Victor Davis Hanson: This WNBA Controversy Just Got Bigger

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There is more controversy surrounding the Women’s National Basketball Association. Remember, the WNBA is owned by the NBA, and for years it had not shown a profit, and it was a subsidy provided by the men’s National Basketball Association to the women’s.

And then something happened. Caitlin Clark, the star college player from Indiana, joined the Indiana Fever. Now, there was a problem there, to be candid, because – it shouldn’t have been a problem, but apparently the women’s basketball association is 65% to 70% African-American, and people have argued that it’s also 35% to 40% gay.

So, you had a marquee player in Clark, who is white and heterosexual, joining a league which the American public didn’t really, to be frank, pay much attention to. Poor attendance, very meager TV revenues, almost no merchandising, just sort of an adjacent auxiliary charity, so to speak, of the NBA. And then everything changed.

Clark turned out, as everybody expected, to be a superstar. Her games in Indiana are sold out. When she plays on the road, many of those games are sold out. All of the players got a second look in the league, and their TV revenues and merchandising contracts soared. People have estimated that if you look at the television revenue, the merchandising revenue, the attendance revenue, and the private contracts individual players use themselves, in addition to the league revenue, that Caitlin Clark may have been responsible for a $1 billion surge in total league and individual revenues.

So you’d think that she would be worshiped, but as we said before on one of our videos, she’s been beat up. She’s intentionally fouled. She’s had flagrant fouls. And the general impression that the public has after watching this is that she is a target because of envy and jealousy, that she gets so much public attention and media attention that the other players, who feel they’ve been in the league longer, have been neglected.

The bottom line is they can’t think rationally and strategically that they are flying in private jets, they have enhanced conditions to play, they get more money, they get more attention because of Caitlin Clark. All they can focus on is, she is white, she is heterosexual, she gets too much attention. And that is the subtext that we’re not supposed to discuss around the league.

Now, there’s a new controversy, hence this video. Sophie Cunningham, kind of a statuesque, blonde, beautiful, white, heterosexual team player and fellow player on the Indiana Fever. She’s the protector, in basketball terms or parlance, of Caitlin Clark, and she was famous most recently for doing that gesture where she pointed at the player who fouled and the referee who allowed that foul on Caitlin Clark, that notorious foul where there was a fist on her Adam’s apple. And that went viral, not just on social media, but in terms of endorsements, etc.

And Sophie Cunningham has gotten almost the same amount of publicity now as Caitlin Clark, and the two of them have soared revenues in the league, enhanced them even further, and the Indiana Fever has had a new burst of enthusiasm. It’s on a winning streak, etc. So you would think that everybody in the league would calm down and say, No, do not kill these golden gooses. Do not flagrantly foul them. Do not get into the racial politics or the sexual politics. Let’s just be united and all get rich together. 

That didn’t happen. Sophie Cunningham said, when asked in an interview what was her attitude about biological male-transexual athletes participating in female sports, and of course, she said she thinks girls should participate, biologically determined women, not men that are transgender.

Now, that is not a controversial view. Eighty percent of the American people agree with her, and most Americans feel that they have no problem with trans athletes. They can have a special trans league. But they do note that when biological men and their muscular-skeletal systems are superior to women’s by birth and nature, they have an unfair advantage that sometimes can border on danger to other women in general, and in particular when they share female facilities, showers, gyms, etc.

There are problems. They also know, the 80% of Americans who disapprove of this, that when women with muscular-skeletal systems at birth, female, when they transition to male sports, they don’t win anything. And in the public’s mind, that’s sort of proof that biology determines your size and muscularity, which is very important to sports.

So why are we talking about this now? The reaction to Sophie Cunningham’s offhanded remark that while she thinks trans people should enjoy all the civil rights of everybody else, but as originally a biological male, they have undue advantages over females, and that should stop. Well, what was the reaction?

Two fans went to a game and they had various signs suggesting that they supported Sophie. What’s so wrong with that? But what happened was almost amazing. The Seattle Storm’s co-owner—co-owner of the franchise—and by the way, all these franchises were losing money until Caitlin Clark came. But she came, walked over to the court, saw these two teenage girls, and started to berate them, cuss at them, scream at them. This was the owner. 

She was only suspended for five days. Everybody saw that. That is almost as if she was deliberately trying to counter the positive influence, and the money, and the revenue, and the audience share that Caitlin Clark, and to somewhat the same degree Sophie Cunningham, have done for the league.

But that wasn’t all. Recently, the Minnesota coach, Cheryl Reeve of a Minnesota Women’s National Basketball Association team, wore a jacket saying, “Trans kids belong,” in other words, a political slogan, after the fine against Celeste Keaton, the co-owner of the Seattle team. 

So what are we trying to say? Whether it is Caitlin Clark, who gets beat up periodically by members of the women’s basketball league, or it’s Sophie Cunningham, who is starting—she got hit in the mouth the other day—she’s starting to get beat up. And Sophie Cunningham is now targeted not just by the women’s basketball association’s players, but by a coach and a co-owner. A coach and a co-owner. That is the official administration of the Women’s National Basketball Association. So let me sum up.

Let me sum up. We Americans, for the most part, if revenues are any indication, didn’t know anything about the Women’s National Basketball Association. It was irrelevant. Nobody cared about it.

Nobody liked it. Nobody disliked it. It just didn’t exist for most Americans. And then something happened. A brilliant player brought attention to it and enriched it and made it something that it was not. But as people started to come to the games and read about them and watch them and hear about it, they saw things that bothered them.

In other words, that this league was racially obsessed, it had an obsession with sexual orientation, and the owners were promoting a particular political view that was not disinterested. And when two players had helped enrich them, they couldn’t even see their own advantage, whether at the player level or the administrative level.

Bottom line, the more that the public sees the Women’s National Basketball Association, the less they like it. They don’t like the culture, not because it’s gay or predominantly Black, but because people in that league use that to discriminate and even harm other players, and the people who operate the league and own it either condone that chauvinism or promote it.

This is a suicidal policy, and if they keep it up, it’s going to return to its past irrelevance. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.