Flak Magazine: Boys or Girls, 12.10.03

It's June, and I'm watching the NBA Finals with my friend Brian. We're drinking, grazing on snack chips and generally behaving like the feckless stooges glorified in beer commercials. Except there are no jiggly-breasted vixens here, just Bugles, beer and the elliptic oral stylings of Bill Walton.

The Spurs and Nets are stuck in a regrettable game. They're flat-footed and mechanized, arrhythmic, missing open shots and firing passes into spectators' laps. The grotty details of the game have taken the edge off the ritualized experience of TV sports viewing.

"This sucks," Brian says.

In a less shitfaced moment I could argue that the game is an articulate kind of social commentary, a robotic manifesto on human isolation. The players are disconnected, the spaces between them describing American separateness, maybe, our fat, gassy solipsism.

Instead, I say, "Dude, this totally sucks."

But we keep watching. Excitement is forthcoming. Watching NBA basketball is like chewing Fruit Stripe: short bursts of flavor followed by protracted periods of bland, phlegmish nothing, with vaguely menacing mascots at the periphery.

During the telecast, WNBA ads run intermittently featuring sexed-up versions of point guards and power forwards. The athletes repeat versions of the league's promotional mantra — "This is who I am" — while lolling around in tight clothes. For the first time I feel like the WNBA's target demographic.

Women's pro basketball has, to date, failed to connect at the communal and personal levels of the men's game despite the localized success of collegiate programs. The sports in which women achieve the widest audiences — tennis, figure skating, gymnastics — are those dominated by individual personalities and underwritten by overt sexuality. Basketball is new to this approach. But the approach doesn't work because it doesn't address the essential reason Brian and I consume sports: We spend our time and money on jerseys, tickets, fantasy teams and the misery of Spurs vs. Nets because we wish we were them.

Like Robert Coover protagonists, we have elaborate, private fictions cooking in our heads in which we star, and these secret (yet common) inventions — adolescent wish-projections for ourselves — are built around the mythology of sport. But Brian and I don't talk about this.

"Sue Bird's hot," he says. "Need another beer."

Four months prior, on a cold Chicago Sunday, I sat in the DePaul Athletic Center watching a basketball game. The Chicago Blaze and Springfield Spirit of the National Women's Basketball League were warming up minutes before tip-off. The NWBL operates during the WNBA off-season, attracting top-tier female players to play a 10-week schedule. Springfield forward Rebecca Lobo, a former Olympic gold medalist and WNBA all-star, was shooting free throws. Lobo's teammate Swin Cash, a former collegiate all-American and rising WNBA star, drained a series of perimeter jumpers as she scanned the crowd.

More accurately, she scanned the wooden bleachers where, normally, one might expect a crowd.

There were 98 fans in the gym. It was such an absurdly small number that I counted heads — twice, just to fix the figure. 98. In a metropolitan area of 8 million people, in a gym that seats 3,000, there were 98 fans.

The game itself was fluid and physical, essentially the same as a men's pro game minus the vertical dimension. Lobo and Cash were generally brilliant, doing what smart and talented players do: moving the ball, finding open space and defending. But it wasn't nearly enough. The Blaze shot implausibly well, scoring from the lane and the perimeter, and finishing crazy, syncopated fast-breaks with twisting layups. And 98 of us enjoyed it. In the expansive and largely empty gym, the game was reminiscent of some pioneering, black-and-white 1940s barnstorming event, and it was easy to think of women's pro hoops as an early iteration of something fairly exciting.

Afterward, interviewing Lobo, I completely failed to discuss the game, instead focusing on the lack of a crowd. "We are more surprised when we have smaller crowds at home [in Massachusetts]," she said. "We understand that women's basketball isn't the phenomenon in other places, like it is in Connecticut." Lobo starred at the University of Connecticut in the mid-1990s, playing for a team that received rock star treatment from local fans.

I described the dearth of local Blaze advertising, primarily as a way to couch my community embarrassment, and Lobo responded diplomatically: "There aren't the same marketing dollars in the NWBL as there are in the WNBA. My fiance has family in Chicago and they don't see anything about the Blaze. And they are sports fans who are tuned into the women's game. We need to let fans know that games are being played.

"I really believe that if people come to our games, they will appreciate the basketball and have a great time and want to come back."

"Women's basketball sucks."

ESPN.com writer Stacey Pressman offered this in an April 8 piece published by The Weekly Standard's website. She continued: "I have nothing but respect for women's basketball players. They're talented athletes and fierce competitors. But watching 40 minutes of underhanded lay-ups just isn't exciting."

This isn't a new argument exactly, but it's a dicey one for a female sportswriter and it's predicated on a satisfying idea about why we watch sports, whoever we are. We watch sports ostensibly for the snapshots of athletic mega-brilliance, moments without antecedent that provoke awe, reverence and maybe civic glee. Pressman elaborated during a phone interview: "Sports is about entertainment. And people want to see a high level of entertainment. We want to see those amazing moments of physical feats. That's what we remember. Kareem's skyhook, Jordan's kiss-the-rim dunk."

She was unapologetic discussing what she considers the excessive coverage accorded women's basketball. "Should it be promoted in the same way as the men? Absolutely not. Who knows if there's a feminist mafia talking to ESPN? Sixty-three [women's college] games on ESPN? I shouldn't have to suffer watching this stuff."

Describing the pro game's recent saucy marketing, she said, "The WNBA is resorting to pimping and prostitution." Yet she recognizes that a certain metaphorical pimping might be necessary to capture a larger, or more masculine, audience

"I believe men will only watch women's sports where the women are hot," she said. "The sexual persona is more important than athletic ability. I was writing about women's college basketball during the NCAA tournament, and I was asking people around ESPN about the game. They'd say, 'We're rooting for Tennessee because Brittany Jackson's hot.' I think that men — I'm not a sociologist, of course — but I think that men respond to hot women. And successful women are sexualized first before you can get to the important subject of the day."

It's the morning after the Spurs-Nets game and I'm ill. I shouldn't lose so much sleep — and suffer crippling hangovers — just to participate in the mechanical routine of watching whatever sporting event I'm socially conditioned to watch. The WNBA might offer a path out of hell. They seem to play at sensible hours. They comport themselves respectably. They seem at odds with vice. But that's not enough. If it were, I'd go to church, join a Bunco club and that would satisfy the sports-socialization-escapist urge. I hit the Web looking for an accredited sociologist

Dr. Alan Bairner, a professor of Sports Studies at the University of Ulster, has written extensively on the sports-modern society dynamic. He'll do. We exchange e-mail.

He writes, "I think the sports arena and the nature of spectatorship allows us to behave in ways that are less likely to be sanctioned in other spheres of our existence. We can shout loudly, curse, cry, hug complete strangers, fight other strangers, et cetera. Figurational sociologists have referred to this as 'the quest for excitement' in an increasingly civilized and thereby mundane world. More frivolously, in the case of Americans in particular, sport also provides great opportunities to engage in the National Pastime — eating."

Smug European jerk, I'm thinking, licking Ruffles grease from my fingertips while ESPN2 drones in the background.

"We [especially men] are also told to watch sport," he writes. "It's the manly thing to do. Furthermore the media-sport complex is such that the message is also getting through to more and more women as well as to men. Sport is cool. Sport is fashionable. Ultimately economics drive this process. How much should we pay for that ticket that everyone wants/needs in order to be part of an 'unmissable' spectacle?"

Dr. Bairner describes the humbling fact that drives sports fanaticism, but is often talked around: "One of the main reasons that men [and women] like to watch sport is so that they can act out fantasies through the actions of their heroes. These fantasies may be largely personal (the hard tackle, the fast sprint, the great goal, all of which we would like to have done ourselves) although they can also have a more collective aspect — the fantasies that relate to the triumphs of nation, the ideology, the race."

This is the ludicrous challenge for a women's league attempting to engage a male audience. As spectators, millions of us are simultaneously projecting ourselves into the event, imagining a personal role in the outcome. It's silly, it's false, and it's essential to obsessive fandom. It's also extremely difficult to achieve psychologically when Rebecca Lobo is on the court instead of, say, Jason Kidd. Not because Lobo's game is slow or terrestrial, but because she's a she and there are limits — gender limits — on our imaginings. WNBA players are saying "This is who I am," looking pretty and acting seductive, but they're reminding us of who we aren't

Months earlier, describing the faces she'd like to see in the NWBL or WNBA crowd, Lobo suggested, "The average male sports fan demographic is desired, [but] we still need to focus on our core audience: families with kids and young girls." And this seems reasonable if a bit evil. The cruel, dark side of gender equity in America is that the game's success demands the transformation of our daughters into drunk, daydreaming fans, gorging themselves in front of televisions in a learned, liturgic way. This is who I am.

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E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.