Uncovering Coverage Behind the WNBA

Should WNBA games be reported like NBA games because the players are women, and therefore, equal? Or, should the quality of their product be judged like any other league?

Mike Penner writes that those suggesting the women players get something other than front-page coverage are “chauvinistic old-schoolers.”

There are many reasons a team could and should get other than front-page coverage besides ignorant sexism. These reasons range from a lower quality product, resentment of being force-fed something from the NBA marketing machine and, of course, sheer lack of fan interest.

Is a UCLA lacrosse team that wins 18 in a row entitled to front-page coverage on the merit of this alone (if it ever happened)? Should it matter if the players were men or women? Or should fan interest have some bearing? Remember: the NBA wallowed as a rinky-dink operation for years until people like Chick Hearn, uh, sparked interest in it.

Is the lack of coverage of WNBA games due to chauvinistic ignorance or fan apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Hale Antico

Pasadena

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That sound you hear, (or don’t hear) is the collective yawn of L.A. sports fans as they open up their Sunday papers to see the local women’s auxiliary not only on the cover of the sports page but on the front page of the paper itself. A few cold hard facts for you.

1. The vast majority of sports fans are men.

2. The only time we want to see women playing sports is if we see them as sex objects. (Anna Kournikova, the WNBA is on the phone for you.)

3. Professional women’s basketball suffers from the same affliction as the LPGA. Namely, unattractive women playing a man’s sport at a high school level.

Enough already. This is a failed experiment and try as you may to shove it down our throats, we honestly don’t want to read about it. If you must cover it, do so in the fashion section with the rest of the inane garbage that we have zero interest in.

Kevin Michael Kirwan

Woodland Hills

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Having not seen a WNBA game this year, I can’t give an opinion on the quality of the play. But judging from the WNBA action photos appearing in The Times this season, I can only come to one of the following two conclusions: Either the players are awkward, and games feature many off-balance shots, clumsy scrambles for loose balls, and out-of-position defensive players; or the photo editor in charge of action shots has a brutal sense of humor.

Paul Ollen

Lakewood

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Mike Penner’s column of Sept. 3 helped put into perspective two sports coverage phenomena for me:

* Why it has taken five years for me to really notice the Sparks and their wonderful style of team basketball.

* The near invisibility of the WUSA in the L.A. Times sports pages during its rookie season. The Women’s World Cup in 1999 got such great coverage that this year has been a shock.

It doesn’t explain why Mike Terry’s story of the Game 1 victory in the WNBA finals started with a sentence about the Lakers, not the Sparks.

Linda J. Hoyer

Whittier

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As I got into my car at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, I was yearning to hear Jim Healy playing, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” in honor of the Sparks.

Tom Stradley

Canyon Country