22nd
LADIES BRACKET
Originally published: March 26, 2010
Did you forget to fill out a women’s bracket again this year? Do you know anybody who organized an office pool for the ladies’ day-late, many dollars-short version of March Madness? Or perhaps more telling, do the brackets to the right there now make you wish you’d paid closer attention?
The, ahem, “real” version could hardly compare to the rampant upsets of the boys brackets seeing as the University of Connecticut’s girls haven’t lost a game in nearly two years and have yet to meet an opponent that comes within even a dozen points so far this year. Their Final Four date was with a Baylor team led by freshman standout Brittney Griner, a 6’8” center who had already set a tournament record for blocks—and whose braids and height lead most people to immediately believe she’s a man, according to her father. Griner’s game has been impressive enough for some to suggest she could play in the NBA. That would probably be preferable to a career in the WNBA, indeed the first team-oriented women’s professional sports league to survive for more than a decade despite its continued willingness to downplay the importance of that giant elephant in the arena that constitutes its largest demographic: lesbians.
It was just last season, in fact, that the Washington Post’s Mike Wise noted that city’s Mystics lacked a “KissCam” that’s something of a staple at most NBA games and basically any sporting events involving men. Not having one at all at least seemed a bit more sensitive than the few WNBA locations that simply opted to avoid putting homosexual couples on their Jumbotrons, but the Mystics’ managing partner, Sheila Johnson explained, “We got a lot of kids here.” So despite gay fan appreciation nights consistently constituting the highest attendance of the season for the savvier teams in the league, apparently Tim Hardaway needs to feel welcome too.
Of course, if that handful of actual women’s basketball enthusiasts really want to see their sport take off, then I would suggest that rather than avoiding having a shallow, superficial set of brackets pairing college ladies (past and present) based entirely on looks, they embrace this as a sort of mission to create the sex symbol that no organization would refuse. Anna Kournikova, after all, never won any WTA singles title, and yet the continued sponsorship that followed her everywhere she went only proves that looking good is indeed just as important as being good.
