the .237-hitting Addison Russell the NL's starting shortstop. Fine, unfortunate that he has to bat once. But twice! Sluggers like Starling Marte and Jonathan Lucroy only batted once off the bench. Premier hitting shortstops Corey Seager and Almedys Diaz only batted once. And why isn't Bryce Harper playing the whole game. Or Paul Goldschmidt the entire game as the DH. Instead of one substituting for the other. Play to win next time!
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The National League batting title trophy will now be named for Tony Gwynn. I'm sure Stan Musial finished second again, as he must have when they decided to name the All-Star MVP award after Ted Williams. (I'll let you look up the lifetime All-Star game records for both Williams and Musial.) Of course, Gwynn's eight-batting-title swing produced 135 career home runs. Musial's seven-batting-title swing produced 475.
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New York and Boston still rule Major League Baseball. I guess we've collectively forgiven steroid cheats Colon and David Ortiz. They are the princes of the midsummer ball. Yet all-world players Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, who played west of the Hudson, remain frozen out of the Hall of Fame.
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Serena Williams would already have more Grand Slam titles than anybody else if Margaret Court and Steffi Graf had sisters with the tennis talent of Venus Williams. The story arc of the Compton, California Williams sisters is, in my opinion, the third-most extraordinary/fascinating story in American sports history, and certainly #1 for the most positive. I would put only above them the O.J. Simpson rise-and-fall narrative and the saga of Steve Bartman.
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Kevin Durant had no choice but to sign with Golden State and create a new "super team." It was predestined. LeBron needs a new challenge.
posted by CM @ 9:07 PM
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