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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Opinion: Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are in the WNBA now. Stop
telling them to ‘play nice’
Opinion by Frankie de la Cretaz
Updated:
11:36 AM EDT, Thu April 18, 2024
Source: CNN
Women’s basketball finally has the kind of audience it deserves,
with the NCAA Championship Game in what the “Caitlin Clark
effect” and “a long time coming.” That is great for the game
and has brought in a ton of new fans. It also means there are more eyes
on the sport than ever before, with stars Clark and Angel Reese, among
others, being drafted into the WNBA Monday night as watched.
With an increased audience has come a lot of “calling out” of the
behavior of the athletes, whether it’s Clark or Reese’s trash
talking — despite that it’s not personal and they don’t hate
each other — or WNBA vets like Diana Taurasi taking digs at the
incoming rookies.
“Reality is coming,” about Clark’s success in college.
“There’s levels to this thing. And that’s just life. We all went
through it. You see it on the NBA side and you’re going to see it on
this side. You look superhuman playing against some 18-year-olds, but
you’re going to come play with some grown women that have been
playing professional basketball for a long time.” At Outsports,
“a truly odd, disrespectful moment from Taurasi” while others have
implied the 20-year veteran with the incoming rook.
The public critique of the in-game actions of these players has been
harsh, undeserved and completely removed from the context in which
their chippiness exists. It’s also fostered a toxic environment for
these women in ways that go far beyond trash talk on the court. “I
have been attacked so many times,” received “death threats” and
“been sexualized, threatened,” in a post-game press conference
following LSU’s loss in the Elite Eight, marking the end of her
collegiate career. “I’m still a human. All this has happened since
I won the National Championship and I haven’t been happy since
then.”
What masquerades as “criticism” from the public can cross the line
into straight-up harassment, all because women’s basketball players
like Reese engage in the tried-and-true art of talking trash to an
opponent.
This criticism is sexist — how often do we expect men to play nice?
Many people have noted the double standard when it comes to what men
are allowed to say on the court, including the fact that, historically,
players in the women’s game for things that are a routine part of
the men’s game.
Kalani Brown, a WNBA player for the Dallas Wings who won an NCAA
Championship with Baylor University in 2019 that when she was
playing in college, athletes couldn’t get chippy the way players do
now because they would get called for a technical but she is glad
that players can talk it up today. “It’s just kind of the stigma
that we’ve always had,” she said. “These kids that are coming up
are breaking it.”
Beyond the obvious sexism, the criticism also ignores that the
women’s game has always been full of good-natured rivalries. The new
kids might be breaking the mold — but they’re not the first to go
hard at each other. Sports is a form of storytelling and there’s no
protagonist without an antagonist, no hero without a villain. The WNBA
players who highlighted that. Stories ranged from and the other
player getting called for the foul to to .
What about in 2017 when the San Antonio Stars’ Monique Currie was
asked about the New York Liberty’s Brittany Boyd getting called for a
technical foul after slapping the ball out of Currie’s hands and
mouthing off to her and , “I couldn’t think straight because her
breath was stinking?”
Or following a viral moment during the 2021 WNBA Finals between Kahleah
Copper, then on the Chicago Sky, and the Phoenix Mercury’s Sophie
Cunningham, when Copper featuring a photo of the incident? Or when
Taurasi reportedly broke a locker room door following the Mercury’s
loss to the Sky in the 2021 WNBA Finals, the Sky trolled the veteran
player by ? Or the Sky’s Marina Mabrey’s ?
Longtime WNBA viewers will be well acquainted with Taurasi’s mouth,
whether it’s the number of times she’s featured in the
aforementioned “welcome to the W” stories, her “I’ll see you
in the lobby later” after she didn’t like a call he made (which you
can also ) or her well-known love of heckling rookies.
“Every time you played rookies, you just wanted to f**king kill
them,” Sue Bird. Bird agreed, noting that “it’s so easy” to
best first-year players.
“It’s physically punking them,” Taurasi continued. “It’s
mental bullying that takes place right before the ball goes up. It
happens in different ways like ‘Oh you had such a great senior year.
I’m about to bust your ass right now.’”
The WNBA even nodded to this history in its new promotional video ahead
of the 2024 season. The spot, notes that the league is known for its
“super welcoming” environment before showing a clip of Breanna
Stewart blocking a layup from then-rookie Olivia Nelson-Ododa, and that
it’s a place where “communication is highly valued” before
cutting to clips of Taurasi and Chelsea Gray yelling at people.
“The vet talking about the rookie, that’s always happened,”
comedian and women’s basketball superfan Morgan Murphy . “It’s
not until somebody outside of that frames it as ‘women attacking
women,’ that it becomes that to people who also probably didn’t
watch the whole interview [or] read the whole article.”
Sports rivalries are part of what makes the games so fun. Why do we
encourage men to have them but criticize women for the same? “If we
can’t express how the guys do, how do you expect us to react?” LSU
guard Kateri Poole . “We’re gonna talk trash. It’s just the
reality of the game and it makes the game more exciting … What
we’re doing and what other teams are doing is just empowering
women.”
Having athletes fans love to hate gives them someone to root for — or
against — and adds a level of spice to the game that you just can’t
get any other way. Sports are entertainment and it’s always more
enjoyable when there’s conflict involved; after all, tension is what
defines a good story. I don’t want to see less trash talking, I want
to see more. I don’t want to see women pressured to be polite or
likable, I want them to be allowed to be a**holes. Let women athletes
be haters — sports needs more of them.
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