News Stories

Unspoiled Sports
The WNBA's All-Stars Attract a Crowd as Dedicated as They Are

By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 17, 2002; Page C01

When the NBA All-Star Game blew into Washington 17 months ago, it brought the gushing bottles of Cristal and the entourages and the celebrities and the hootchy mamas, their taut haunches rolling under Lycra stretched to its limits. It brought the stench of sex and money and the disappointment that comes from worshiping indifferent stars.

When the pro women basketball players brought their all-star show to MCI Center on Monday night, the grand total of stretch limos idling at the curb seemed to be one.

Instead, streaming off the Metro, here came young girls in cornrows and Chamique Holdsclaw jerseys. Suburban families -- Mom and the kids, all in sneakers and shorts, meeting Dad, his suit jacket draped over his arm, shirt sleeves rolled up. Young couples on dates. Lesbians by the myriad, from all classes, old and young, black and white.

The worship was all different in this scene. The fans screamed themselves hoarse for the players; the players put on a real show before a sellout crowd, racing up and down the court, diving for loose balls, keeping the game between East and West tight until the last minute. What's more, the women looked like they enjoyed every minute of it. They grinned and ran and set up smart, fast plays. The audience fervor made MCI throb like the inside of an Olympic stadium.

Oh, the differences abound between the all-star games of the men and the women of basketball.

Monday night, there were fewer tattoos and, with Dennis Rodman out of the sport, more lipstick.

There was steelier performance. Tamika Catchings, a second-year player for the Indiana Fever, played with a broken nose and a concussion. Any personal vanity was buried under a clear protective mask that made her look like a character out of "A Clockwork Orange." In the men's All-Star Game in 1997, five of the biggest names pulled out, citing injuries -- a groin pull here, a sore foot there.

Instead of NBA wives dripping in diamonds and picking their way to very good seats on impossibly high heels, there was an acknowledgment of the Girl Scouts of America. Instead of Lakers girls shaking it all over, there was the Mystics Mayhem, a troupe of kids in loose pants doing hip-hop gymnastics.

Instead of star power like Denzel Washington and Will Smith just outside the baseline, there was a single announcement of a Famous Person in Our Midst: Soccer powerhouse Mia Hamm was in the house, and, as seen on the big screens above the floor, she looked, all in all, as if she were there to concentrate on the game. Abe Pollin, in his blue shirt and regimental striped tie, sat with his wife, Irene, in their box. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright sat in the stands unnoticed. If corporate cronies were larding it on in the skyboxes, they stayed in the shadows. A fan could actually move about the concourses for several yards without being Swooshed.

Of course, there are groupies hanging around the players.

"Leeeeeesa, Leeeeeesa," pleaded one guy, hanging over the walkway where Lisa Leslie, the Wilhelmina model and the All-Star Game's most valuable player, was wending her way after the game. Sometimes the groupies look just like the ones who shadow the men, with their arched eyebrows and plunging necklines and shimmying ways, but there aren't nearly as many of them. And their motivation seems different; how can you trick a WNBA player into letting you have her baby?

Teresa Weatherspoon may have had dinner after the game with a beautiful woman in skintight clothing, but here the similarity to her male colleagues ends. The women were dining in . . . a bookstore, Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle.

Instead of the velvet rope lines that guarded nightclubs across town during the men's All-Star Game, there were quieter, underground bashes, organized through e-mail exchanges and word-of-mouth. Lisa Buggs, an event planner who helped throw a packed bash Saturday night at Mango's on 14th Street, decided not to announce the party on the radio. "Men would flock to the club if we did that," said Buggs.

During the women's game itself, there was a whiff of the political: Title IX -- Preserve It," read one placard in the stands. And in the spot where one might expect to find the fat guy trying to win a car with a free throw shot from half court, there was an only-in-Washington replacement: The league gave a tribute to the former senator and current congresswoman who had sponsored the original era-making legislation 30 years ago -- Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) and Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii).

Cynics predict that if and when real money comes to women's basketball, the gals will turn out just like the guys. Those open, genuine faces will turn to impassive poses, and the autograph-hunting kids will be ignored, and the athletes will begin some sorry disassociation from their fan base until they're just another set of jerk millionaires. How would women act who are too rich and too worshiped? Hard to say. There aren't too many examples outside of the plastic surgery pavilion.

On the court, around the edges, the women's and men's teams are drawing closer. There is labor strife on the horizon in the WNBA, with the sides lining up the way they always do -- the workers want more money, and the employer says it has no more to give. The other night, Portland's Michele Marciniak drew a fine for fighting with another player. (Nobody stands accused of hunting anyone down with a gun, though.)

For now, WNBA players don't get charter flights. They have to fold those long legs into commercial coach. They get per diems. Meal money. Most of them have to hold two jobs or play in Europe in the offseason to get by. Dawn Staley, who played her point guard heart out Monday, coaches the Temple University women in the offseason. Rookie Sue Bird and her University of Connecticut teammates agreed the other day at a news conference that they had it better in college.

So the women players remain mostly unspoiled, and that, combined with play that gets better all the time, produced an abiding sense of pride Monday night. Worshiping women for being strong and fast and powerful is a relatively new religion, and the righteous in the WNBA house stomped and chanted with the spirit.

In a section behind the basket, the Ladies in Motion, 60 strong, swayed in their matching polo shirts. They were black and white women from all over the country who have convened for each of the four WNBA All-Star Games. "And I like this one best!" said Hazel Hatcher, a consultant from Plano, Tex., who watches women's basketball whenever her work travel takes her to a city with a team. "I've been watching for years, and supporting them, and they just keep getting better and better at their play. The men?" She shook her head.

"We aren't even gonna talk about them."

Staff writers Teresa Wiltz and Stephen A. Crockett Jr. contributed to this report.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

Printed without permission from the Washington Post website. Read the story along with additional history on this story at the Washington Post website.

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