Ladies, Take It Up A Notch

(7/1/99)

I realized the other day why I am having trouble feeling anything more than tepid enthusiasm for the various sporting teams and leagues suddenly attaining popularity by featuring a novel gender in old games like basketball and soccer. I was watching the Washington Mystics get thrashed by the Houston Comets in one of the first games of the second WNBA season. The Mystics are bad, like all Washingon-area teams (except professional soccer), and they weren't doing anything to temporarily belie that fact on that Saturday afternoon. Knowing the game was a lost cause, I nevertheless felt the need to throw my sportswatching oar in the water with our local women's basketball team, doomed so quickly and unfairly to mediocrity. So when Sheryl Swoopes of the Comets hoisted a three-pointer that would have extended the lead from 18 to 21, I did what I would have done while watching a men's basketball game: I yelled "Swoopes! You suck!" And indeed, she laid a brick.

Strangely, this sequence did not produce the profound satisfaction it normally does.

I tried again: as the Houston crowd yelled "DEE-fense," I shouted my customary addendum of "SUCKS!" This only made it worse (the feeling, not the defense). What was this emotion? It took a whole plate of nachos to realize it, but what I felt was…shame. After all, women haven't had a league of their own, Geena Davis movies notwithstanding, that could command the national spotlight like this for a long time. Why couldn't I be positive, cheer for Washington and not against Houston, and just enjoy the flow of the game?

I quickly changed the channel to arena football.

Men will not enjoy women's sports until they are allowed, by custom and acknowledged right, to enjoy them in a male way. The current attitude towards women's sports is that we should just be glad they're there, and we should support them so they provide examples for young women who wish to become sporting. There is this general halo surrounding pro women's sports coverage which seems to eschew criticism in favor of a effusive approval of the sports themselves. This is a very emotionally functional, empathetic, womanly way to root for sports, and it is no damn fun.

Men, by contrast, constantly mock teams they don't like and make up unflattering nicknames for opposing players, while saving special hatreds for the home team's performers who may not be performing at their absolute peak. George Steinbrenner called one of his own starting pitchers a "fat pussy [rhymes with fussy] toad." Patrick Ewing is referred to by those in the know as "The Missing Link," a reference to his incredible ugliness. My personal favorite moment in watching sports occurred recently when I was in the second row at Wrigley Field with the always-estimable Robert Kahn and my redoubtable godfather Mark and his sister Mary. Mr. Kahn and I mocked the San Diego Padre Ruben Rivera to the point where he stared directly at our section, then hit a home run just to spite us. (I think he may have wanted his team to win, also, but his efforts proved futile.) The general tenor of women's sports so far has been "glad to be here." The general tenor of men's sports is "what have you done for me lately?"

The Washington Mystics are example one. They have the best player in women's college basketball history, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Nikki McCray, who are seventh and fifth in the league in scoring, respectively. They seem to be eager to blow a double-digit lead every time they get one, and have three wins and eight losses. If the Washington Wizards (the men's team) were displaying such ineptitude, local columnists and ESPN analysts would be calling for the coach's head on a platter. Instead, whatever protests there are drown in a sea of feel-good coverage. The Mystics are losers. Something needs to be done. Nothing is. I keep looking for outrage and not finding any.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's better to act like the competition between determined, skilled athletes actually matters, even if it descends (sometimes joyfully) into unmoderated bad taste and foul language, than to simply be content with having a team at all. (Well, maybe I am.) Still, it's no accident that the only women's sport which features rivalries, bad blood and trash-talking, women's tennis, is also the only one males watch. I would really love to be able to watch women's basketball with full enthusiasm, since I enjoy most sporting competition and the WNBA features more players who can make midrange jump shots than the NBA does. But I can't stand this feeling that I should be circumscribing my normal vicious criticism of everything. Until we start acting like women's sports are a fierce competition and not a cheery celebration, I'll stick with arena football.

Well, now the Mystics are pretty good now. I even went to a Mystics game last season with my sister. Two women and a young girl (I'm not going to try to figure out the family dynamic there) were sitting next to us. For some reason, the two women were rooting for the New York Liberty, the opposing team, even though they were in D.C. and this game was to determine home-court advantage in the upcoming playoffs. I rooted rather loudly for the Mystics, and thought I was ruling the seats immediately around me, until I heard the little girl yell, with one of the women beaming proudly beside her as if she had just taught the girl the times tables, "Mystics suck! Mystics suck!"

The WNBA has become a more normal league.

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