My First WNBA Experience

A Gay Old Time in Connecticut.
By Adam Greene 09/15/2005

As of yesterday morning, the entirety of my knowledge about the WNBA consisted of one fact: lesbians love it. Now, to me this is a good thing. I myself enjoy donning a nice golf shirt, keeping my hair cut short and nails trimmed, and I also fast forward directly to the girl on girl scenes when watching porn. With so much in common with lesbians, perhaps I too could find the WNBA fannnn-tastic.

So, with game one of the WNBA finals scheduled for Wednesday night between the Connecticut Sun and the Sacramento Monarchs, now was the time for me to finally give in to that curiosity I’d been dealing with for all these years. Sure, the WNBA isn’t something I’d naturally watch, but last night I was young, drunk and feeling experimental. And, while I’ll always prefer the NBA, and I plan on forming a lifetime commitment to following one of the teams, I feel safe enough with ESPN 2’s coverage of the game to let some of those inhibitions go. Now is the time to experience all the new things the world has to offer. I mean, just watching one game doesn’t make me a WNBA fan for life. Everybody has at least one WNBA game in their past. My one hope, like most fans’ first time with the WNBA, was that it would be exciting, feminine and gentle… and not captured forever on video tape.

You can’t come at something like this cold. A writer must do his research, and I’m not one to half-ass my way through a sports column. I show up prepared. I do all the real work before the writing begins. So, after researching lesbians for four and a half hours on the internet and taking a power nap, I finally felt equipped to watch ESPN 2’s WNBA Shootaround Pre-game show.

Hosted by Pam Ward, ex-Detroit Shock coach Nancy Lieberman and UConn Women’s Basketball Coach Geno Auriemma, I felt confident that I would be both informed and entertained. And I was not disappointed. Quickly, through the first few minutes of the show, a sub-plot began to take form, i.e. “How many times will Pam Ward inappropriately touch Nancy Lieberman?” I’ve seen lots of these three-panel shows. Hell, I watch ESPN’s College Gameday every week and can honestly say that I can’t remember one instance in which Chris Fowler turned to Lee Corso and gave him a flirtatious squeeze on the shoulder while discussing the Gamecock’s young tight end.



The thing is, in my research on lesbians and the WNBA, I discovered that Nancy Lieberman, while coaching the Shock, was rumored to have had a torrid and scandalous affair with her point guard Anna DeForge. Which would be ridiculously hot if Lieberman didn’t look like the wacky bug-eyed neighbor from a 1980’s sitcom and talk just like Barbara Walters on her third bottle of Mad Dog.



My interest piqued, I wondered how Pam and Nancy were going to play it. Would they go Moonlighting’s David Addison-Maddie Hayes route and mask their true desires with raucous contention? Or would it be a little more like The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, a smoldering unspoken mutual desire that would take nine or so years to be culminated? As Pam gently touched Nancy’s wrist when asking her about the impact of the Sun’s Lindsey Whalen’s knee injury, I knew that this subtle mating dance had only just begun.

For his part, UConn’s Geno Auriemma just sat back and relaxed on set with the cautious optimism of a man alone in a room with two women who could tongue kiss at any moment.



From here, the show goes into standard highlight mode, showing how both teams got to where they are today, playing a meaningless game in front of a handful of fans on ESPN 47. Once the package is complete, we’re introduced to the fourth member of the WNBA Shootaround team and ace shortstop in ESPN’s yearly softball game with FoxSports, the towering Nell Fortner. This prompted the most surreal event of the night.



You see, as the pre-game show cuts between Pam, Nancy and Gino in the studio and the courtside announcers Terry Gannon and Doris Burke, Pam’s microphone in the studio remains live for a minute or two. Off and on, we hear Pam mumbling something for a few seconds as Doris Burke tries not to notice that Terry Gannon has on more make-up than she does. A few garbled sentences are all that Pam gives us.

Until this moment.

Nell, standing courtside with a young girl roughly half her size, says, after being introduced by Pam in studio, “Thanks, Pam. I’m here with 2005 Rookie of the Year Tamika Johnson…”

And, at that moment, Pam’s mike picks up her unmistakable voice saying, “And I could f—k her up.”

Stunned, I hit the pause button on my DVR. No way did I just hear that. I reversed the video and listen again.

“…of the year Tamika Johnson…’

“And I could f—k her up.”

No way. I call for my wife to come and listen. She hears the same thing.

Pam Ward wants to f—k up little Tamika Johnson.

The question is, “why”? And does “f—k up” mean the same thing to Pam Ward as it does to me?

Because, to me, it means Pam wants to fight with Tamika. But I’ll admit that I’m not up on all the new lingo and perhaps it means something different. Something which, I think, could and should cause a jealous rift to emerge on set between Pam and Nancy. At this point, before the game had started, I had found the WNBA completely fascinating and full of sexual intrigue. And if everything had ended right there, I would have had a sterling report. Unfortunately for me, there was still an actual game to be played. And that, my friends, is where things went terribly wrong.

The first startling difference in this whole WNBA experience for me was having the game presented to me by Tampax tampons, and how jarring that is to hear for the first time.



I’ve had various sporting events presented to me by all kinds of products, be it beer, beer, and even on some rare occasions, beer, but never, ever Tampax. I wasn’t sure how to feel about Tampax presenting something to me, but I quickly gleaned from the commercials that I should feel both fresh and free. Even on my light days. So that was different…but kind of nice in a very fresh, freeing way.

The game begins and suddenly my faculties are barraged with scene after scene of flailing ponytails and basketballs careening dangerously in every direction. At one point, Terry and Doris commented on the great defense each team was playing, but where I come from that isn’t called “defense”, it’s called “banging it off the rim”. The bricks were falling everywhere. Three minutes into the second half, OSHA showed up and closed down the game until everyone came back wearing steel-toed boots and hard hats. In one thrilling moment, frustrated from the slab of Stonehenge that had just whistled by her head, Sacramento Forward Yolanda Griffith bravely choke-slammed Sun 7’2” Center Margo Dydek, who I’m pretty sure is a robot.



I have to take a moment here to discuss the aforementioned Margo Dydek, an assault to the senses if you’re unprepared for her. It’s like the Sun trapped and shaved a Sasquatch and taught it to play basketball. Why was she not mentioned on the pregame show? I think having a giant android terminator from the future on one of the teams might have been something I needed to know about. I first caught sight of her at the tip-off and instantly thought something was wrong… with me. I took a moment to assure myself that I wasn’t suffering dementia brought on by one of the bizarre, mutant, Asian chicken flus that the news keeps claiming is trying to kill me. Luckily I wasn’t feverish. She was real.

She was also a terrible player. I can see why a team would roll the dice with Dydek, though. She looks like she should be pile driving a T-Rex on Monster Island. The problem is that Margo played the game like she had never seen a basketball before. Passing her the ball was like tossing an orangutan a Rubik’s cube. She didn’t know whether to shoot it, pass it, or just sit down on the floor and shove it deep into her mouth. It’s nice to know that basketball’s “big white stiff” problem isn’t gender specific.

The Sun led for most of the game, filling the crowd with a joy of almost Lilith Fair-ian proportions. That glee was short-lived, however, as Griffith’s horse collaring of Connecticut’s mechanical center not only fired up the rest of her team, but drove Sun coach Mike Thibault completely insane as well.

Thibault (whose name is pronounced “TEE-BOWE” even though, maddeningly, it doesn’t contain a single “E” or “O” and ends with a “T”) had been miked so that the home audience would know exactly what a short, fat man might scream at gargantuan female basketball players. Instead, we were blessed with Mike’s courtside profanity-laced meltdown during his feud with the game’s referees.

What made these coach-referee altercations a treat was not watching Thibault’s shiny scalp growing more and more purple with every perceived missed call, it was that the person manning ESPN 2’s language censor button seemed completely incapable of bleeping out a single curse word. I’d not seen anyone whiff that bad since Garth Brooks took batting practice with the Padres. Thibault would be in the ref’s face saying, “That’s *beep* s—t! It’s *beep* f—king s---t! *beep*.” Incredibly, the censor missed every time. He’s bleeping out prepositions… adverbs… all the stuff you diagram in a sentence but the actual “S” and “F” bombs themselves. I’m sure it prompted many a small child watching the game at home to turn to one of his two mommies and ask, “What did the little bald man mean by *beep* s—t damn f—k?”

The Sacramento Monarchs charged ahead and stayed there, winning game one 69-65 on the Sun’s home court. Connecticut has one chance Thursday night to even up the series in front of their home crowd. And I for one hope they can pull it off, if only to give their fans something nice to hold them over until the next Indigo Girls concert rolls through town.