In basketball, nastiness will only get you so far, as the Sky is learning
Being hated and being feared are not the same, even though they can be. Winning is usually the way to join them together. Right now the Chicago Sky is only half way there, still with more notice than none.
Having no reputation is vacant and peaceful, a sort of do not disturb sign for the curious or the lost to disregard. In that happy haven did the Sky exist, as well I might add, did the WNBA, now truncated to a simple “W.”
(Initializing is a form of certification, giving us X (formerly Twitter) and MAGA, not to be confused with IQ.)
Yet, suddenly, the W is everywhere, on social media, in national newspapers, on network chat segments, in editorials both local and international, on perpetual podcasts, as part of cable sports blather, in columns like this one, a welcome redundancy. Thank you Chennedy Carter.
Is this a welcome thing, being noticed for nastiness? Crowd size and attention, welcome or un, may be the deciding factors, and for now bad behavior seems to be good marketing.
“It’s generating tremendous additional interest,” said Adam Silver, he being the commissioner of the NBA, the one without the “W.” He is all for promoting rivalries of the kind that the Sky and Indiana Fever now surely have.
By intention or accident, the Sky has staked out the hard edge of attention, the place where loathing lives, where the Bad Boys of Detroit smirked and the Raiders, in whatever residence, have always lurked and at whatever address various hockey bullies take turns dwelling.
The Bears have had their turn too, loved locally but despised everywhere else, now lately disregarded as a vague threat to those NFL teams with ambition. Nervous laughter is as close as the Bears get to real concern.
Instinct has always tended to think better of female athletes, more so than the male brutes of familiar games when, after all, jocks are jocks, competition is competition and when no one is watching as Nancy Kerrigan gets whacked in the knee by a friend of Tonya Harding or Zola Budd trips a Mary Decker on the track or dope cheats are evenly spread between the genders.
Does the current inspection of motives and the endless unsolicited opinions about it all mean that the W is now an adult league, full of exactly the same kind of harsh creatures and mean muggers who pass for sports heroes in leagues that need more than one initial?
Is it really necessary to have rivalries based on bitterness rather than mutual respect? Nah, we’re talking about sportsmanship here and that died the first time money changed hands.
The Sky’s position as villain arose from the hip check heard round the web where the aforementioned Carter sent sprawling Caitlin Clark, the frail and pastel new center of basketball attention.
Oh, no, voices cried in horror, as if their own child had been clocked by the schoolyard bully, while Clark herself shrugged it off and made the free throw.
Opinions rained down from all corners, mostly in disgust, reviving voices like Nancy Lieberman (who I believe invented the W), vowing, “If I were Caitlin Clark, I would have punched her.”
Billie Jean King, pioneer and icon, recalled how she counseled the fledgling women’s tennis tour to welcome Chris Evert, sweet young teen, into their ranks rather than resent her. Ease off, she’s making you money, King is saying.
Draymond Green, the reigning villain of the NBA, supported Carter, but advised, “You want to take the villain role? Great, love it.”
Ah, the Chicago Villains. Has a ring to it.
Angel Reese, the Sky rookie with a Caitlin Clark history, seems ready to take Green’s advice. “I’ll take the bad guy role,” Reese said. “I know I’ll go down in history.”
Well, let’s see the company she would keep. Mike Tyson comes to mind, the noted ear chewer and Dennis Rodman, dirtiest Bull ever, Bill Laimbeer, Conrad Dobler, Marty McSorley, names cluttering history for being nasty.
Is that really what Reese wants? Or the Sky, to be hated, to be confronted by strangers as they come off the team bus?
Well, that’s what they’ve got.