Longing for Phoenix from England as WNBA All-Star Game marks pivotal sports moment

It’s 8 a.m. in Phoenix, and I’m enjoying a crisp and frothy lager as I reflect on my day. To be clear, it’s 4 p.m. in the U.K., where I am, so this whole opening scene shouldn’t seem quite so sordid.

In the past week, I’ve reveled with rabid English soccer fans in a charming London pub and tipped pints in Wales’ Turf Club, the bar spotlighted in “Welcome to Wrexham,” the popular documentary about actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney trying to revive a struggling “football” club.

Soon I will be staring into the bacteria-laden abyss known as the River Seine, in which it has been illegal to swim for more than a century but is apparently good enough for Olympic athletes to compete during the Paris Games.

WNBA competitors: Brittney Griner in skills; Caitlin Clark not in 3-point contest

Yet despite my immersion in this veritable potpourri of sports with global appeal, all I can think about is a big happening in Phoenix.

But why am I addressing you from Europe? Because I am weaseling my way back into your lives as an occasional sports columnist for The Arizona Republic.

I missed you.

Sadly, I also will miss Saturday’s 2024 WNBA All-Star Game, a pivotal moment in sports, and Phoenix is the epicenter.

Enjoy it, embrace it, appreciate it. But please, don’t ruin the moment.

The world is watching. Tickets sold out quickly and some on Ticketmaster are going for as high as $4,400. Mercury and Suns owner Mat Ishbia said in a news release he chose Pitbull as a halftime performer because “it’s important everything we do, on and off the floor, is at the same level as the superstars who will be playing.”

Even Pitbull posted on X that he “was raised by a woman, and a woman made me a man. … Here’s to all the powerful women of the WNBA.”

While 2024 has been a game-changing year for women’s basketball, the renaissance has been slowly building in recent times. For me, the eye-opening moment came when I saw Devin Booker and Chris Paul sporting WNBA jerseys. That never happened in the earlier years of the league.

So here’s hoping the All-Star Game doesn’t turn into an avalanche of false narratives that have marked the league this season.

Let’s stop pitting Caitlin Clark against other players and turn it into a cat fight, unveiling patriarchy at its ugliest. And let’s stop making one a hero and one a villain. This is basketball, man. Players talk trash, commit hard fouls.

And many of them are 20-somethings still finding their way. Let them be clumsy. They sometimes are using the wrong words, not committing armed robbery.

And let’s stop treating young black women as miscreants. I’ll never forget the words last year of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, who had enough of the microaggressions.

“We’re not bar fighters. We’re not thugs. We’re not monkeys. We’re not street fighters.”

This is an incredible time for women’s sports. Your young daughter will be stronger and more empowered because of it. And if she goes on to play professionally, she will make more money than her predecessors could have imagined.

When I started writing in 1997 about the Phoenix Mercury, one of the league’s eight original franchises, my emails were filled with pejoratives.

Sad to say, security guards had to become involved in one of those threats.

Many readers were so obsessed about comparing the men’s and women’s games that they couldn’t get past the concept that this wasn’t a competition. It was a historic moment.

Think about it. For many years, the message young girls received was that the only way to get on the cover of Sports Illustrated was to wear a tiny bathing suit. Nothing is wrong with celebrating healthy female bodies, but that was never SI’s goal. Selling sex for financial gain was.

Relentless gender bias also defined the earlier years of the league. Announcers, for example, more frequently calling female athletes by their first names than they did with men, a way of trivializing and diminishing their accomplishments.

So Saturday, let’s applaud the promise of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, the greatness of Diana Taurasi and the mere presence of Brittney Griner.

What Griner experienced while imprisoned in Russia for 293 days was horrible. Fifteen-hour workdays in a sweatshop-like facility with no heat while sewing and cutting fabric for a quota of 500 uniforms a day. Bathrooms with no hot water covered in filth. Outdoor exercises in blizzards. Russian prison guards ogling her and photographing her while naked. Poor nutrition. Binge smoking to battle the stress. Thoughts of suicide. No dignity. No privacy.

Let’s make Saturday a day of celebration. Not an event with Stephen A. Smith’s “Who does more for the WNBA than us?” as a soundtrack.

I wish I could be there.

I will continue my job overseeing the Cronkite News Phoenix Sports Bureau at Arizona State’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where I’m about to help lead a group of young journalists to cover the scene around the Paris Olympics. But the opportunity to challenge and perhaps exasperate readers, to periodically pontificate and celebrate sports, was too enticing to pass up.

It’s good to be back.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Longing for Phoenix from England as WNBA All-Star Game marks pivotal moment