2020 WNBA Jersey Sales Show Old Guard Is Finally Getting Its Due
By Tamryn Spruill Old guard WNBA players are finally get their due from mainstream media. But what about the younger class of women's basketball players not named Sabrina Ionescu? On Friday, the league announced before tipoff of Game 1 of the 2020 WNBA Finals that the orange WNBA logo hoodie in 2020 became the bestselling merchandise piece in the league’s history. The hoodie, popularized by the late Kobe Bryant, a fierce supporter of the league and a mentor to many of its players, is “the most popular item this season across official online retail partner Fanatics’ network of e-commerce sites, including WNBAStore.com,” according to a league statement. The signature item also has been embraced by NBA players like LeBron James and other celebrities. But when it comes to individual player jerseys, the old guard reigns supreme while younger players, with the exception of Ionescu, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 WNBA Draft, float beneath the radar. Former No. 1 picks from recent years who got little or no jersey love include: Jackie Young (2019), A'ja Wilson (2018) (sixth in sales), Kelsey Plum (2017), Breanna Stewart (2016) (seventh in sales) and Jewell Loyd (2015). Sue Bird, an 11-time All-Star and three-time champion with the Seattle Storm, had the bestselling jersey this year in spite of playing just 11 of 22 regular-season games due to knee soreness and load management after missing the 2019 season because of the knee. That all but one player in the top five for jersey sales are veterans on course for induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as soon as they are eligible suggests fans may be buying up the gear before these players retire and their garb becomes unavailable outside of auction. Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury (second in sales), Candace Parker of the Los Angeles Sparks (third in sales) and Maya Moore of the Minnesota Lynx (fifth in sales) complete the top five, with recent league MVPs A'ja Wilson (2020), Elena Delle Donne (2019) and Breanna Stewart (2018) coming in sixth, eighth and seventh, respectively. Satou Sabally of the Dallas Wings, the No. 2 pick overall pick in 2020, joins Ionescu as the only rookies on the list. WNBA jersey sales in 2020 Sue Bird, Seattle Storm Diana Taurasi, Phoenix Mercury Candace Parker, Los Angeles Sparks Sabrina Ionescu, New York Liberty Maya Moore, Minnesota Lynx A’ja Wilson, Las Vegas Aces Breanna Stewart, Seattle Storm Elena Delle Donne, Washington Mystics Courtney Vandersloot, Chicago Sky Satou Sabally, Dallas Wings It is Bird's first time at the top of the list. Her increased mainstream profile due to media appearances in the offseason is potentially the biggest contributor to this result. Additionally, Bird's popularity has soared outside of the basketball space because of her relationship with soccer star Megan Rapinoe, with whom she appears in a television commercial for Symetra. Any recognition for Bird and the other WNBA veterans is long overdue and the power that comes with cultural ubiquity was long ago earned. Taurasi, Parker and other history-making stalwarts of the league deserve similar culturally-ubiquitous shine. But the league's new crop of stars, such as Natasha Cloud, Delle Donne, Stewart and Wilson -- plus the promising talents of tomorrow such as the 2020 and 2019 Rookies of the Year Crystal Dangerfield and Napheesa Collier, respectively, both with the Minnesota Lynx -- have made strong cases for media worthiness. Their accomplishments on the court and their personalities, leadership and extracurricular pursuits, demand visibility. Media make the stars. These dynamic women should not have to wait until they are nearing the age of 40, like Bird, to draw the gaze of the mainstream and the endorsement dollars that come with it.
ICYMI: Why America Doesn’t Deserve Sports Right Now
By Tamryn Spruill “Come back, Maya!” Imani McGee-Stafford exclaimed during a call with me on Saturday, June 13. “Come back, Maya!” She was referring, of course, to Maya Moore: the WNBA star who called a temporary pause on her basketball career at the basketball-prime age of 29, just off the heels of winning her fourth WNBA championship in 2017 with the Minnesota Lynx. The future first-ballot Hall of Famer vowed to throw all of her energy into freeing Jonathan Irons: an African-American man from her home state of Missouri whom she believes was wrongly convicted. McGee-Stafford, like most WNBA fans, misses seeing Moore on the court. She also understands and respects the sacrifice Moore is making for a greater good. Her own decision to step away from basketball for two years to attend law school was influenced by “the blueprint” Moore laid down when she traded in a quest for game wins with a pursuit of legal victories on behalf of Irons and criminal justice reform generally. The 2020 WNBA season was supposed to begin on May 15, but tipoff was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The league announced on June 15 that an abbreviated 22-game season would be played from the confines of IMG Academy in Florida beginning in late July. Yet, the economic and health crises the pandemic presented were compounded by civil unrest stemming from the police killings of unarmed African Americans, which shifted the players’ focus to social justice issues. With two viruses raging—the coronavirus and systemic racism leading to dead Black citizens because of police brutality and modern-day lynching—should teams be returning to competition? While some believe Black athletes should not be entertaining a U.S. fan base while Black Americans are still being gunned down on a daily basis, even amid ongoing protests stemming from the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, the other view is that a return to play will return players to a large platform from which they can work to effect change. “I see both sides,” McGee-Stafford said, about whether the nation should return to basketball. During my conversation on June 15 with JaVale McGee—McGee-Stafford’s older brother and two-time NBA champion now vying for his third title with the Los Angeles Lakers—the 7-foot-0 center said of a return to game action: “I’m more concerned about COVID, if anything.” The NBA will finish its 2019-20 season at Disney World in Orlando. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” –Martin Luther King, Jr. Professional athletes are some of the healthiest humans among us, but the coronavirus remains highly contagious and COVID-19 potentially deadly, especially for older people and those with compromised immune systems from underlying health issues. Once the WNBA players and NBA players enter IMG Academy and Disney World, respectively, they will not be able to exit. But arena workers, vendors, television crews and others will be coming and going, posing risks of spreading the coronavirus to everyone at the sites. With Florida reporting record-high single-day cases of the coronavirus, the threat is real. Major League Baseball, though mired in a battle with its players’ association, has announced the closure of its spring training facilities in Florida due to the spike in reported cases. If the sporting show must go on, no players are more deserving of a season than those in the WNBA. The Women’s Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA) reached a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the league and deserves to capitalize on that momentum. The WNBPA’s accomplishment was so profound that the players’ union was named recipient of the 2020 Eleanor Roosevelt Human Right Award. Yet, it is impossible to fully embrace a return to sports at a socially critical time for race relations and during a pandemic—both caused by life-endangering viruses that are killing Black Americans in numbers exceeding those of other racial groups. A gold-medal winning gas station attendant For Jesse Owens, the Olympic village in 1936 Berlin was “one of the seven wonders of the world.” In Germany, in spite of Adolph Hitler’s reign, Owens had been treated with basic decency and respect by the German people that he had not known as a Black man living in the United States. Still, this was Nazi Germany, and Hitler was using the Olympic Games as a tool to prove Aryan white supremacy. When Owens ascended the medal stand, the crowd cheered and Hitler exited the stadium without acknowledging Owens’ historic accomplishments: four gold medals and three world records. The momentary snub witnessed by the world was no worse than what Owens had experienced on a daily basis, from birth, in a segregated United States built from the forced labor of Africans brought to the Americas in shackles. The son of sharecroppers, Owens had to work picking cotton from the age of seven years old, something many Americans, of any racial persuasion, cannot fathom today. From those beginnings, he became a track star and in high school, which led him to higher education at Ohio State University. “His life, when he came back (from the 1936 Berlin Games), was quickly mired in American racism, and the lack of opportunities for Black men, even famous black men,” history professor David Steigerwald said in the 2011 documentary “Jesse Owens: Enduring Spirit.” The documentary reveals that the White athletes who won medals at the 1936 Games were invited to visit the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Owens and the other Black athletes were not. “The hypocrisy of American race relations followed Owens home,” Steigerwald said. “He won his medals and lots of Americans declared it a strike against Aryan racism without bothering to check their own.” What Owens returned to was an inability to find sustainable, dignified employment. He participated in “spectacle” races, such as running against horses and racing around baseball diamonds during games. For a time, he worked as a gas station attendant. The promises of big employment opportunities he’d been given while in Berlin had all been lies told to get him to compete in Games many African Americans disagreed with. “It became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, shake my hand or have me up to their suite, but no one was going to offer me a job,” Owens said of his post-Olympics struggles. Thus, he navigated the segregated life he’d known his whole life. As a star track athlete at Ohio State, he had been banned from living in the dorms with his White teammates and was forbidden to sit down and have a meal with his White counterparts, despite being captain of the team. But that was then, when water fountains had signs screaming “WHITES ONLY” and African Americans, after paying for a meal, were denied the option of sitting down to eat it in the restaurant where they’d just spent hard-earned money from underpaying, barely-there jobs. Times have changed. Right? The two deadly viruses of 2020 It is now 2020 and humankind is facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists are working around the clock to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Sorry anti-vaxxers, but history shows vaccines can manage or stop viral spreads, such as was the case in the 1950s with the polio vaccine. History also shows a history of Black athletes protesting racial injustice, but we’ll return there in a moment. Like COVID-19, racism is a deadly virus, but it differs from its polio counterpart because a vaccine does not exist to stop its spread. It differs from the coronavirus because governments and institutions are not embarking upon emergency efforts to develop a vaccine to eradicate its spread. By the 1950s, around the same time as the development of the polio vaccine, Black Americans had had enough of the segregated, second-class lives assigned to them. They began pushing back. The concept of “separate but equal” was exposed as a tool of further injustice—schools in Black neighborhoods did not have adequate resources, making access to equal education impossible. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that school segregation based on race was unconstitutional, paving the way for schools to be desegregated. Passage of Brown vs. Board of Education was met with the expected hostility and violence of White people who did not want their children in the same room with Black kids. It is 2020, and racial inequities still exist because the virus racism hasn’t been stopped. The inequities simply show up in different ways. Following some nifty shape-shifting mutations, the virus racism produces the same dehumanizing results. Our nation is in crisis in 2020 (which hopefully will become a point of reckoning) because of sustained resistance to full equality and derision towards those, including Black athletes, who have dared to use their platforms in defense of inalienable human rights. Of power and peace By the time the Mexico City Olympics rolled around in October 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, like all African Americans, were fed up the institutionalized racism that showed up in every aspect of their lives. Black Americans didn’t get the good jobs. If they did, it was a rare occurrence – just like today. If they got jobs, they struggled to earn salaries equal to their White counterparts – just like today. Though American life was segregated on paper by mandate of the Supreme Court of the United States, those changes did not manifest into equal access to opportunity and better living conditions because the virus racism lived on. By the time Tommie Smith and John Carlos arrived in Mexico, the Civil Rights Movement had brought landmark legislative achievements designed to treat the symptoms caused by the virus racism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 “ended segregation in public places and banned employment...
Kelly Loeffler: An Affront to the Dream
By Tamryn Spruill Scroll through the Twitter feed of the late John Lewis, Civil Rights icon and Representative for the state of Georgia’s fifth congressional district, and you will see receipts from a lifetime of service. On July 10, he tweeted an official statement opposing Donald J. Trump’s intended changes to the student visa program, which would have prohibited international students from staying in the country if their classes moved to online status because of the coronavirus pandemic. Three days prior, he tweeted the mug shot from his May 1961 arrest and wrote: “59 years ago today I was released from Parchman Farm Penitentiary after being arrested in Jackson, MS for using a so-called ‘white’ restroom during the Freedom Rides of 1961.” Lewis saw more than the inside of jail cells during his fight for racial justice—he saw his life flash before his eyes under the brutal violence of police officers, which he described in a tweet on March 7. Lewis’ reflections on the brutalities and sacrifices of the past never overshadowed his ongoing efforts for justice—first, in the streets of the segregated South, and eventually as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lewis passed away on Friday at age 80 following a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He leaves behind grieving family, friends and colleagues, and a legacy of do-gooding and troublemaking matched only by his peers: Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been a mentor to Lewis before King was assassinated in 1968, and C.T. Vivian, a minister and “field general” to Dr. King, who also passed away on Friday. Georgia Senator and Atlanta Dream owner Kelly Loeffler on Saturday tweeted condolences to Lewis’ family, in a message that rang shallow and disingenuous. “John Lewis changed Georgia, America, and the world for the better,” Loeffler tweeted. “He lived a life of service and his impact cannot be overstated,” adding that she and her husband are “praying for his loved ones during this difficult time.” Yes, Lewis changed the world, and he survived imprisonment and “gave a little blood” during his fight for racial equality to do so. Yes, Lewis changed America, and he did it by speaking up against wrongdoing, the same way the players of the Dream and the entire WNBA are speaking up against the ongoing brutalization and killings of African Americans by police. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up,” Lewis said. “You have to say something; you have to do something.” More powerfully, Lewis urged young people to accept risk on behalf of the greater good. “I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way,” Lewis said. “To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.” The players of the WNBA, inspired to transform the 2020 season into one big campaign for racial justice, are doing just that—making good trouble—in a way that would make Representative Lewis proud. Loeffler, on the other hand, who is politicizing their efforts and transacting on Black people’s pain? Not so much. Kelly Loeffler: An affront to the Dream Dr. King’s, the American, the WNBA’s and otherwise From trouble in the IMG Academy bubble located in COVID-19 hot spot Florida to Elena Delle Donne trending on Twitter following her essay in The Players’ Tribune concerning the WNBA’s panel of physicians’ decision to deny her request for a medical exemption, the league is getting lots of attention heading toward the July 25 of the delayed and abbreviated 2020 WNBA season—May 15 was the original regular-season start date and 22 games will played instead of the 36 required under the new collective bargaining agreement—and much of it isn’t great. Just north of where the pandemic season is playing out, dual crises smolder in the backyard of the Atlanta Dream. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp—whose claim to the governorship hinged on a recount against Stacey Abrams (an African-American woman with strong leadership roots in Atlanta who serves on the WNBPA Board of Advocates) and remains in question—has sued the city of Atlanta over Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ choice to mandate that all citizens wear masks in public spaces to quell the explosion of coronavirus cases in the Southeastern United States. Bottoms, also an African-American woman, is battling the coronavirus herself. And wedged within these political battles are Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loeffler and the team’s players, past and present, who are engaged in a war of their own against racial injustice. When players Natasha Cloud of the defending champion Washington Mystics and Renee Montgomery of the Dream opted out of the 2020 WNBA season to throw their full attention into social justice initiatives, the players—80 percent of whom are Black women—advocated for the league to dedicate the season to social justice. WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced the league’s agreement to emblazon BLACK LIVES MATTER onto the courts of IMG Academy and to proceed with a #SAYHERNAME campaign, conceived by original Dream star Angel McCoughtry, whose name will always be synonymous with the team, that will add that hashtag and the names of Black Americans killed by police—like Breonna Taylor’s, whose killers still have not been charged—onto the backs of players’ jerseys. Loeffler, whose politics came to the forefront when she accepted an appointment to the U.S. Senate, spoke vehemently against the WNBA’s choice to embrace Black Lives Matter and in a letter to commissioner Engelbert stated, “The truth is, we need less — not more politics in sports.” True, which is why Loeffler should have kept her mouth shut on the matter, the way she did in 2016—pre-Senate appointment—when players donned “I can’t breathe” warmup t-shirts before games to protest a spate of police killings of unarmed African-American men that year. “My personal opinion is that she has to play the political game to look good in front of her peers,” McCoughtry said on Saturday during media availability for the Las Vegas Aces. It is her first year in an 11-year career playing for a team other than the Dream. “If you want to play the political game, do that, but don’t include us in it,” McCoughtry added. “So, that’s where I’m at with it—leave us out of it. When we’re talking about social injustice and things, that’s not politics—that’s human rights. So, I don’t even know why she’s mixing the two.” The answer is simple: Loeffler is using her privilege as a wealthy, White politician in a transaction for political gain at the players’, teams’ and league’s expense. She is using the power white supremacist structures have afforded her to take something for herself at the expense of players enduring the hardship of playing in the “bubble” in swampy, critter-ridden Florida, unable to leave, while also experiencing personal reckonings with the state of the nation due to what McCoughtry on Saturday referred to as a “pandemic” of racism. In line with the views of the base she is courting, Loeffler appears to be denouncing Black Lives Matter as a political organization every chance she gets, further politicizing a human rights matter and misconstruing the aim of Black Lives Matter and the goals the WNBA, its teams and the players have for the season. “In a time when polarizing politics is as divisive as ever, sports has the power to be a unifying antidote,” Loeffler stated during a campaign stop in Georgia, according to NPR. “There is no room for racism in this country. We cannot have it. But there is an organization, different from the saying, an organization called Black Lives Matter founded on Marxist principles. Marxism supports socialism.” Black Lives Matter embraces no official political agenda and the organization’s mission statement asserts, in part: “Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.” When Loeffler was appointed to the U.S. Senate in late 2019, the WNBA appeared to have adopted an approach of keeping the freshman senator’s political dealings separate from the league’s affairs. On draft day in April, for example, Engelbert referred me to Loeffler’s senate office when I inquired about the insider trading allegations against her. When the players began demanding that Loeffler sell her ownership stake in the team, Engelbert stated that the WNBA will not force Loeffler to do so. Loeffler, however, has failed to separate her political ambitions from her role as team co-owner, for the opportunity to politicize the 2020 WNBA season was too tempting. But the reasons she is wrong for the Dream specifically run much deeper. Loeffler’s Antithesis to the Dream “Yeah, when I first got drafted, my goal, of course, was to retire in Atlanta, and play in the city where, you know, Martin Luther King originated, and you know, it’s a very predominantly Black city,” McCoughtry reflected on Saturday when I asked whether she believes Loeffler is living up to the original vision of the Dream. “So, things change, of course, but as far as Kelly’s concerned, I think that as of right now she has not reflected what the Dream logo stands for,” she added. When then-WNBA president Donna Orender announced in late 2007 that the city of Atlanta was granted an expansion team, to be owned by local businessman J. Ronald Terwilliger, the next step was to come up with a team name, logo and colors. The ownership group and league agreed on Dream as the Atlanta team’s name to honor the Civil Rights legacy of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose fight for racial justice began in the...
Erasure: A Methodical and Exacting Choice
Even for a topic as grim as the potential for the coronavirus to kill a professional athlete, the WNBA and its players are left out of the conversation. A report by Will Fleitch in New York Magazine on Friday discussed the matter in reference to the NBA, NFL and MLB and omitted the WNBA, a league also returning action. Fleitch is not alone. In a NBC Nightly News segment on Saturday, Sam Brock, reporting from Miami on how rising coronavirus cases in Florida could impact the return of basketball, also failed to mention the WNBA in keeping what has become the industry standard regarding the longest running professional women’s sports league in the country. Also on Saturday, Chicago Sky guard Sydney Colson announced on Twitter that she has tested positive for the coronavirus. “I do the least and tested positive so I’m tryna see how folks who do the mooost are out here partying and feelin grand,” she tweeted. Fleitch did name-drop a women’s league in his reporting: the NWSL, a league made up mostly of white players. The WNBA, a league boasting approximately 80% Black women with an original 2020 season start date of May 15, was not. If Fleitch saw fit to mention the NWSL concerning the stoppage of sports in March, he was remiss not to discuss that Sydney Wiese of the Los Angeles Sparks had the coronavirus and recovered; she caught it while playing in Spain during the WNBA offseason and announced it on Twitter on March 27. And, so it goes in the world of mainstream media — controlled predominantly by white men who historically allot ample budgets toward the coverage of men’s sports leagues and athletes and systematically marginalize, diminish and reject coverage of women’s sports, and especially those featuring many Black athletes. Society has been more willing to embrace women in individual sports, especially if they are petite and cute like the gymnasts who made up the “Magnificent Seven” at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Simone Biles of today, or tennis players of slight build, like teen phenom Coco Gauff, or whose appearance suits the heteronormative male gaze like, Maria Sharapova’s. But a special vileness is reserved for women athletes who carry larger, more muscular physiques, identify as LGBTQ or shirk heteronormative beauty standards. People did not rumor that Lolo Jones, Sharapova or Elena Delle Donne were born men. They did suggest that Caster Semenya, Serena Williams and Brittney Griner had been. A tale of two 133-pound, gay women with short locks With the WNBA made up of 80% Black women, including many who identify as LGBTQ, society not only has struggled to embrace the league, it has in some ways abjectly rejected it, just as it has marginalized and discriminated against Black women and LGBTQ people across time. Soccer star and activist Megan Rapinoe may be gay, but she’s also palatable to the American public because she presents as anyone’s quirky pal in a similar way that Ellen DeGeneres does. With the women’s national soccer team rising to prominence during its whirlwind World Cup win, Rapinoe has now captured the attention of brands and advertisers. For all that she has accomplished in her sport, the endorsement deals are hard-earned and long overdue. But the likes of the WNBA’s Courtney Williams probably would not enjoy a similar mainstream embrace. Rapinoe, a 5-foot-6 midfielder, is deemed worthy of commercial deals but, say, Courtney Williams, a 5-foot-8 guard known for her charisma is not. The difference between them physically is two inches in height, race (Rapinoe is White and Williams is Black) and gender presentation. Rapinoe presents in a style that does not conform to feminine ideals, but is feminine enough — for example, she wears makeup — to not be threatening. Williams, however, is covered in tattoos, doesn’t wear makeup and dresses in what the more binarily conditioned among us would call “boys’ clothes.” If Williams’ 2019 Finals appearance isn’t enough to convince those in the BUT RAPINOE IS A CHAMPION camp, why not Seimone Augustus, who is of similar age and winning hardware? For advertisers and brands to get on board, mainstream media must. Now that we’re at a moment of reckoning in America, media enterprises that historically have shunned the voices of people of color, especially those of Black women, must be held to account, even as they now clamor for the insights of Black journalists after rejecting pitch after pitch on topics of race and relegating those story concepts to NICHE (not catering to the White middle class) or CONTROVERSIAL (likely to make White people uncomfortable. They also must be held to account for failing — no, refusing (because it is not hard given the abundance of diverse talent out there) — to make newsrooms inclusive in the first place and now treating Black journalists like puppets. So, when these companies and editors pay lip service to women mattering, to Black lives mattering, to queer people mattering, it is incumbent upon us all — especially White people, and doubly so for White people with decision-making powers — to examine if the talk is being backed with action, and then take action if it is not. Tweeting the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag or changing a profile or background photo to an image with similar messaging is a performative gesture. The real work requires identifying ways to right historical wrongs, one action at a time. Journalists, especially those in mainstream media who discuss U.S. professional sports broadly and omit the WNBA, should know their work comes off as exclusionary — anti-Black, anti-woman and anti-queer. Also, their work smacks of journalistic inaccuracy and erases the WNBA from the recorded history of humanity. Omitting specific groups in a society as diverse as ours is never innocuous; it always erases the contributions of the people in those groups and communicates very specific messages about inequality — which lives are valued and which lives are not valued. So, as America fumbles through attempts at rectifying its legacy of racial injustice, mainstream media must reckon with the role they have played in fortifying this injustice take actionable steps to ensure inclusivity in reporting. Otherwise, women of the WNBA will be relegated to the Hidden Figures status of NASA engineers Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary W. Jackson that the world will learn about on a fifty-year delay. This is no longer acceptable. Inclusive reporting is required in a diverse society and media companies can take these actions to produce it: #1. End the practice of defaulting male. Men do not have ownership over sports and, more likely than not, any men’s league has a women’s equivalent. So, when broadly referring to “the return of basketball” in a headline, the story should discuss both the NBA and WNBA because both leagues are preparing to return. Writers must specify that the story is about men’s basketball if the story is about men’s basketball alone. Otherwise, readers assume the articles are about men’s sports (and search engine algorithms do too). When reporting on NCAA underdogs for CBS Sports, for example, these writers needed to specify NCAA Men’s Tournament. From the same outlet, the authors this article needed to specify that their work is about the top NCAA men’s coaches of tomorrow. #2. Have a WNBA reporter on standby. With the WNBA season played during the summer months, traditional thinking holds that there’s nothing for a reporter to write about during the long autumn and winter of the offseason. Yet, many players compete in leagues overseas during this time and those who stay stateside engage in various off-court endeavors. Thus, the stories are there, and by maintaining coverage in the offseason, an audience already will be engaged when the WNBA season returns. Financially, online media as an industry is in the toilet, so if a staff position can’t be opened right away, at least keep a WNBA freelance journalist around who can report on an as-needed basis. It is no longer acceptable for mainstream sports media companies to not at least have a freelancer on standby. #3. Stop omitting the Houston Comets from discussions of pro sports dynasties. When sportswriters mention the dearth of championships for the city of Houston, it is hard not to secretly hope an asteroid plummets to Earth and lands on their heads. Sure, there are the problematic Astros and their 2017 World Series “win,” plus the Rockets’ NBA titles in 1994 and 1995. But Houston should consider itself lucky to have been home to the WNBA’s first dynasty, the Comets, who won four straight championships between 1997 and 2000. Not only should the Comets be in all the conversations concerning Houston and sports dynasties, they should be recognized as the gold standard for dynastic athletic reign. Fragile male egos do not change the Comets’ achievements and if pro men’s leagues want to dominate this conversation, they’d better get busy winning four titles in a row. If current writers and editors can't or won't rise to the demands of their profession, media managers must tap into the pool of overqualified Black women who have stacked degrees and experience while being passed over repeatedly by lesser qualified white colleagues. Unlike their white counterparts, Black women don't need to be coached on the culture; they are the culture. And by living and working in a white supremacist social structure, they are also fluent in whiteness.
Why America Doesn’t Deserve Sports Right Now
By Tamryn Spruill “Come back, Maya!” Imani McGee-Stafford exclaimed during a call with me on Saturday, June 13. “Come back, Maya!” She was referring, of course, to Maya Moore: the WNBA star who called a temporary pause on her basketball career at the basketball-prime age of 29, just off the heels of winning her fourth WNBA championship in 2017 with the Minnesota Lynx. The future first-ballot Hall of Famer vowed to throw all of her energy into freeing Jonathan Irons: an African-American man from her home state of Missouri whom she believes was wrongly convicted. McGee-Stafford, like most WNBA fans, misses seeing Moore on the court. She also understands and respects the sacrifice Moore is making for a greater good. Her own decision to step away from basketball for two years to attend law school was influenced by “the blueprint” Moore laid down when she traded in a quest for game wins with a pursuit of legal victories on behalf of Irons and criminal justice reform generally. The 2020 WNBA season was supposed to begin on May 15, but tipoff was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The league announced on June 15 that an abbreviated 22-game season would be played from the confines of IMG Academy in Florida beginning in late July. Yet, the economic and health crises the pandemic presented were compounded by civil unrest stemming from the police killings of unarmed African Americans, which shifted the players’ focus to social justice issues. With two viruses raging—the coronavirus and systemic racism leading to dead Black citizens because of police brutality and modern-day lynching — should teams be returning to competition? While some believe Black athletes should not be entertaining a U.S. fan base while Black Americans are still being gunned down on a daily basis, even amid ongoing protests stemming from the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, the other view is that a return to play will return players to a large platform from which they can work to effect change. “I see both sides,” McGee-Stafford said, about whether the nation should return to basketball. During my conversation on June 15 with JaVale McGee — McGee-Stafford’s older brother and two-time NBA champion now vying for his third title with the Los Angeles Lakers — the 7-foot-0 center said of a return to game action: “I’m more concerned about COVID, if anything.” The NBA will finish its 2019-20 season at Disney World in Orlando. Professional athletes are some of the healthiest humans among us, but the coronavirus remains highly contagious and COVID-19 potentially deadly, especially for older people and those with compromised immune systems from underlying health issues. Once the WNBA players and NBA players enter IMG Academy and Disney World, respectively, they will not be able to exit. But arena workers, vendors, television crews and others will be coming and going, posing risks of spreading the coronavirus to everyone at the sites. With Florida reporting record-high single-day cases of the coronavirus, the threat is real. Major League Baseball, though mired in a battle with its players’ association, has announced the closure of its spring training facilities in Florida due to the spike in reported cases. If the sporting show must go on, no players are more deserving of a season than those in the WNBA. The Women’s Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA) reached a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the league and deserves to capitalize on that momentum. The WNBPA’s accomplishment was so profound that the players’ union was named recipient of the 2020 Eleanor Roosevelt Human Right Award. Yet, it is impossible to fully embrace a return to sports at a socially critical time for race relations and during a pandemic—both caused by life-endangering viruses that are killing Black Americans in numbers exceeding those of other racial groups. A gold medal-winning gas station attendant For Jesse Owens, the Olympic village in 1936 Berlin was “one of the seven wonders of the world.” In Germany, in spite of Adolph Hitler’s reign, Owens had been treated with basic decency and respect by the German people that he had not known as a Black man living in the United States. Still, this was Nazi Germany, and Hitler was using the Olympic Games as a tool to prove Aryan white supremacy. When Owens ascended the medal stand, the crowd cheered and Hitler exited the stadium without acknowledging Owens’ historic accomplishments: four gold medals and three world records. The momentary snub witnessed by the world was no worse than what Owens had experienced on a daily basis, from birth, in a segregated United States built from the forced labor of Africans brought to the Americas in shackles. The son of sharecroppers, Owens had to work picking cotton from the age of seven years old, something many Americans, of any racial persuasion, cannot fathom today. From those beginnings, he became a track star and in high school, which led him to higher education at Ohio State University. “His life, when he came back (from the 1936 Berlin Games), was quickly mired in American racism, and the lack of opportunities for Black men, even famous black men,” history professor David Steigerwald said in the 2011 documentary “Jesse Owens: Enduring Spirit.” The documentary reveals that the White athletes who won medals at the 1936 Games were invited to visit the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Owens and the other Black athletes were not. “The hypocrisy of American race relations followed Owens home,” Steigerwald said. “He won his medals and lots of Americans declared it a strike against Aryan racism without bothering to check their own.” What Owens returned to was an inability to find sustainable, dignified employment. He participated in “spectacle” races, such as running against horses and racing around baseball diamonds during games. For a time, he worked as a gas station attendant. The promises of big employment opportunities he’d been given while in Berlin had all been lies told to get him to compete in Games many African Americans disagreed with. “It became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, shake my hand or have me up to their suite, but no one was going to offer me a job,” Owens said of his post-Olympics struggles. Thus, he navigated the segregated life he’d known his whole life. As a star track athlete at Ohio State, he had been banned from living in the dorms with his White teammates and was forbidden to sit down and have a meal with his White counterparts, despite being captain of the team. But that was then, when water fountains had signs screaming “WHITES ONLY” and African Americans, after paying for a meal, were denied the option of sitting down to eat it in the restaurant where they’d just spent hard-earned money from underpaying, barely-there jobs. Times have changed. Right? The two deadly viruses of 2020 It is now 2020 and humankind is facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists are working around the clock to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Sorry anti-vaxxers, but history shows vaccines can manage or stop viral spreads, such as was the case in the 1950s with the polio vaccine. History also shows a history of Black athletes protesting racial injustice, but we’ll return there in a moment. Like COVID-19, racism is a deadly virus, but it differs from its polio counterpart because a vaccine does not exist to stop its spread. It differs from the coronavirus because governments and institutions are not embarking upon emergency efforts to develop a vaccine to eradicate its spread. By the 1950s, around the same time as the development of the polio vaccine, Black Americans had had enough of the segregated, second-class lives assigned to them. They began pushing back. The concept of “separate but equal” was exposed as a tool of further injustice—schools in Black neighborhoods did not have adequate resources, making access to equal education impossible. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that school segregation based on race was unconstitutional, paving the way for schools to be desegregated. Passage of Brown vs. Board of Education was met with the expected hostility and violence of White people who did not want their children in the same room with Black kids. It is 2020, and racial inequities still exist because the virus racism hasn’t been stopped. The inequities simply show up in different ways. Following some nifty shape-shifting mutations, the virus racism produces the same dehumanizing results. Our nation is in crisis in 2020 (which hopefully will become a point of reckoning) because of sustained resistance to full equality and derision towards those, including Black athletes, who have dared to use their platforms in defense of inalienable human rights. Of power and peace By the time the Mexico City Olympics rolled around in October 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, like all African Americans, were fed up the institutionalized racism that showed up in every aspect of their lives. Black Americans didn’t get the good jobs. If they did, it was a rare occurrence – just like today. If they got jobs, they struggled to earn salaries equal to their White counterparts – just like today. Though American life was segregated on paper by mandate of the Supreme Court of the United States, those changes did not manifest into equal access to opportunity and better living conditions because the virus racism lived on. By the time Tommie Smith and John Carlos arrived in Mexico, the Civil Rights Movement had brought landmark legislative achievements designed to treat the symptoms caused by the virus racism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 “ended segregation in public...