T-Mac United wrote:That's unfortunate. I'm not a WNBA fan either but in general, people need to show some empathy to women and their sports. Those comments on that article are harsh. I'm not sure how the dismissal of the team is a good news.
I don't follow what this means. Not to be overly harsh, but I seriously can't think of many sports where women might be generally more capable of excelling than men, and they're pretty much either all olympic sports or tennis, and I'm pretty sure men are really far better in those too, but the womens' sports just get more press. Sports isn't about sympathy, sports is about either rooting for the underdog...
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-playing-field/200804/why-we-love-losers wrote:In fact, across the boards, no matter what the facts were, participants chose the underdogs to win.
As far as why? The researchers favor two ideas. The first is that cheering for those who are seen as disadvantaged seems to ignite our innate sense of fairness and justice. The second is the across-the-boards belief that the underdog needs to outwork the top dog in order to succeed.
I think there's a third basic catagory that they missed: specifically the idea that if "they" (meaning the underdog) can do it, so can I. It's not that we don't value hard work and solid justice, but we value them more if it means we too are eligible for a miracle.
Rooting for the underdog is about transference, about the transference of possibility. We want the impossible to happen not just for its own sake, but for what it might mean for us.
(psychology today doesn't exactly have the best "writers" around, but this tends to cover my ideas on underdog rooting)
... cheering for insurpassable excellence, or gaping at something you think you'll never see again. Sports additionally have spaces where smaller scale imagination boggling or physically ridiculous feats are cheered by providing empathetic adrenaline rushes.
I don't really see how any of those fall into empathy for watching a sport that almost never manages to provide any thrills, rarely allows for cheering excellence, pretty much only provides transferrence to the very, VERY small set of girls/women who truly like basketball (or perhaps more precisely, the ones that like to play it), or things you'll never see again. As far as getting men to watch, well, in addition to the prior, you may recall I tried to pick the ten prettiest players in the league for whatever reason (mod approved!
) and ran into some difficulties.
I have absolutely no problem with women playing sports, or to be more accurate in this case, pro basketball. If they want to, more power to them. I absolutely loved watching Kim Perrot and Cynthia Cooper play, even in the first year when the league overall could lovingly be called "pathetic". Yolanda Griffith was enjoyable before she got old. Overall though, there's just very little substance to the league (I never understood all the expansion teams when the existing teams were barely cutting mustard), and it's never seemed very commercially viable (iirc, the NBA underwrote it for several years, and may yet be, but has no doubt pulled back a lot, if not all, of its financing, and depending on who owned what, may even be calling in debts). It sucks that the Comets are gone, as three of their 4 championships were nice summertime distractions (though I haven't watched a full WNBA game since a year after our last win, but i'm a sentimental fool). I just don't get.. where empathy comes in? It's the market stating that a product that has very little going for it isn't working. If it IS working, then it's badly run and will need several failures to allow a restructuring which, I'm guessing, would be similar to whatever the NBA did early on when it had lots of franchises folding. How could it be either good news or bad news unless you were one of the few fans of the team? I kinda see where you're coming from, since you taking slight offense to "i'm glad they're gone" isn't much different from me railing against "we should trade battier for jamal crawford", but we're both missing things there (i.e. typical humans, so whatev.).
In other startling news, I'm currently single.
For the side note, I think I could run 6-12. I played against several girls on UH's team and usually did pretty well offensively, even without any trace of a jumpshot, but also never faced structured defenses, eh.
