Seattle’s WNBA team, the Storm, are off to slow start, partly because the team’s principle star, Aussie Lauren Jackson, has decided to take time off to recover from her various injuries and prepare for the 2012 Olympics as a member of the Australian national team. The Olympic basketball schedule doesn’t start until July 28, which means she will miss most of the scheduled Storm games; this is unlike her schedule in 2008, when she didn’t go back to Australia until July. I’m sure to most sports fans in town, this information represents little more than points on a graph, but I have to confess that I am not opinionless about the Storm, that annoying person in the back jumping up and down trying to get your attention.
Given the Storm’s schedule, which is no more strenuous than a college player’s season, locals might wonder upon Jackson’s frequent injuries. Unlike NBA players who don’t need to augment their income, player like Jackson who have notoriety and are of the right color don’t just sit home and rehab; In a couple of seasons, Jackson seemed to prefer to rehab on the Storm’s time instead of missing out on the real payday. After the 2008 Olympics, Jackson missed the remainder of the Storm season with an ankle injury. The next three years saw various injuries to her Achilles and hip. Without Jackson in the line-up, Bird appears rather ordinary, even lost. Together, they are “complimentary” because they play like they are the only two players on the team. When one or the other is missing, they play as if they’ve never seen the people they are playing with before.
So what has Jackson been doing in the “off-season," if not preparing for WNBA play? After the 2005 WNBA season she played in Russia for five seasons, for a considerably larger sum than her WNBA pay. Some people in town might not be aware of it, but Sue Bird and other Caucasian American players were also signed-up to play for the Moscow team for considerable sums. As an added incentive, Jackson bunked in the team owner’s mansion, or at least until the owner--a former KGB operative and businessman who likely had links to organized crime--was assassinated. In 2011, she signed with a Spanish club for a wheel-barrel load of cash. Of course, some Storm fans might wonder if this means that Jackson and Bird are really “their” stars and not someone else’s, but since most Storm fans have no idea of their mercenary existence, we’ll just let the fans remain reveling in their private fantasy.
Despite the fact that Jackson and Bird have been marketed as the top tandem in the game, the Storm haven’t exactly been the “dominant” team in the league, winning two titles in the dozen years that Jackson has been a member of the team. And not that there has been a lot of competition—the league is down to 12 teams this season. How bad has the league’s viability situation been? Bad enough that the two franchises that have won half the league’s championship titles—Houston and Detroit—have folded. One wonders if the league will still be around when Brittney Griner enters the WNBA next year; she is clearly a woman amongst girls in the college game now; when one recalls that roundhouse right into the face of some snooty white girl named Jordan Barncastle—after she grabbed the 6’8” Griner by the arm and tried to swing her into the ground—it could be a most interesting match-up between Jackson and Griner. Jackson has been known to make offensive, derogatory remarks about opponents on court, which may explain why she was kneed in the groin by Lisa Leslie in a game in 2002. A story in USA Today that year remarked that “These two teams (the Storm and the LA Sparks) have plenty of history. A fight punctuated their last meeting…And back in the 2000 Olympics, Jackson, playing for Australia, pulled out Leslie's hair extension in the gold medal game.” I would like to see the arrogant Jackson pull any kind of stunt like that on Griner.
Like many women who have a lot of money and fame searching for “meaning” in their lives to explain some void in their personal life, Jackson has chosen domestic violence and rape crisis centers as the best outlet for whatever it is that moves her (such single-minded victomology allowed former high school football star Brian Banks to be falsely accused of rape and sit in jail for five years, while his accuser essentially stole a $750,000 settlement from a California school district—all of which she has already spent and is now living on subsistence income). Although a person her size is more likely to inflict pain than receive it, Jackson is “passionate” about preventing domestic abuse—except, of course, if women are guilty of it. Jackson also supposedly likes to talk to her Storm teammates about women’s rights and Lady Gaga. The problem with the politics of people like Jackson is that their money and fame buys them plenty of “rights” and opens lots of doors that many of us (including, I dare say, men) find closed. When one considers countries like Australia which for many years barred immigration by non-whites (and still has an unspoken ban against African immigrants), Jackson’s “rights” demagoguery tends to have a rather hollow meaning. As far as Lady Gaga is concerned, she is all about self-promotion and her garish costumes. In regard to her music, at least Madonna has some notion of tunefulness; it is perhaps without irony that Gaga uses a name that refers to “senile,” “silly” and “crazy.”
Jackson has also complained that people principally define her by her birthday suit spread in some magazine featuring Australian Olympic athletes some years ago. She claimed that when she googles her name, all that comes up are those pictures. I found this hard to believe, so I decided to investigate her claim. I typed in "Lauren Jackson" and after 20 Google pages and finding nothing that referred to the photos, I decided that it was all in her head. Even when I did a search for images, there was only a couple unexplicit shots that appeared. You actually have to do considerable search refinements to find the photos that Jackson says she doesn't regret doing.
I don’t know what else to say, except that I can’t wait for the NFL season to start so that I won’t have an excuse to wander off into the sports world’s Outer Limits.
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