No Spark and Little Fanfare

“Everybody out!” screams an official, and the best women’s pro basketball team in Southland history is tossed from its practice gym.

A college P.E. class has reserved the space.

The best women’s pro basketball team hustles out to an area where the exhausted players can sit, relax, and ice their knees.

This would be the hallway floor.

The best women’s pro basketball team, which will play tonight at 7:30 at the Long Beach Pyramid, is big, fast and wondrously skilled.

It also may be doomed.

Say hello to the Long Beach StingRays of the American Basketball League, two games into an inaugural season that has already illustrated the reality of women’s professional athletics.

In two victories, the StingRays have shown that women pros can play great team basketball, and don’t need a funny-colored ball to do it.

None of which apparently matters.

Because women sinking 15-foot jump shots off the dribble don’t sell. Women making no-look passes don’t sell. Women playing during the conventional basketball season don’t sell.

What sells is women players shopping for dresses on TV commercials.

Women wearing makeup and sweatsuits chanting, “We got next!”

Women playing when men don’t.

The StingRays are clearly superior to the Los Angeles Sparks, this town’s celebrated entry in the WNBA’s inaugural league last summer.

But they are also clearly lacking the necessary sparks.

In their first game Friday, the StingRays scored 98 points against San Jose.

The Sparks never once scored more than 93.

But in that same game, their home opener, the StingRays could not sell out the 4,000-seat Pyramid.

The Sparks never drew fewer than 5,987 to the Forum.

Good hoops, little interest, while playing in the smallest arena in this small-arena league. And there is no reason to think it will be any different any time soon.

This being the only area of the country where the ABL has decided to put a franchise so close to a WNBA franchise, it is instructive to listen to people like Anita Fitzgerald.

A social-services worker from Huntington Beach and a professed “die-hard” women’s hoops fan, she attended nearly a dozen Sparks’ games.

She then went to the StingRays opener, “but only after I was able to find information about it in a local throw-away shopper.”

Her evaluation?

“The play was incredible,” she said. “They had much better players than the Sparks. But compared to the Sparks, it felt like a high school game.”

Her opinion was echoed by others who loved StingRay basketball, but missed the Sparks’ community atmosphere, their celebration of women’s issues during games, their acknowledgment of women’s basketball history.

“The players were more professional in the ABL,” said Fitzgerald. “But the operation seemed more professional in the WNBA.”

Fitzgerald says the basketball has persuaded her to attend more StingRays games, as soon as tonight’s against Colorado.

But what about the fans who are not so dedicated? How many of those will continue showing up when there is so much else happening at this time of year?

“I was kind of disappointed in our opening night,” acknowledged StingRay guard Nicky McCrimmon. “But I know in this town, you’ve got to be visible. If nobody knows about you, you are in trouble.”

McCrimmon is a former USC star who chose this league--and its bigger paydays--over the WNBA. She says she doesn’t regret her decision because of the guaranteed money.

But Nikki McCray, the ABL’s most valuable player in its first season, recently became the first true star to jump leagues.

“If we had the WNBA’s marketing, we would knock them out of the box,” McCrimmon said.

Part of the problem is money. If its star women are getting their ankles taped in hallways, you know the league isn’t spending much on national advertising.

“People heard so much of, ‘We got next!’ on the TV during the NBA playoffs, it gave them an edge,” said Clarissa Davis-Wrightsil, two-time college player of the year from Texas. “We feel like when we get that kind of exposure, it will put us on an even playing field.”

But that may never be possible because of the second part of the problem, timing.

This newspaper is covering the ABL in the same manner it covered the WNBA, with a beat reporter who follows them both at home and on the road.

Yet while WNBA stories appeared regularly on the front page of last summer’s sports sections--even one column on the front page of the entire paper--not one ABL story has made the sports cover this fall.

Not with college football, pro football, and the baseball playoffs occurring at the same time.

“The ABL is playing when everything else in the world is going on,” said Bill Dwyre, Times sports editor. “It is lot tougher getting prominent placement in October than it is in August.”

Regardless, led by an awesome forward named Yolanda Griffith, the StingRays will play again tonight, that tree will fall again in the middle of the forest, and you will again wonder.

With this city finally ready to support one women’s professional league, why make us choose?

Davis-Wrightsil sighed, and admitted what so many in those new businesses have been afraid to admit.

“At a time when we should be coming together, I hate the fact that there are two leagues,” she said. “I hate it.”