Records in the Women’s National Basketball Association have been falling all year. It has produced all-time highs in regular-season attendance, cable viewership, franchise sale price, and player compensation.
Yet those benchmarks often have been overshadowed by league headlines that have nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with rivalries, political agendas, and player unrest.
Consider a recent game in Toronto. When Caitlin Clark, one of the top players in the league, led the Indiana Fever on Aug. 18 against the Tempo, one of the worst teams in the league, thousands came decked out in Tempo gear, embracing the WNBA expansion team in its inaugural season. Plenty of others wore Ms. Clark’s No. 22 jersey.
Thirty years after its founding, the WNBA has hit a new stride, with a growing fanbase and soaring revenue. Alongside those successes has come greater public attention on player controversies, turning the league into a microcosm of social issues which divide Americans.
Among them were mother and daughter Shandelle and Jordan Randall, basketball fans so devoted that teenage Jordan was named after NBA legend Michael Jordan.
“We’ve loved basketball our whole lives,” Ms. Randall says.
They whooped as the trailing Tempo suddenly pulled within four points of the Fever in the fourth quarter when Marina Mabrey sank back-to-back three-pointers, electrifying the 19,000 fans packed into the Scotiabank Arena.
But a player considered by many fans as a villain in their midst also spurred the Toronto crowd. When the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham checked into the game, she was met with boos every time she touched the ball. Ms. Cunningham, a shooting guard, ignited national debate in July over comments she made in support of limiting transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports. The jeers made it clear: America’s culture wars had followed the Fever across the U.S. border into Canada.
And, somehow, it also means that the WNBA, in its 30th year, has finally arrived in the nation’s zeitgeist.
As attention on the league has amplified, so have discussions around it centered on race, gender, and sexuality. The debate about transgender athletes is just one of the media firestorms. Other headlines have touted flagrant fouls between white and Black players. Racist and misogynistic online attacks against players have proliferated. Political commentary about the league from both the right and left continues to fan the flames of public opinion. But some observers of women’s sports say the culture wars running through the WNBA are simply a microcosm of issues roiling society – and that it’s certainly nothing new.
“It’s so quintessentially American,” says Theresa Runstedtler, author of “Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA.” Similar social anxieties surrounded the struggling National Basketball Association of the 1970s, when the men’s league became a proxy for broader cultural conversations. At the time, the NBA was considered “too Black,” and players were too violent on the court for mainstream white audiences, she says.
“As soon as a sport really starts getting popular, selling tickets, becoming commercialized in the way that the WNBA is now, it becomes a barometer for U.S. race relations,” Dr. Runstedtler says. “Add in sexual orientation and gender presentation, and all of these things are now being talked about through the lens of the league and its players.”
She adds that it wasn’t until the NBA figured out how to market a Black league to a white mainstream audience – leveraging the rivalry between superstars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird – that the NBA gained traction, paving the way for Michael Jordan and an “apolitical Blackness” to emerge.
In contrast, the WNBA, a majority Black league with a strong culture of LGBTQ+ inclusion, “has always stood for nonconformity and pushing against the grain from the beginning,” Dr. Runstedtler says. “And now, as more of mainstream America suddenly begins to pay more attention to the WNBA, it’s like all of the questions about gender identity and race have become so central to the storyline.”
The forces that shape headlines around women’s sports extend much further back than the modern era, says Mary McDonald, a professor of American culture and sports at Georgia Tech. As American sports entities developed in the late 1800s, masculine exceptionalism was the standard. To this day, Dr. McDonald adds, there’s still lingering societal discomfort about women’s physical capabilities and competitiveness, even though in the decades since Title IX, the presence of girls and women in sports has grown exponentially.
