Why I Have A Hard Time Watching the WNBA

        I'm trying very hard to not write this in a way that sounds sexist. First off, understand, that I am probably in the 99th percentile of basketball fans on Earth. I will watch any game that I am either fortunate enough to catch live or is broadcast on TV. I don't care who is really playing, I'll watch. Whether it's the Public League 8th Grade City Semi-Finals or some random pick-up game, if there is a game going on it gets my undivided attention. I have this feeling regardless of whether it's men's or women's basketball. I mean this sincerely. It's due to my sports upbringing. I'm a proud graduate of Whitney M. Young Magnet High School. On top of it's many other achievements, Whitney Young has one of the premier women's basketball programs in not just the state, but the country. So early on I got to see some supremely talented female hoopers. I remember how dominant I thought Dominique Canty was. I remember watching Natasha Pointer, and Clarissa Flores routinely run 2 on 5 fastbreaks with ease, and when that got boring, take turns dismantling a teams half court defense.
      That's where my appreciation for the women's game began. From there, I really started paying attention. I actually became fans of particular players. I remember watching Ivory Latta at North Carolina and thinking she had nasty handles. I remember thinking Candace Wiggins had one of the best jumpshots I'd ever seen. I remember watching Candace Parker play and saying out loud, "Hold up. Is she playing point-center?" I remember that Olympic team when they had Cynthia Cooper, Lisa Leslie, and my homegirl Dawn Staley. Shortly after that, I remember the debut of the WNBA and honestly believing it was a good thing. I thought this will relieve my basketball addiction during the NBA off-season. Except for one thing...it didn't.

     I watched the first few games and never got into them. I wasn't sure why that was. I had been watching women's basketball for a while and up until that point, found myself fairly interested in the game. So why when there was finally a professional women's game, was I totally not interested. I remember one of my boys saying he could never get into the WNBA because there was something about knowing that every play was going to end with a layup, no matter what, that makes the game uninteresting. To be fair, he had a point. But it wasn't that for me. I was used to the difference in athleticism. Keep in my mind, I'm a basketball purist. I can appreciate the fundamentals of the game. (I still will insist to this day that Diana Taurasi is one of the game's best passers...ever). Yet every year, I say I will actually watch some games this season. Then I sit through a quarter and a half of a game and never cut it back on. I convinced myself it was simply because Chicago didn't have a team, and me being a hometown guy, I  needed something to root for. Then the Chicago Sky debuted and it didn't make a damn bit of difference to me.This was starting to bother me. I'll admit I am sexist when it comes to certain things. I'll probably never vote for a woman president. I tend to take female police officers (or most female authority figures for that matter) a little less seriously than their male counterparts. But basketball and rapping were two things where I did not have a gender bias. Yet I found all the WNBA games to be boring and mundane. Unless something like this happened.

Other than unsportsmanlike incidents like these, I found the games monotonous, low scoring, and boring. Yet occasionally I would still watch a woman's college game. So the problem had to be with the league itself.

       It wasn't until a year or two ago, when Brittany Griner, Elena Delle Donne, and (my newest crush) Skylar Diggins got drafted into the league that I realized what the problem was. These were three of the most dynamic women to hit the league at the same time in the WNBA's short history. This should have been the defining turning point for the league. The same way the NBA took off  from a marketing standpoint when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird came in, these three young ladies should have had a similar impact on their own league. Then the WNBA had a promo and were marketing Griner. Delle Donne, and Diggins as " The Three to See". And I remember thinking, " that's the dumbest, weakest, marketing tag-line I've ever heard. That's the best they could come up with?!?" And then it hit me. I could stomach the fact that the league isn't that athletic. I could deal with the low scoring and the excessive layups. I can get past the fact that some of these young ladies look a lil.....rough and tumble. I can tolerate the fact that they put ads on the uniforms now and they got these ladies looking like race car drivers. (The press conference pic of a player holding up a jersey loses a lil something when the jersey has the Boost Mobile logo on it.)  I could muscle through the boring commentators, analysts, and sideline reporters. But when you take all those things and combine them with horribly thought out marketing strategy, it becomes unbearable.
       See, what I understood was this: the WNBA has basically said to hell with me. Once I started paying attention to the ads and the marketing, I realized that the reason I felt no connection to this league, is because, to paraphrase the great Ice Cube, they either don't know, don't show, or don't give a damn about marketing to my demographic. If you understand anything about marketing and advertising, watching the average WNBA telecast you realize that there are two groups that they are marketing very hard to and ignoring everyone else. The two groups are women who like sports (not the biggest demographic but not as small as you may think) and the LBGT community (with an emphasis on the L). And they wonder why the league is not as economically viable as you hope,
       WNBA execs, allow me to give you a piece of advice. You can't have a successful sports league without marketing to one demographic especially: the male heterosexual sports fan. We are and will always be the biggest consumers in the sports world. Not to say don't market to other groups, but your league will never have the profitability that it should unless we feel included. We will buy the jerseys, the dvds, the tickets, and whatever else you can sell us if you can figure out how to make us passionate about the sport. And FYI, going to a Monistat 7 commercial every time out doesn't help your cause. I watched a game once and thought Why do they run a gazillion breast cancer awareness ads every two seconds. Because this sport isn't for me that's why. Throw me a freaking bone here! I'm not saying that the WNBA should only draft sexy women or come up with new tantalizing uniforms (some of these girls should stay covered). But give us something. Maybe only hire sexy female eye candy as sideline reporters. I'm sure we can find another way to utilize Rebecca Lobo, and her horse like teeth. I would suggest a dunk contest but considering how you only have three women in the whole league that can dunk with any kind of consistency, that may not work. Besides Brittney Griner would just win every year. I dont have all the answers. I'm not a marketing genius. I'm just a dude that loves every kind of basketball.  Except yours.