RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Can men handle the mainstream success of the WNBA?
The middle-school energy they've brought to the last two Sky games has me wondering.
I thought about it during Friday's Valkyries game, when a barrage of sex toys landed on the court.
I thought about it again Sunday, when Enes Kanter Freedom showed up to the Fever game . The former NBA player recently mocked the league and the queer community by claiming to be a woman and declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft.
By Monday, the league had reportedly declared him ineligible. But Sunday, he was still pretending to be a WNBA prospect.
At halftime, I found him posing beside the women’s bathroom. Someone complimented him on his “funny” shirt, which defined a woman as “an adult human female.” The bathroom-goer told him about another shirt she liked: “Trump’s rights are human rights.”
As the two of them owned the libs, or whatever the hell they were doing, I stared up at all 6 feet, 10 inches of him and thought: Is there anything gayer than going to a women’s basketball game and having your handler photograph you next to the women’s bathroom?
It wasn’t an original thought. That was Natasha Cloud’s message to the dildo-throwers Friday night: Bringing a sex toy to a women’s basketball game was about the gayest thing they could do. Stop attacking marginalized groups, she told them, and admit you’re one of us.
I thought it was genuinely funny. Still, hearing her call the offenders gay made me tense.
Suddenly, I was back in middle school, calling people gay as an insult, even though deep down I knew it was wrong, even though deep down I knew I was one of them.
Cloud’s joke, I think, was exposing that exact dynamic: We hide to protect ourselves from other people, only for the hiding to hurt us even more.
Still, I remembered how easy it was to adopt their logic. I worried that calling people gay because we were pissed at them, even in jest, might not be safe for us, either.
I sensed that insulting Kanter, or making him the butt of a joke, would cut me off from what was really happening.
Who is Enes, and what is he doing here?
Who am I, and what am I doing here?
Those felt like the necessary questions. But it was halftime, and although I’d made good progress on my gamer, this was Sky-Fever in Sophie Cunningham’s WNBA . You’ve got to be ready for anything.
So I walked behind Kanter back to my seat and wished for simplicity. I wanted him to disappear into the crowd so I wouldn’t have to reckon with him any further.
That didn’t happen.
Cloud hit a huge layup, then turned, screamed and pointed at Kanter in his courtside seat. He stepped forward and spread his arms wide.
He was doing what he had come to do: Be a tall man taking attention away from a women’s basketball game. Make himself a martyr for “protecting women’s sports.” Give talking heads another chance to call the WNBA messy, unserious and unworthy.
After the game, Sky coach Tyler Marsh made his familiar plea for people to focus on the good in the league, on the players playing. Then he addressed Kanter directly.
“If you come to a game, you should probably come to enjoy the basketball,” Marsh said.
“It seems pretty simple to me.”
A few days earlier, Marsh and I had talked about why he left the NBA coaching ranks for the WNBA, even after “a hundred people” told him not to.
He found more purpose here, he said, in a league with a shared sense of fighting for something, of speaking for those who could not speak for themselves. He wished the fight weren’t necessary. But it was, and fighting it together created a sense of belonging.
Something clicked.
No wonder queer players such as Sydney Colson and Theresa Plaisance call him their favorite person. No wonder Cloud respects Marsh so much, often praising his steadiness and emotional control.
“When you talk about men, we love when they can regulate their emotions,” she had told the Sun-Times earlier that week.
Maybe because of Cloud, or Marsh, or Kanter, I spent the next day with another question:
What is a good man?
Is it coaches such as Marsh, drawn to the league by its collective struggle? Is it NBA players such as Kevin Durant, who invest in relationships with young WNBA stars?
Maybe. Still, it didn’t seem that simple.
And then, because I was no longer writing a gamer, because I finally had a moment to be queer and expansive and make room for complexity, I thought:
What is a man, anyway?
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