Rebecca Lobo was such a popular basketball player at the University of Connecticut that a rabid male fan once dashed into the beauty salon where she was getting her hair cut and stole the discarded brown clippings.
Then her image went national. After leading her team to an NCAA title in 1995, she appeared on David Letterman’s show, jogged with the president and co-wrote a book with her mom.
Lobo was by no means the best player women’s basketball has seen–former Texas Tech superstar Sheryl Swoopes, for one, was much more graceful and electrifying to watch–but she was marketable and the timing was right.
Now, the same phenomenon is happening with the Women’s National Basketball Association, the NBA-sponsored league being forced in the faces of unsuspecting sports fans.
A fast-paced, below-the-rim spectacle that derives its beauty from solid fundamentals such as quick passing and accurate shooting, women’s basketball is enjoying unprecedented exposure.
It clearly struggles to compete with the flash and power exhibited in the NBA, and rim-shaking dunks are noticeably absent. But women’s basketball showcases the sport in a pure form, the way it was meant to be played. For the 13 million female basketball players between the ages of 7 and 17, a professional women’s league offers role models, hope and inspiration.
Ready or not, women’s basketball, which has respectable numbers of loyal supporters in small pockets of the country, has gone national. If the WNBA succeeds, it will be more of a marketing victory than a tribute to athletic excellence.
The WNBA is not what most fans want. It’s what viewers are being told they should want, at a time women are rushing to catch up with where they should be today, on the 25th anniversary of Title IX, the federal mandate created to assure gender equity in athletics.
Owned and operated by the NBA, the eight WNBA teams play in the summer, in NBA arenas vacated by the men. The league was hyped relentlessly with commercials and promotional spots during the recent NBA finals, with players confidently and mysteriously declaring in playground lingo, “We got next.” Slick photo spreads appeared in the July issues of Glamour and Self magazines.
But the league’s foundation rests on television, not talent. The unorthodox summer schedule hinges on television’s ability to attract attention, revenue and credibility to the league. Television networks and sponsors were corralled before players even were drafted.
And television, the great legitimizer, is the reason more people know about the WNBA than the rival American Basketball League, a well-organized competitor that already has a season under its belt and will expand by another team next season.
“They can say `We got next,’ but our response is `We got players,’ ” said Gary Cavalli, a former Stanford sports information director and one of the founders of the ABL.
In a sense, the ABL is the league developed by women’s basketball purists, while the WNBA was created by realists.
The ABL, for instance, left out the word “women” from the league’s name. Teams play a 44-game schedule from October to March in smaller cities such as San Jose, Calif., and Columbus, Ohio, where women’s basketball traditionally has done well at the college level. The arenas are small, and players have been assigned to teams in cities where they already had local appeal.
U-Conn’s Lobo, for example, originally was assigned to play for the New England Blizzard based in Hartford, Conn., before she defected to the WNBA. Her former college teammates, Jen Rizzotti and the recently signed Kara Wolters, are members of the Blizzard.
ABL players own shares in the league and were involved in every decision from uniforms to ball size. The ABL plays with the 30-inch diameter ball used in the men’s game, not the 28 1/2-inch ball used in girls’ high school and women’s college versions of the sport.
The average ABL salary is $80,000, but players are not allowed to perform for competing leagues such as the WNBA, even though the seasons do not overlap.
The ABL lured eight members of the 1996 gold medal-winning Olympic team, including Dawn Staley, Teresa Edwards and Katrina McClain.
Another coup for the ABL was signing Olympic gold heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who played in the Illinois High School state basketball championship for East St. Louis Lincoln. When she appeared on “Nightline,” NBA Commissioner David Stern only half-kiddingly asked her to join the WNBA.
The WNBA, on the other hand, seems to want nothing more than to be associated with the league that brought the world Michael Jordan.
The eight teams, operating in the NBA cities of Charlotte, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Sacramento and Salt Lake City play an abbreviated 28-game schedule in cavernous arenas. If crowds are sparse, “decorative draping” is used to section off seats and help create the illusion of fullness for TV cameras.
In the WNBA, players can compete off-season for other leagues or overseas, but, with its average salary of $30,000, the league often has been outbid by the ABL. Games are televised by Lifetime, ESPN and NBC and the unique three-tiered arrangement segments the market and targets specific audiences. ESPN aims for the predominantly male sports audience. Lifetime attracts women between the ages of 18 and 49, and NBC gives the WNBA a national audience on Saturday afternoons.
Off the court, a comprehensive Web page (www.WNBA.com) has been created, and games will be “cybercast” worldwide on ESPN SportsZone (espn.com). Portions of WNBA ticket sales will go to a breast cancer awareness program.
The most marketed and visible players have been the four Olympians: Lobo, Swoopes, the willowy Lisa Leslie, who also has a modeling contract with Wilhelmina Models Inc., and Ruthie Bolton-Holifield.
Swoopes, married to high school sweetheart Eric Jackson, delivered a 9-pound 7-ounce boy June 25, four days after the birth of the league, and she is expected to join the team sometime this season. Swoopes and Jordan are the only two athletes to have Nike shoes named after them.
The WNBA also has recruited extensively overseas and resurrected long gone but not forgotten names. Nancy Lieberman-Cline, 39, is well past her prime, but playing for Phoenix. Cheryl Miller, 33, is general manager and head coach for Phoenix, and Ann Meyers is a commentator for NBC.
In public, officials from both leagues wish the other well and downplay merger talks. They point out how two leagues double the opportunities for players and coaches and give the sport year-round exposure.
But the result is a diluted talent pool at a time women’s basketball can’t afford to put anything less than spectacular on the court.
So far, attendance has been encouraging. A crowd of 17,780 fans watched Phoenix at New York in Madison Square Garden on June 29, and through the first 16 games the average was 10,369 per game. The WNBA opener between New York and Los Angeles attracted 14,284, while 3.7 million households watched on TV.
But even the WNBA recognizes the numbers will drop off, probably to preseason expectations of 4,000, and how many households will continue to watch as they realize the game is nothing like the men’s version?
Viewers are being set up with unrealistic expectations. And those switching to the women’s game expecting to see the equivalent of the NBA will be sorely disappointed.
If television even sticks around. What happens if the women’s league is dropped? Ample precedent exists. Remember the spring-season United States Football League that promised television would guarantee its success? ABC agreed to telecast the USFL 10 months before it played a game, and ratings initially exceeded expectations.
But after two years, ABC backed away from regional games, and the ratings fell. Finally, the network refused to pay $7 million in scheduled rights fees, and the two parties went to court.
Up to this point, every attempt to elevate women’s basketball to the professional level has failed miserably. Only one, the Women’s Professional Basketball League (1979-1981) survived for more than a year. The WPBL’S Chicago Hustle, coached by DePaul women’s coach Doug Bruno, received television and newspaper coverage and drew its fair share of fans, but it eventually collapsed as the rest did.
“I don’t see it failing this time,” Bruno said. “I think (the NBA) sees a real potential for the women’s pro game to enter into the commercial market. We would obviously like to maintain the purity of the product. But at the same time, we would like to see it recognized and enter into an economic market of supply and demand and see it hold its own.”
The women would be able to do that if the ABL and WNBA merged and all the Olympians played for one league–and if their game is watched and judged on its own merits, not compared to how men play.
But the hype could be too much, too soon, something the 23-year-old Lobo experienced when she was a member of the national team prior to the Olympics.
Constantly in demand for autographs and appearances even though younger and less experienced than international stars such as Edwards and McClain, Lobo had trouble meeting team fitness standards and didn’t live up to expectations in scrimmages.
At one point, Olympic coach Tara VanDerveer said she was considering replacing Lobo on the U.S. roster with a more experienced player.
Lobo stayed, but after the Olympics she was burned out and didn’t touch a basketball for a month. Then she signed with the WNBA’s New York Liberty over the ABL, explaining she wanted to feel love for the game again, in its pure form.
That sensation may be hard to find in the already commercialized WNBA, but it’s an opportunity players can’t afford to pass up. The marketing monster the NBA has set into motion isn’t likely to come around again.
