Jay Mohr finishes what the Sports Guy started:
The WNBA finals begin Wednesday, and if you listen very closely you’ll be able to hear that nobody cares….
Sadly, when it comes to the WNBA, almost all of us are outsiders. Do you know anybody who has ever watched a game? Have you ever spoken about the WNBA at work? At home? Anywhere? The NBA and the networks that have aired the sport have tried in vain for far too long to prop up this league as entertainment. If you are entertained by 7-foot, 225-pound women from Poland who have less basketball skills than the worst NBA D-Leaguer then I guess you are one of the few people who cares.
I would have no objection to the WNBA if it were just another poorly conceived sports league that would quietly go off and die. But since it has been made into A Symbol by the same women who brought us Title IX and murdered dozens of men’s college sports programs, I consider it my solemn duty to piss all over it at every given opportunity.
What’s interesting about this is the way in which the younger sportswriters don’t feel the need to genuflect in front of feminist icons the way the older ones do. I suspect this is because we are the first generation of athletes to actually have competed on the same field as our female counterparts, so we don’t buy into the hype about how good the women supposedly are.
I have plenty of respect for the women who were sprinters, jumpers and hurdlers on my NCAA D1 track team. I spent every day with them, ate almost every meal with them and every Wednesday, vomited on my hands and knees next to them. (Wednesday was Speed day, let’s see you run 17 sub-28 200s without throwing up.) But they simply weren’t on the same level as us, and in the same vein, no man who’s ever played basketball would take that league seriously, much less follow it.
My guess is David Stern is going to have to pull the plug on the WNBA sooner rather than later. Now that some of the most popular sportswriters at ESPN and SI are openly mocking it, it can’t possibly hope to survive.