For most of the last 36 years, since I was introduced to women’s basketball in a major way, I’ve been asked why I’m drawn to the game.
The question almost always comes from other men. Sometimes, it comes with a joke, like from a reporting buddy of mine who wondered if I had lost a bet.
Then there’s the variation of the question that comes with an insinuation that there must be some sexual component, as in, I must be trying to land a date with a player or a coach.
Just a guess, but I’d be willing to bet that no one has ever asked George Will why he’s so passionate about baseball, or at least not in a manner where his judgment comes into question.
Same thing with Peter King on football or Jack McCallum on the NBA or Seth Davis on men’s college basketball. It seems to be taken a matter of faith that if you’re a man in this country, your love of sports played by men is automatic and unquestioned, as in, that’s what men are supposed to do.
However, men if you appreciate women’s sports
The funny part of that otherwise insensitive proposition is that I actually met my wife at a women’s basketball game, but she has never played the game and usually doesn’t want to be in the same room when a game – played by men or women – is on.
Almost always, the question is delivered with an insult to the product itself, as in “You can’t seriously want to watch this, right?” “This is horrible.”
(True story – At the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper I worked at for 23 years, some of the men I sat next to used to say that a local boys high school team would mop the court with the Tennessee women’s team, at the time the national college champions. That may have been true, but so what?)
In those years since
sheplayshoops 