WNBA, Sparks Fight for Position
Doing it just the way they do it with Shaq and Kobe, NBC dispatched a sideline reporter to pester the home team’s coach during intermission of the final game of the 2001 WNBA season Saturday.
Fred Roggin, pushing a microphone in the face of the Sparks’ Michael Cooper: “What did you tell your team at halftime?”
Cooper: “We’ve just got to keep doing what we did in the first half to get that 13-point lead. We slid back a little bit, but we’re still playing well. This is a tough Sting team.”
Roggin: “All right, appreciate it, Mike, talk to you later on, thanks.”
Elapsed time of total interview: 12 seconds.
Cooper blinked, looked into the camera and then back at Roggin, feigning astonishment.
“That’s it, Fred?”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, in less time than it takes Marv Albert to clear his throat, is the essence of the WNBA and its relationship with the American media.
Very brief, very rushed, but at least the WNBA is trying to keep a sense of humor about it.
Five years in, the NBA’s great attempt to launch a sister league finds itself stuck in a four-corners stall. The initial rush of excitement that followed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a.k.a. The Women’s Games, dissipated long ago. The novelty of watching women playing hoops for money, on NBC, wore off right about the time Houston won the third of the league’s first four championships.
Attendance has leveled off, even in Los Angeles, where the league champions drew only 7,174 for their Western Conference title-clinching victory over Sacramento at Staples Center. Television numbers are at an all-time low. Before Saturday, NBC had averaged a 1.1 share--meaning 1.1% of U.S. households--with its WNBA telecasts this season.
And Saturday, after a team from mega-market Los Angeles won the league championship, media reaction to the Sparks’ triumph ranged from underwhelmed to patronizing to little more than a hiccup between college football highlights.
After CBS signed off its afternoon U.S Open coverage, the local “Sports Central” wrapup show on Channel 2 led with the Sparks and their 82-54 victory over the Charlotte Sting. Host Bret Lewis opened the show with this:
“All year long, they’ve battled for respect. Of course, the best way to get that respect is by winning a title. The Los Angeles Sparks may not be this city’s favorite team, but after today’s WNBA title-clinching victory, you can make the argument they are the most dominant.”
With introductions like that, who needs a victory parade?
Partner Steve Hartman said the fallout from the Sparks winning the title “is going to be very interesting because the WNBA is now five years old. Houston has won the first four championships--now the championship comes to Los Angeles. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of reaction this city has for these Sparks ...
“I think it’s also going to be a real sign for the league itself. You have a Los Angeles champion. Is it going to mean something to really boost the league? Because, let’s face it, over the last couple years, it’s there, but it really hasn’t made that leap up.”
Initial returns were not encouraging.
After a long day of uninterrupted college football coverage, ESPN’s widely watched Saturday night “SportsCenter” went back, back, back, way back before acknowledging the existence of new champions in the world of women’s pro basketball.
Before uttering its first word about the WNBA title-clincher, “SportsCenter” rolled out an all-you-can-eat buffet for its 5-to-75 male demographic. After wading through more than 55 minutes, 14 college football updates, 11 baseball updates, a U.S. Open wrapup, a South Carolina 200 wrapup, a look at the big-league home run race, a report on the Seattle-New Orleans NFL exhibition game and breaking news that Ball State had denied alumnus David Letterman’s request to have the school’s football stadium named after him, the new WNBA champions finally got to take their bows before mainstream America.
Sixty-five seconds. No interviews. But some nice footage of Jerry West winning the 1972 NBA title, Derek Fisher sitting in the Staples Center stands and Shaq lifting this year’s NBA championship trophy.
It’s a tough go, this pioneering business. As letter writers to this sports section continue to debate, where should the Sparks and the WNBA fit into the glutted sports menu?
As much coverage as the Lakers, as some rather naive Sparks enthusiasts have demanded?
A few inches of game reportage buried back with the horse racing charts, as some rather chauvinistic old-schoolers have countered?
Neither side has it right, because neither side is looking at the clock. The NBA has been around for 50 years, and needed the first 35, plus a once-per-century cosmic convergence of the stars--Magic, Bird and Jordan--before elbowing its way past the media’s baseball-football obsession. The Lakers have been a Los Angeles institution for 40 years and, last time I looked, have the Sparks swamped when it comes to championship banners and retired jerseys.
But where was the NBA, where were the Lakers, in their fifth year of existence? As the WNBA is learning, it’s a long haul, eroding age-old stereotypes and earning your place. The key is to hang around until you’re good enough to change people’s minds.
For inspiration, the Sparks should study those “SportsCenter” U.S. Open highlights. The best tennis players in the world are playing in New York, and right now, the women are a bigger story than the men.
But it took them 100 years to get there.
