Tall Poppies
- calebwatts007
- May 21, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 30, 2024
An attempt to reframe a narrative around women’s sport.
Sunday 7th April was a day that the basketball landscape changed forever.
Iowa vs South Carolina, with a preliminary average TV audience of 18.7 million viewers, was the most watched basketball game since 2019. (ESPN PR)
For those not in the loop with basketball this statement might seem unremarkable.
Except the game I’m talking about was between two college teams. Two female college teams.
If you are struggling to gauge the enormity of this fact – these comparisons will help.
Imagine the Women’s UEFA Champions League pulling in more viewers than the men’s version.
Picture a World Cup final with Messi and Mbappe going head-to-head having its viewership dwarfed by the Spain vs England female equivalent.
It’s a big deal.
The players that played in Iowa vs South Carolina, the finale of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) ‘March Madness’ Tournament, the knockout competition that is the greatest possible prize for a college team to win, are not even professionals yet. Student-athletes, mostly twenty-two years old or younger. Dwarfing TV numbers for the previous four years of NBA Finals viewership.
While all the players who played in the final contributed to the game that interested so many people – there was one player who everyone was tuning in to see. All time NCAA leading point scorer and Iowa Hawkeye’s talisman, Caitlin Clark. The two-time national player of the year led her team through the tournament, averaging a competition high 31.8 points, only to fall at the final hurdle. Even as her team lost, the victorious coach for South Carolina Dawn Staley had this to say about her -
“I want to thank Caitlin Clark for lifting up our sport…you are one of the GOATS of our game and we appreciate you.”
The WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) and people around the game recognise the wave that Clark is at the crest of. Women’s basketball is on the up. A once seemingly stagnant league has become a go-to for basketball purists, more tactically appealing and intricately played as opposed to the more athletic ‘one vs one’ style of the NBA. Clark’s selection at the number one spot in the draft to the Indiana Fever was a foregone conclusion and their first game of the season was moved to a venue to accommodate the anticipated ticket-buyers. This expectation was not misplaced. Clark’s home debut was made in front of 17,274 fans (previous season average of 4,067 per statista), surpassing the Indiana’s Men’s team Indiana Pacer’s average home attendance of 16,466. This level of anticipation has never been seen before in Women’s Basketball. The Fever have also had 36 of their 40 games selected for live national television coverage.
And as we know, where interest lies… money follows. Clark recently batted off approaches from Puma, Under Armour and Adidas to sign an 8 year long endorsement contract with Nike worth a reported $28m which will see her receive a signature shoe design. League interest outside of Indiana is also on the up. Reigning WNBA champions, the Las Vegas Aces, recently announced that they’d sold out 15 out of 20 of the 2024 season home games, after setting a team-record attendance in their first game of the season. Coincidence? I think not.
Clark is at the heart of a revolution in Women’s Basketball. The Iowa vs South Carolina final is only the beginning.
About a month before the start of the tournament, on February 18th 2024, the greatest ever NBA shooter, Steph Curry, scraped a win over the WNBA’s Sabrina Ionescu in a one-off, head-to-head 3 point competition over the All-Star Weekend. While it wasn’t as hotly anticipated as anything Clark has been involved in recently – it was no small event. In the end Curry prevailed with 29 points to Ionescu’s 26, but her score would have tied the winning scores of the previous two years – doing away with debate around any ‘gulf in skill’ that separated male and female players. Speaking after they had finished their competition Curry said:
“...for her to have a presence on this stage is going to do a lot to inspire the next generation of young boys and girls that want to compete and see themselves in either one of us. Wherever it goes from there, we know we can kind of plant our flag as doing something really special.”
Ionescu played a pivotal part in putting Women’s Basketball on a level playing field – where their skill could be seen as equal, rather than a ‘lesser version’ of the men’s game, as is so commonly the narrative around female sport. Caitlin Clark swoops in a few months later – captures the hearts of millions with her skill and women's basketball is changed forever.
As Mark Twain once said -
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Women’s tennis, the most progressive form of female professional sport, has been through a similar rigmarole. 1973 saw Billie Jean King, the number one ranked female player in the world, play Bobby Riggs, a fifty-five year old formerly ranked world number one, and beat him in straight sets. King was a vocal advocate of equal pay on the tennis circuit to huge opposition at the time and Riggs, while he perhaps overplayed his ‘chauvinist’ part to promote himself and the contest, he was by no means a supporter of King’s cause, famously saying women belonged “in the bedroom and the kitchen’ and that they lacked the “emotional stability” to be athletes. The game was dubbed the ‘battle of the sexes’ and King’s victory was huge for her fight for equality – setting tennis on a course that now sees male and female players earn equal prize money at all four major tournaments.
The mindset that allows The Battle of the Sexes and Ionescu’s three-point contest performance to be such big moments in sports history is an easily explained one. Sometimes, due to the athletic difference, women’s sport initially appears to be less entertaining or skilled than men’s. Social media comments reveal swathes of fans who think that they they are better than the women who they are watching (or often not watching) on TV. Moments like the ones talked about above provide irrefutable evidence to the contrary. No, the average punter cannot chase a female professional’s forehand across the baseline and return it for a winner; or shoot three-pointers with the same accuracy and consistency as a WNBA player. These moments also have the advantage of attracting an audience who wouldn’t otherwise watch women’s sport but are drawn in by the presence of a man competing. In an ideal world, these reminders wouldn’t be necessary. But clearly, in the one we live in, they are.
Twenty two years after the battle of the sexes, Serena Williams played her first ever professional game, and entered a sport that was ready to get behind a fresh face. Young, talented and graceful – the William’s sisters walked the tightrope of perfection that the media demands and the rest is history. While this is an over-simplication of the tireless fight that King and many others fought to provide a sporting environment that the Williams sisters could thrive in, the battle of the sexes and its cultural and social importance cannot be overstated.
To be one of these ‘stars’ that progresses the sport, a few characteristics are essential. While skill and athletic superiority is needed to get to the pinnacle of the sport – the media and spectators need to like the person, and on the pitch/court success isn’t enough. What do we value in women in society? We want grace and skill. We hate arrogance and outspokenness. They are expected to be compliant and only emotional in a way that is gentle and digestible. Anger or belligerence is unacceptable. Where male counterparts can get away with imperfection off the pitch and on it (see videos of Andy Murray shouting into crowd in frustration), when it comes to our female athletes similar behaviour evokes discomfort. The media’s preference to the quieter, more graceful Venus is testament to this. Serena was clearly the better player, and her achievements reflect that, but the more athletic, aggressive nature in her play along with proclivity to call out bad calls and argue her case on the court made it hard for the viewer and mainstream media to stomach her in the same way. If she hadn’t captured hearts as the meek but talented fourteen-year-old with the out-spoken father – the treatment she got as a ‘sweetheart’ of tennis could have been very different.
How does women’s football learn from all this? While the English Women’s National team continues to compete at the very top of the sport, it remains separate from the male alternative, and is often treated and spoken about as ‘lesser than’ rather than different but equal. Women’s Super League (WSL) attendances are rising, Arsenal Women’s team sold out the 60,000 seated Emirates Stadium on back to back gamedays – with those around the club describing an emerging ‘community feel’ to matchdays. Despite this, and the rising popularity across the league, the sentiment around women’s football on social media especially is one distinctly lacking in respect for the players’ ability. Basketball, once similar, is on its way out of obscurity and into a landscape of viewers who value it for its differences to the men’s game, and who tune in to satisfy specific appetites and to watch specific players.
On reflection, we missed an oppurtunity to propel a new star to the top of the game – our very own Caitlin Clark or Serena Williams. Lauren James entered the 2023 World Cup as the second youngest player in the England squad and easily the most exciting. Her skill, technique, strength, and fearlessness in her application of all the above made her a box-office attraction and one who earned deserved plaudits for her performances. Her brother, Chelsea right-back Reece James even said before the tournament that “she’s technically better than men who play in the Premier League.”
An exciting young player playing in a potentially World Cup winning team. At a World Cup. Two years after that same team won a European championship. This couldn’t be the moment, could it?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Lauren James lost her temper in a knock-out game against Nigeria, stamped on an opposition player, and was sent-off and banned for two games. Even though England won in her absence – what was to follow was disappointingly predictable. The then 21-year-old was hounded on social media, branded as arrogant and afflicted with an attitude problem and that was that. An oppurtunity missed. Our collective inability to like a sportswoman who doesn’t live up to the expected version of feminine perfection is to blame.
The paradoxical nature of this inability should be obvious. Extreme emotion, athletic bodies and unfiltered competitiveness is what makes sport so rousing and inspiring. Without it we are left with a lukewarm product – a bunch of people running around a pitch or court for no obvious reason. However, when sportswomen start to conform to the necessary requirements of entertaining sport, the common reaction is squeamishness. Not ladylike enough for us!
Caitlin Clark was the main draw for the huge viewership. But she wasn’t the only one. Social media pages such as ‘House of Highlights’ and ‘Bleacher Report’ followed the tournament closely - and the amount of ‘trash talk’ and taunting that occurred throughout was unlike anything the tournament had seen before. Hero and villain stories emerged from the most anticipated games, adding to the engagement and excitement surrounding the competition. Viral clips of LSU’s Angel Reese imitating Clark’s WWE style ‘You can’t see me’ celebration blew up on social media, bringing a whole hoard of newly interested viewers to the sport - invested in the narrative surrounding what they were watching.
Story lines matter. That’s why so many of us had our head in our hands when Emma Hayes turned her post-game confrontation with Jonas Eidevall* into a criticism of ‘male aggression’ rather than accepting it as part of the game. Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel’s similar handshake confrontation, on the other hand, immediately wrote itself into Premier League lore – celebrated as a pinnacle of the competitive nature of the sport – not a moment to be ashamed of.
Since the World Cup, women’s football has returned to being a fairly well-viewed attraction, and while it’s important to acknowledge the huge growth the sport has seen, it’s still not one that feels it’s close to being seen as a ‘different but equal’ version of the men’s game. History has shown us the steps that need to be taken to get us there. Will it be a female manager succeeding in the men’s game? Will we break the mould and accept female players as highly skilled without needing to see them in direct comparison with men? Or does more need to be done to stoke the fires of confrontation and hostility within the games – especially when women’s football, through no fault of its own, lacks the historical nature of derbies and rival fanbases that men’s football has been blessed with.
One thing is clear from the history explored here. Attitudes that compel fans to say things like ‘women’s football is no good’ or ‘they’ll never be worth watching’ are fragile. The same words were used to disparage female tennis players and basketballers. It doesn’t last. A moment that shows naysaying football fans that yes, they really are that good, and then a star to get behind. A star we don’t tear down at the first possible oppurtunity. That might be all that it takes.
While we deliberate over how change will be made – other sports are moving on. How long will it be until we join them?
An interesting read on a related topic -
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