Not everything that goes wrong in women’s basketball is a misogynistic plot.
Not everything that goes wrong in women’s basketball is a misogynistic plot.
F ollowing 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.”