By Christian Schneider
Thursday, April 04, 2024
Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in
2012, Republicans famously issued an “autopsy” to assess what they had done
wrong. The document provided a blueprint for expanding the party into one that
in future could win national campaigns. It focused primarily on boosting
“inclusion.” (Funny how that word’s connotations have changed.)
After Donald Trump’s win in 2016, the GOP had become a
“big tent” party — but when traditional conservatives looked around, they were
confused by just who had snuck into the tent. Suddenly, QAnon conspiracy
theorists, incels, people with retrograde racial attitudes, and most
chillingly, people who say “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party” were
now part of the family.
On Monday night, the NCAA Tournament match between the
University of Iowa and LSU became the most-watched women’s basketball game in
American history. The nation has fallen in love with Iowa sharpshooting guard
Caitlin Clark, and 12.3 million people tuned in to watch her
vanquish LSU, the team that beat Iowa in last year’s national-championship
game.
One would suspect that women’s sports enthusiasts would
be thrilled with all this attention. Viewership, while still trailing well
behind the men’s tournament, is up sharply, thanks primarily to Clark.
But while women’s sports have craved this type of buzz
for decades, some fans have looked around and are not pleased about who is now
in their tent. Specifically, they are upset with the newfound scrutiny applied
to female players and coaches. Their dream scenario was always to have fans
revere their players and schools as much as they idolize the men, but without
the criticism that men’s players and coaches receive.
Earlier in the week, USA Today columnist
Nancy Armour bemoaned the fact that boorish LSU coach
Kim Mulkey had come under some recent criticism for actions taken
throughout her career — actions like backing her former employer, Baylor
University, during a sex scandal, allegedly counseling gay players to remain in
the closet, and backing her players after they got themselves mixed up in a fight
during the Southeastern Conference championship game two weeks ago.
Armour said Mulkey’s behavior had “prompted a level of
vitriol among the media that borders on the unprofessional.”
“Women are held to different standards, and that goes
double for women who are successful,” Armour continued. “Quadruple for women
who are successful in businesses traditionally dominated by men.”
“You might not like Mulkey,” she finishes. “You might not
like her players. But if you are not bothered by the public discourse that
surrounds them and cannot see the sexism and racism at its root, the problem
isn’t them. It’s you.”
Oh.
One needs only to go back two weeks to the LSU–South
Carolina game fracas to realize how absurd
this all is. Rather than apologize for her players’ actions, Mulkey was
defiant, blaming the referees for the incident, in
which South Carolina center Kamilla Cardoso, who stands at six-foot-seven,
knocked LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, a mere five-foot-ten, to the floor.
“I wish [Cardoso] would have pushed Angel Reese,” Mulkey
said, referring to an opposing player who’s six-foot-three. “Don’t push a kid
— you’re 6′8″. Don’t push somebody that little. That was uncalled for, in
my opinion. Let those two girls that were jawing, let them go at it.”
On the other hand, South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley,
a fiery competitor in her own right, immediately apologized for her players’
actions.
“I just want to apologize for us being a part in that,”
Staley said. “Because that’s not who we are and that’s not what we’re about.”
So, according to this new scorecard, are those praising Staley, a black woman, for
handling things in a more dignified, sportsmanlike way, now enabling . . .
“racism” and “sexism”?
The charge that somehow Mulkey gets more scrutiny than
men’s coaches is simply preposterous. For instance, Armour notes that a recent
piece about Rick Pitino, the former Louisville men’s basketball coach, having
impregnated a woman who wasn’t his wife and then paying for her abortion wasn’t
noted “in a profile about his most recent act of redemption.”
But, of course, when Pitino’s transgressions were made
public 15 years ago, they were covered by the New York Times, ESPN, NPR, and every other outlet. Armour’s own paper reported on Pitino’s
firing in 2017. (Lest anyone accuse yours truly of gender bias, let me be clear
that Pitino is a loathsome human being.)
Yet men’s coaches face intense scrutiny that women’s
coaches rarely do. After Kentucky’s first-round loss to Oakland University this
year, John Calipari — one of the most successful coaches of the past three
decades — was hearing calls that he should be fired. Men’s coaches frequently
have full books written about them: Remember 1987’s A Season on the
Brink, in which author John Feinstein detailed a full year with Indiana
coach Bobby Knight? It dug into Knight’s personality flaws and foibles in
painful detail and forged Knight’s public persona for the remainder of his
life.
Oh, and as for long-form reporting on men’s coaches: In
2008, Sports Illustrated ran a shocking deep
dive on then–St. Louis University men’s coach (and this
author’s former boss) Rick Majerus, which contains this
spicy nugget from a University of Utah team practice:
“When a guy catches the ball in
the post, you gap him six inches!” [center Michael] Doleac recalls Majerus
yelling. “Then he turns to the guys sitting on the baseline and says, ‘Six f——
inches,’ and he says, ‘the size of the average white d—!’” and pulls it out.
(I can confirm the story, as I was standing ten feet from
Majerus as he . . . uh . . . “performed” it.)
In researching the story, the reporter, S. L. Price,
interviewed Majerus’s family members, asked him questions, and contacted former
players and coaches — all things Mulkey just spent a week complaining about
regarding a fairly anodyne recent Washington Post article
about her.
The lesson in all this is that, with all this new
attention, it isn’t enough to be a fan of women’s sports, you have to be the
right kind of fan. One that, for instance, uncritically praises LSU players
like star forward Angel Reese for taunting Caitlin Clark in last year’s
national championship game well after the outcome of the game had been decided.
Reese went on to cash in on this loutish behavior,
signing a number of name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals totaling an estimated $1.8 million this season. And
yet her defenders believe asking players to show sportsmanship is somehow
misogynistic.
(To her credit, Clark said she didn’t mind Reese’s
taunting and got her revenge by cooking LSU alive this week, scoring 41 points
and sending Reese home.)
Critics still maintain that everything that goes wrong in
women’s basketball is somehow a misogynistic plot. Earlier this week, NCAA
officials realized that the three-point lines painted on the court at a women’s
tournament game in Portland, Ore., were different lengths; columnists
immediately slammed the mistake as something that would
never happen in men’s sports.
But, of course, things go wrong in men’s basketball all
the time. Remember when a group of high-profile teams tried to play games
outdoors on an aircraft carrier and had to
postpone them because the weather caused too much condensation on the court? Or
the days when the NCAA had to outlaw slippery court stickers for both
men’s and women’s games? Things happen. Tape measures are not sexist.
As one example of the recent misogyny in women’s
basketball, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins offered up the case of Notre Dame’s Hannah
Hidalgo, who — heaven forfend — was told she had to take out a diamond-studded
nose ring that she had been allowed to wear in earlier rounds. Silly? Maybe.
But if you can find any examples of men’s players in the tournament being
allowed to wear diamond jewelry, please point them out.
If all the grievance-mongering in women’s sports is
intended to drive people away from watching, it might be successful. Take
progressive political commentator Marc Lamont Hill, who was forced to
repent after calling Caitlin Clark, a white
player, “the most spectacular college player I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
“Then you never seen Sheryl Swoopes, Cheryl Miller play.
. . . This ‘whitewashing’ of Black women is outrageous!!!!,” commented one
person on his X (formerly Twitter) feed, leading Hill to respond, “I consider
Miller to be the greatest player ever. Swoopes may be the most dominant. But I
would not consider their style ‘spectacular.’”
You just can’t win. The more successful women’s sports
get, the more it gives the grievance industry a chance to claim victimhood.
So a note to women’s sports enthusiasts: If you want the
attention, you have to take everything that comes with it. You don’t get to
pick your fans, they pick you. And if you call them sexist and racist for
demanding basic decency and sportsmanship, or rooting for a player of the wrong
color, be aware that when Caitlin Clark leaves college basketball, the fans
will, too.
Otherwise, you have to put up with all the crazy things
fans say about your favorite athletes and coaches. Trying to micromanage how
fans behave will only backfire. Outrageous comments about men’s sports figures
have kept people interested and made a lot of men — and women — very rich, even
if some feelings are hurt.
As Mad Men’s Don Draper would
say, “That’s what the money is for.”
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