Dear Diana: It’s not that women’s basketball is bad ...
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It’s not that women shouldn’t play basketball or that a Candace Parker crossover, a Lisa Leslie soft bank shot, a Diana Taurasi jumper, the consistent class of the women’s Olympic gold medalists isn’t a joy.
It’s not that the Connecticut-Tennessee, Geno Auriemma-Pat Summitt, spitting, hissing, dissing rivalry isn’t riveting.
But when Title IX came to be and the women sports powers-that-were chose basketball as the sport to feature, to promote more than others, those powers made a big mistake.
It doomed women’s basketball to the constant comparison to men’s basketball.
Honestly, if I had to pick which game I would buy a ticket for, it would always be the UCLA
men over the UCLA women, the Lakers over the Sparks. If the TV clicker is poised over an Iowa-Illinois men’s game or women’s game, my clicker will always stop at the men’s game. It just does.
If only the women had picked volleyball or soccer to make the centerpiece. Most of us American sports fans never watch men’s volleyball or a lot of soccer. Women’s volleyball (men’s too) is enthralling. There isn’t a sport more fun to watch in person than Olympic volleyball, women’s or men’s.
The Mia Hamm-Julie Foudy-Brandi Chastain soccer starburst was possible partly because we just hadn’t paid that much attention to men’s soccer. We watched the women and just appreciated them for being them.
It has nothing to do with being fair. Some things are just more fun to watch. Men’s basketball over women’s, women’s gymnastics over men’s. NBC would never be so silly as to try to play up men’s figure skating over the women’s at the Olympics. And women who don’t chose women’s basketball over men’s aren’t being bad women. They just made a choice.
It would be cool if the Sparks won a WNBA championship. I just wish they were playing volleyball.
-- Diane Pucin