Storm on this parade

“Seattle Taken by Storm” blares the front page of the Seattle Times. This is almost as “catchy”—and fulsome—as ESPN’s “Everything They’ve Got,” which failed to generate much interest in the WNBA’s televised playoff games, with no higher ratings than the meager regular season. I’m all for the women and their fan base—mostly limited, it seems, to rather butch-looking white females—to have their day in the sun. But forcing people to be “thrilled” by the Storm’s winning the WNBA title is like being told to eat your spinach: It looks bad and tastes worse—but it’s “good” for you. Let’s be frank: if this is the most “thrilling” event that the Seattle sports scene has to offer, we’re in deep trouble. Not that we have to trouble ourselves needlessly, however; the Storm winning the WNBA championship has as much staying power as a hot-dog eating contest—mildly intriguing for a moment, then forgotten the next day. There is supposed to be a victory parade of some sort, so the local media will be sure to entertain what curiosity is out there for a day or two longer; but it would be by the slimmest of ironies to say if they had not won the championship, the Storm might have warranted a brief mention on one or two local sports updates, and then forgotten completely until next year (providing the league is still solvent).

For the vast majority of sports fans, the WNBA, and women’s basketball in general, is mostly about the result, not how you got there. There’s just the score running across the ticker on the bottom of the TV screen; Fox Sports’ website doesn’t even bother to run a WNBA webpage with standings and statistics (at least not on its homepage). For non-fans, it’s like one of those football computer simulations; input some variables, and it spits out random results. I’m not saying that disinterest by the general fan is wholly due to play that often appears athletically-challenged and painful to watch, but interest does seem to be mainly of the “go-girl” politics variety. Could the Storm beat a top-tier Division I men’s college basketball team? No. Could they beat a Division II team? Probably not. A Division III team? Possibly, but not likely. A championship-caliber boys 4A high school team? Maybe. There is no getting around the fact that even though the Storm are WNBA champions for the second time, it is, after all, only the WNBA, which was so bad this year that the Storm was the only team in its six-team conference with a winning record, and a 13-21 record was good enough to make the playoffs. Out of twelve teams, eight were required to make the playoffs just so that you didn’t have the conference championship series in the first round. What word am I looking for? Incestuous?

There is nothing that could make me watch a WNBA game after the first headache-inducing time, especially with the players are in those ankle-length duds. It isn’t even fun to laugh.