Lessons the New York Liberty taught me following the 2024 election
The IX: Basketball Wednesday with Jackie Powell, Nov. 27, 2024
(Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. We have a special column from Jackie Powell today about the New York Liberty, the 2024 election and resilience. Happy early Thanksgiving!)
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Basketball Wednesday
It still feels surreal to think about and remember the confetti, the tears of joy and “Empire State of Mind.” I must have heard that modern theme about New York by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys at least 80 times in the span of a week.
Those were some of the most prominent sensory images of the New York Liberty, a team that was the only original WNBA franchise without a title, that finally won one. An almost 30 year curse was broken late on a Sunday evening during the penultimate week of October.
And then in the days following the franchise’s first championship win, players were up early on Good Morning America, the Today Show and CBS Mornings. Their mascot Ellie the Elephant was on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, and players made a TikTok backstage at the Tonight Show with Megan Thee Stallion on the same evening when they were honored on the show themselves.
And then on Thursday of that very week, the city of New York shut down for the Liberty. Thousands of fans were behind barricades during the first ever ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for a women’s professional sports franchise. The celebration concluded in Brooklyn where legions of fans loaded up the Barclays Center on less than five days’ notice for an event where no basketball would be played. It was just a celebration.
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And for some Liberty players like Sabrina Ionescu, Kayla Thornton, Jonquel Jones, Nyara Sabally and Leonie Fiebich, the celebration of what this year’s Liberty team has accomplished has only continued.
Ionescu hoisted that championship trophy back in Eugene, Oregon. Thornton’s college and high school jerseys were retired in Texas, and Jones has now touched down in her native Bahamas to be honored as a hometown hero. Sabally and Fiebich returned home too, and were all over German television.
But on the morning of November 6, less than two weeks following the end of the team’s full week of celebrations in New York, was when it was made clear that the winner of the presidential election was not who I and almost 73 million Americans voted for. It seemed in many ways antithetical to not only the Liberty’s triumph in the largest media market in the country, but is antithetical to what this calendar year has been for women’s basketball and more broadly the women’s sports ecosystem.
Nancy Armour wrote a column for USA Today that argued that the incoming administration and congressional majority is going to be a powerful hurdle for women’s sports to continue its ascent as respected leagues and conferences instead of institutions loitered with apathy and ridicule. The incoming administration’s plan to shut down the Department of Education throws the very existence of Title IX into question, and their potential restrictions on women’s healthcare make it harder for women to play sports, period. This could be just the tip of the iceberg.
But Armour’s point was one that has been uttered many times before. As we look at history, global and domestic, it tends to inform us as to what comes next. And oftentimes that history looks cyclical rather than forward thinking. Progress in the women’s sports world and specifically in the women’s basketball space is no stranger to this.
When I read Howard Megdal’s latest book Rare Gems earlier this year, I was taken in particular by a couple of situations he discussed involving women’s basketball in California in the early 20th Century. The women at Cal and Stanford were denied varsity letters for playing basketball. Huh? Something absolutely unthinkable today.
And a San Francisco paper cried wolf trying to sculpt a narrative about the dangers that women playing basketball causes. There was a fake subheadline about a woman, claiming that she might die from an injury after playing women’s basketball.
“When women’s sports make their biggest advances, that is what typically leads to a countermovement mostly directed at shutting down that momentum,” he wrote.
There are more modern versions of this story too.
Candace Parker recently explained some of this pushback that women’s basketball has had to endure. She explained how ABC’s decision to put the women’s NCAA national championship game on for the first time in 2023 was a symbol of years and years of pushback that came before.
“Are you surprised that viewership was up?”, she exclaimed while speaking to business outlet Bloomberg. “Are you surprised that people actually saw the product? It was buried for so long on ESPN.”
Lindsay Gibbs of Power Plays dug into the viewership numbers further, and questioned why it took the network so long to make the switch from cable even after CBS showed the game 28 years ago and got over 7 million people to watch. Why did a sport that drew millions just get torn down from the spotlight?
Now back to the Liberty, a franchise that knows this cautionary tale better than most. This is a team that just over five years ago, believe it or not, was playing in a location that later served as a COVID-19 vaccination hub. A place that hasn’t been renovated properly since it was opened almost 100 years ago. The Westchester County center is not and wasn’t a place for professional athletes.
Even after a first place finish in 2017, former team owner James Dolan had enough. An original WNBA franchise was abandoned without a buyer and shipped to a place that would in the end put the franchise at even more financial peril than at the time when Dolan decided to ship them out.
The New York Liberty of the present, the Liberty that finally made it to the top, were a franchise that had been through and fought directly in opposition to a countermovement.
Countermovements are powerful, manipulating and oftentimes proverbial dementors— groups of people that have philosophies that drain progress and in turn manufacture despair. Countermovements want to divide and isolate instead of uniting and establishing some level of community.
To be clear, this countermovement still exists for the Liberty and the WNBA. We were reminded that it still exists during the very day of Game 4 of the WNBA Finals.
I was asked on a podcast recently if I thought the Liberty were going to survive after Dolan banished them. I didn’t have a firm answer, but I knew that a lot of damage was going to be done to the morale of the team and the fanbase and to the overall standing of the WNBA.
When the Liberty were moved, the response could have been to just throw in the towel and let the franchise die. The response could have been to accept the status quo that had won the war. That is a lesson that sticks with me today as the country is about to go down an uncertain path.
The Liberty’s journey has included a ton of adversity. Early, there was disappointment in losing many of the first WNBA Finals in league history. Later, there was frustration over the franchise not having a consistent home. Radio City Music Hall, the Prudential Center—remember this came before the County Center. Then came an embarrassing front office hire, followed by the devastating move to Westchester.
And then once the franchise thought moving to Brooklyn under new ownership would pump life into the fanbase, a global pandemic swept through everyday life, pausing that. And the first No. 1 overall draft pick in Liberty history, Sabrina Ionescu, endured a third degree ankle sprain, keeping her out of the majority of the WNBA’s bubble season, her first as a pro.
Ionescu and her team’s journey have run parallel. She spoke about this moments following when she was crowned a first time champion.
“I was a 22 year-old kid dealing with a lot of grief, injury, not having a chance to win a championship in college,” she said. “And I never let that be an excuse for me. I’ve just continued to understand it’s part of my journey and part of my story. And now four years later, to know that…I got married, I was able to win a gold medal. Now I’m a champion. It’s just this gratification of knowing hard times don’t last.”
That lesson knowing that the difficult and trying moments don’t run forever are ones she wants to tell her future children. “Hopefully one day I can tell my kids about this and the lessons that I’ve learned, because that’s really what’s important,” she said.
That lesson is mine and should be yours too.
So as we move forward into a future that is going to look to tear down and threaten the progress that women’s basketball has made over the past few years, it’s worth remembering how the Liberty made it out of the darkness and the shadow of their past. It wasn’t easy, but it’s now the franchise’s truth. It can be ours too.
As we move forward there are many questions about how the women’s basketball world will look to respond to the leadership that is about to govern the country where its greatest professional league and some of its brightest young collegiate talent play.
It could look ugly. It probably will. During the first Trump administration, sports became a much more visible battle ground. Athletes rejected invitations to the White House, or never received them, particularly women’s champions, while the President himself used profanities to talk about former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
With this national backdrop, the WNBA fully embraced the viewpoint shared by nearly every player within it and became an expressly progressive organization. The ramifications of this decision not only allowed the league to stay coherent and unified, it helped to flip the United States Senate.
In a conversation recently with Sue Bird, she reminded me that Breanna Stewart, following her first season in the league, famously joined a protest at LAX in opposition to the Muslim travel ban imposed by the current President elect. Back then, A’ja Wilson was still in college and Angel Reese wasn’t yet 14 years old.
But now in 2024, with the league’s mainstream profile and cool factor at an all-time high, will WNBA and college players now be subject to bullying from our incoming President? What that looks like will help dictate the progress, pitfalls and challenges ahead within the next period in women’s basketball.
As others have written, Unrivaled, the 3×3 WNBA offseason league founded by Stewart and Napheesa Collier, will begin just a few days before Inauguration day. I look forward to seeing how women’s basketball players organize although the WNBA’s most knowledgeable and successful organizer Layshia Clarendon (who uses he/him, she/her, and they/them pronouns interchangeably), has since retired from playing the sport. Someone will need to take the mantle from them and I look forward to seeing who that will be.
Before I began professionally reporting on women’s basketball, I was examining the intersections of sport and society while earning an international relations degree at the University of Rochester. Upon my graduation, I said goodbye to my work at the school paper and radio station where I explored these intersections. In my final column, I spoke about the need to continue doing this work that I saw the beginnings of.
“If we stop, we’ll become stale,” I wrote. “If we refrain, those who hold the most power will never know how we feel. I will always stick to sports, but when you stick to sports, you are also sticking to society.”
I called for those fighting for women’s sports and intersectional sports stories to be told to keep going. So years later, that same philosophy remains.
Remember, the joy that the city of New York felt, and the recognition and mainstream stage that the New York Liberty finally found during the penultimate week of October is something that shouldn’t be handed over when it gets threatened. The work that has been done doesn’t just stop when it gets put at risk.
Both Stewart and Courtney Vandersloot spoke often about how demanding physically and mentally it is to win a championship. Betnijah Laney-Hamilton explained how she was going to fight for her team while injured “till the wheels fall off” during the 2024 WNBA Finals.
Head coach Sandy Brondello’s main ideologies also apply to the fight that comes ahead. When something upsetting happens in the women’s sports world or outside of it, it’s important not to get too high or too low.
But also, there’s a balance to be struck between feeling emotions, tempering them and not becoming numb to them. We can’t look away, but we also can’t wallow. It’s a balance I will be looking to figure out as we move forward.
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