We stood in a semi circle at the Fever’s end of the floor, during warmups. The arena was so busy, busier than any of us could recall seeing it for a Raptors pregame, even when Steph Curry’s in town.
Unlike the last marquee game against the Lynx the Tempo had taken over Scotiabank arena for, which felt electric and joyful, this one already had a palpable strain. Jerome joked that he didn’t want to maintain eye contact with the many men there in Fever jerseys; we all questioned whether the tension we were each picking up on was real, never mind that each of us felt it.
For 15 minutes a crowd had pushed as close as they could to Sophie Cunningham, who stood in the walkway between courtside seating and the next section up. She smiled for photos and signed things. Caitlin Clark took the court and a handful of fans seemed to notice.
After about five minutes each of us had to get back to our jobs, but I noticed that when we left that section of the floor it came with palpable relief. My shoulders dropped. When I got back to the Tempo’s end, a loud, yelping cheer went up from the crowd I’d just left. I couldn’t see right away between both teams’ shifting trainers and players amidst warmups, but after a few seconds a slice of space cleared: Cunningham had stepped onto the floor.
She bricked a shot. It didn’t matter. The response was like it is for a musician on stage pointing vaguely to the crowd, or an actor sighted who turns to wave and acknowledge the sighting, like a reward. The desire wasn’t for proof of skill, or the aesthetics of how rhythmically satisfying it can be to watch an athlete work. The desire was for recognition, clarity of self through projection onto another. Iconography.
Clark dribbled a basketball in either hand, crouched and stood, kept her eyes up. She pulled up with one of the balls she was dribbling and hit a long three. No one noticed. Cunningham bricked a free throw, I felt the reverberations from cheers through the floor.
There’s a clip going around of the pre-game demonstrations that took place outside of Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn yesterday, ahead of the Liberty game. A reporter from Sportico asks a handful of people to name five WNBA players. Off the top, one person names Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark, then admits those are the only two they know. The next person gets to five no problem, gets cut off in the clip’s edit as they begin to name another W athlete.
What’s not apparent until 11 seconds into the video, and what’s so smart about it, is it’s not immediately clear that either person is at a demonstration. Nor is it clear the perspectives being demonstrated. There are overt tells if you’ve been following the WNBA lately — the first person interviewed has a shirt on with the definition of the word “woman” on it (which, for the record, is incorrect), the second person is holding a sign with some of the lettering cropped but “STOMP transpho” is legible — but until the caption comes in you don’t really know what you’re being set up for.
What follows are the anti-trans demonstrators telling on themselves.
Are you a WNBA fan? One person is asked. Yes, they reply. Are you going to the game today? Yes! They say, more enthusiastically. Can you name five WNBA players? No I cannot, they admit immediately, I’m sorry.
Asked the same question and a person wearing a “SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS” shirt replies, I sure can. They stay silent, smiling, insisting after a few seconds of strained silence, I can! Could you name five for me? The interviewer prompts. Sophie Cunningham, uh, it’s always fun when I get— They stutter. Caitlin Clark, they quickly add.
The next names they stumble through are not complete: Reese, Ah-jah, uh, uh.
The interviewer keeps asking people to name names, making it more apparent as they go who has stakes in the situation beyond the excuse to stand outside an arena with a sign. The video first made me think of Billy Eichner’s Billy on the Street bit to “Name a woman”. Was that too reductive, paralleling these people to a gotcha sketch? To write them off as parody when the rhetoric they parrot endangers people’s lives and livelihoods?
Well, yes, it is reductive, but these diminishing, morally small people who can’t, for the life of them, name a professional athlete in a league that has become a convenient vehicle for their pet cause, mostly do the diminishing themselves.
