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A Terrible Confession
I want the US women's basketball team to beat Australia and win gold. I know, I know. I love my country. I love Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor and Trish Fallon and Sandy Brondello and the rest of the Opals, but I want Team USA to win.
Here's the thing: the US women's team is not just representing their country, they're representing the WNBA (Women's National Basketball Association). The WNBA is the best-paying women's basketball league in the world. Australians Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor are current WNBA players; Trish Fallon and Sandy Brondello are ex-WNBA players. Russian center Elena Baranova plays in Madison Square Garden for the NY Liberty. I know she does; I'm there every game. The WNBA is the world's league.
Women basketballers and fans like me need the WNBA to do really, really well. The big boys that own the league have to keep funding it, so that sponsorships will get bigger, so that there will be more and more fans, and more and more soldout games.
In the USA, the fight for women's sport to get the recognition, respect and money of men's sports has been long and hard, and is nowhere near over. In the early 1970s, Title IX was introduced, which meant that for the first time girls' sport at school had to be as well funded as boys'. The legislation was hotly contested, but it passed and revolutionised sports in this country. The existence of the WNBA has a lot to do with Title IX.
Even so, the WNBA doesn't even get a tenth of the coverage that the NBA, the men's league, gets. Every single game the New York Knicks play gets columns and columns of coverage in The New York Times. The women's team, the New York Liberty, are lucky to get more than a paragraph's report about every second game. The coverage of women's sports (other than tennis) in the Times sucks generally, and their coverage of the Liberty is disgraceful.
If the US women's team wins the gold medal, it's going to gain them a lot of attention, partly because for the first time ever the men are—at best—going to wind up with the bronze. By reaching the gold-silver game, the women's team has already shown up the men, and garnered a lot of attention for the WNBA. And that's why I want them to defeat my beloved Opals (though I'm hoping only narrowly, and in overtime)—to raise the bar for women's sports in the USA. To ensure that Lauren and Elena Baranova (Russia) and Janeth Arcain (Brazil) have somewhere to play basketball on the global stage, and make a decent living for as long as they're able.
New York City, 27 August 2004
UPDATE 28 August: So they won. Turns out my heart is not talking to my brain: I barracked for the Opals long and loud and almost cried when they fell apart in the last quarter. Still, what I said above, plus the Opals played great, better than they ever have against the USA.
© 2004 Justine Larbalestier
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Musing on the Liberty making it to the 2004 Eastern Conference Finals
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