Let the WNBA Get Ugly

Nobody really wants to say this out loud, but every major American sports league was built on violence. The NFL, the NHL, the NBA, MLB — every one of them went through a stretch when the game was rougher, nastier and more dangerous than it is now, and every one of them got rich doing it.

The WNBA is in its version of that stretch right now. And everybody wants to stop it.

I think that would be a mistake.

The Finals start Saturday. So before anybody cleans anything up, let me make the case for leaving it alone.

Mike Ditka died on Friday at 86, and he’s as good a place as any to start, because he was both ends of this.

As a player he was a tight end who hit people like a linebacker, back when the position was mostly an extra lineman who occasionally caught something. He ran people over. That was the job and he liked the job. He was the first tight end ever put in the Hall of Fame.

Then he coached the 1985 Bears, and that team is this entire argument in one season. Buddy Ryan’s defense didn’t just beat you, it hurt you. They knocked quarterbacks out of games. And America could not get enough of it — they cut a record in the middle of the season, the Super Bowl Shuffle, and the thing went gold.

Nobody was asking the NFL to clean that up. They were buying the album.

The NFL had Jack Tatum. Remember, he is the guy who absolutely leveled Darryl Stingley on a crossing route and paralyzed him for life, and it was considered a legal hit. Plus other defenders like Dick Butkus, Ronnie Lott and just about anyone who played for the Raiders had reputations built on making receivers afraid to come across the middle.

And linemen could hit quarterbacks as hard as they wanted, and they did. Mark Gastineau famously would stand over quarterbacks and gloat after a sack. In my memory, that was one of the first times I remember the league starting to take action against that kind of stuff. Players eventually had to run away from the quarterback to celebrate because the league determined that standing over a player and gloating was disrespectful to the player they had just hit. To me, that was an early sign of the culture changing into what the game is now.

It was truly nasty and scary, but people loved it. There are hundreds of violent examples from those days of the NFL, and that is part of what the NFL was built on in order to get to today’s game, which is considerably less violent but is still America’s number one sport.

The NHL had the same thing. People, including me, went to hockey games to see the fights. Guys like the Broad Street Bullies, with Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, became famous for it. Some of my own favorites were Tie Domi and Stu Grimson, who they called the Grim Reaper. Men whose job description was right there in the nickname.

Then there was Bob Probert and Marty McSorley, two great fighters. McSorley became famous in large part for protecting the greatest hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky. So much so that when Gretzky got traded from Edmonton to the LA Kings, McSorley had to be part of the deal.

The fighting was mainstream. There was even a big-time movie about that whole culture, Slap Shot, featuring the Hanson Brothers. And people still talk about the Hanson Brothers today. They became part of the cultural lingo of hockey. You didn’t even have to be a serious hockey fan to know who the Hanson Brothers were.

That tells you something about how much that era became part of the identity of the sport.

Hockey players literally had no teeth. That became part of the image of hockey too. You saw a guy smiling with half his teeth missing and you almost didn’t need to ask what sport he played.

Then I remember watching a European hockey game one time and thinking the hockey was so much better than the NHL. I wondered if the NHL would ever get to that point where they played awesome hockey and not dangerous, beat-the-shit-out-of-each-other hockey.

And the amazing thing is, eventually it happened.

That transition has been completely accepted. Hockey is still a major sport, but those days helped build it.

Same for the NBA.

The NBA had the Bad Boy Pistons. They didn’t just foul Michael Jordan. Sometimes they fouled the shit out of him. Sometimes the fouls were dirty. Everyone knew it. That was their strategy.

There is also the famous punch by Kermit Washington on Rudy Tomjanovich. There was just really nasty, bullying play, and almost every team had guys who would come in just to hack the other team’s stars. “Hack-a-Shaq” even became a phrase. That was mainly because Shaq was a terrible free-throw shooter, but for years the NBA was also a dangerous and violent league.

Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan could all be physically aggressive, but they also showed people what basketball could be without all the violence. Now, for the most part, they have taken that kind of violence out of the game and the NBA still thrives.

Even baseball had its rougher time. Chin music was commonplace. You put one up and in, the hitter went down in the dirt, and he thought about it a little harder next time he dug in. There was a whole code around it that nobody ever wrote down — you show up one of our guys, one of your guys wears one. Stan Williams, who pitched in the sixties, kept a list inside his cap of the hitters he still owed.

And then there was Pete Rose. Charlie Hustle. The man sprinted to first base on a walk. In the 1970 All-Star Game — an exhibition, a game that counted for nothing — he came around third in the twelfth inning, and instead of sliding he ran straight through the catcher, Ray Fosse, to score the winning run. Fosse came out of it with a separated and fractured shoulder. He hit .312 before that game and .246 for the rest of his career. To his credit, Fosse always said catching wrecked him as much as Rose did. Nobody suspended Rose. Nobody fined him. That was just baseball. And Rose finished with 4,256 hits, which is still the record and probably always will be.

But they needed those rougher times to get where they are today, because people watched. They all had great players who made their leagues great in spite of the violence. Some of my favorites when I was a kid were Pete Maravich, Walt Frazier and Dr. J in basketball. In hockey it was Gretzky, Bobby Orr and Gordie Howe, just to name a few. And in football there was Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, Mean Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain, guys like O.J. Simpson and Lynn Swann, again just to name a few. And in baseball it was Luis Tiant, Mark Fidrych, Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson, pitchers people bought a ticket just to see.

Those leagues eventually changed. They eliminated the worst hits, protected players and cleaned up the games. But they didn’t get there overnight.

The WNBA may be going through its version of that period right now, and I say let it happen.

A’ja Wilson is the biggest, strongest and most physically dominant player in the game. She uses her body relentlessly, and in my opinion the referees give her the superstar treatment. She initiates contact, knocks people around, and somehow an amazing amount of that contact ends with somebody else getting called for the foul.

Fine. If that is the game, play the game.

Every team should have one big, bad ass woman sitting at the end of the bench whose primary purpose is dealing with A’ja Wilson. I don’t care if she can shoot or dribble or even really play basketball. Can she stand her ground against A’ja Wilson? Good. You’re hired.

And yes, sometimes that means hard fouls. Sometimes it means ugly fouls. And it probably also means dirty fouls. That has been part of professional sports forever.

If A’ja wants to bully her way through the lane, make her think about it. If she wants to throw her body around underneath the basket, put somebody underneath there who throws hers around too. You get six fouls. Use them.

The NBA used to have players whose primary value was making life miserable for the other team’s superstar. Nobody pretended otherwise. Michael Jordan had the Pistons. Hockey teams had guys whose whole job was to drop the gloves. NFL receivers knew Ronnie Lott, Jack Tatum or plenty of others were waiting for them over the middle.

Was it dirty? Of course it was.

And here’s the thing: people watched.

They wanted to see what happened the next time those teams played each other. They wanted to see whether Jordan could finally get through Detroit. They wanted to see the next Flyers fight. They wanted to see whether somebody would knock the Raiders down or whether the Raiders would knock somebody’s head off first.

That is what rivalries do. That is what villains do. That is what controversy does. It gives people a reason to tune in next time.

The WNBA finally has that. People are arguing about the players, the officiating and who gets away with what. They are choosing sides. They are getting pissed off. They are talking about games before they happen and still arguing about them the next morning.

Caitlin Clark has been a big part of that story, and most people have been dancing around why. Charles Barkley didn’t. Asked last August why WNBA players seem to have it in for Clark and her teammate Sophie Cunningham, he said: “I think there’s some, like I say it, jealousy. I think it’s a part of it. Race is a part of it. And sexuality is a part of it.” He added that the other women in the league just don’t like them.

I’ve agreed with Barkley on just about everything for thirty years and I don’t think he’s wrong here. A straight white kid from Iowa who shoots from the logo walked into a league that is mostly Black, where roughly a third of the players are openly gay, and that had been grinding away for decades without anything close to that kind of spotlight. Of course there’s resentment. And the resentment is a big part of why people are tuning in.

And here’s the number that should worry the league a lot more than any hard foul.

When Indiana got knocked out this month, the Fever’s last game drew 2.25 million viewers. The next round, without them, drew 1.1 million. Roughly half the audience walked out the door with Caitlin Clark.

Now, the league will point out that the games without the Fever were still up 24 percent over last year, and that’s true, and it matters. The floor came up. But look at what that number is really telling you. The WNBA has one reason for a casual fan to turn the game on, and she plays for Indiana.

That isn’t a league. That’s a tour.

The NFL never needed one guy. Neither did hockey. Jordan and the Pistons wasn’t a star, it was a grudge — and a grudge belongs to both teams and doesn’t go home when somebody gets eliminated. That’s the thing you build on.

And the WNBA is about to find out exactly where it stands. The Finals start Saturday, and Caitlin Clark isn’t in them. Neither is A’ja Wilson. What Atlanta does have is Angel Reese.

Which makes this a better test than it looks. Reese is the closest thing this league has to a genuine villain, and I mean that as a compliment. Half the country has loved her since the night she waved her hand in Caitlin Clark’s face at the national championship, and the other half has hated her since the same moment. That is a rivalry. That isn’t one player being great. That’s two players giving people a reason to pick a side.

So watch the number on Saturday. If people turn it on for Angel Reese the way they turned it on for Clark, then the thing driving this league isn’t one woman. It’s the fight.

And if it craters, that tells you something more useful. It tells you they’ve got exactly one engine, and they’d better start building more.

Because Caitlin Clark was the catalyst, not the business. She proved something nobody had ever proved — that the audience was out there the whole time. Millions of people were willing to watch women’s basketball and nobody had bothered to give them a reason. She gave them one.

But one player is not a league. She gets hurt, or has an off year, and you’ve got nothing. What they need now is ten more reasons. Teams people can’t stand. Players people argue about at work. A game in June that everybody circles on the calendar because of something that happened in April.

You cannot order that up in a marketing meeting. It grows out of players being allowed to go at each other.

Make it bigger. Sell the grudge. Put the two teams that can’t stand each other on in prime time and spend the whole week telling people exactly why they can’t stand each other. That isn’t a scandal to be managed. That’s the product.

Stop trying to stop the fighting.

And eventually, when the WNBA decides it is time to clean the game up, it may discover that all that nastiness helped build the audience that stayed.