"The game can’t save you. But practice, though: practice can. Practice is
hard, practice requires work, but practice keeps things alive — in
games, in kindness, in love ... What’s left is what’s practiced, what’s passed down, what is carried along when everything else is left behind." - Spencer Hall.
Jaelynn Murray laced 'em up for UNC for the first time on November 10, 2017, in a 70-66 loss to Hampton. It was a different team, a different coach, and what feels like a lifetime ago. She started most of the games her freshman year, and then a cavalcade of bad injury luck and just plain poor circumstances put her in a reserve roll for the rest of her Tar Heel career. Your eyes won't pop looking at any of her box scores, but y'all, it needs to be said out loud and full-chest that she's probably the most important player in what Carolina has become since she stepped on campus.
Teams take on the identity of their coaches, certainly. That manifests in offensive philosophy, in defensive hustle, in the HOW of on-court performance and off-court workouts and all the general hoops ephemera that makes a basketball team sing. No one who has watched this team would deny that Courtney Banghart's imprint on the Heels has been one of excellence and sheer joy. Going from a team that occasionally shocked better teams and made The Dance but lost opening weekend fairly consistently to a team that just went four quarters against South Carolina in a Sweet Sixteen match-up and did not back down an inch is a massive accomplishment and it doesn't happen without Coach Bang. But it also, very much, does not happen without Jaelynn Murray.
If you watched the pre-game-get-hype huddles in the tunnel at Carmichael, you noticed that Jaelynn was the emotional centrifuge at the heart of them. If you went to road games and a "TAR!! HEELS!!" chant got started, Jaelynn was the one standing up off the bench and raising her arms up, urging us on. Come on, y'all can do better, be louder, give us our love. Her joy was infectious and powerful for her teammates and the fans alike. She was a nuclear reactor of good vibes that detonated every game and shone a light we all reflected.
When Jaelynn was out for the 2019-2020 season with a knee injury, Janelle Bailey switched from her number 44 to Jaelynn's number 30 uni for the year to make sure she was always on the court with the Heels in spirit, if not in actuality. That's the level of importance she had for this program. That's a kind of special you just don't see that often, but that's who Jaelynn Murray is. The engine and propulsive force that moves the team, whether she sees the floor or not on a given night.
On Senior Night this year, you could feel the Jaelynn Effect on full, Marshall-Stack Amplifier levels. The thing she's taught this team over her time here is not effort; you don't get to be a high-level athlete without that baked into your DNA; it's the more subtle but more important lesson that effort plus joy for you and those around you and fighting towards a common goal with you has a cumulative effect. That playing the game is not as important as the people you play it with. She has been the heartbeat, and everyone else picked up that pulse. That's why, if you looked at the bench when Jaelynn subbed in while Carolina was smoking Duke that afternoon, you saw her teammates going absolutely bonkers when she started putting in buckets. There is not a column for soul or resonance in a box score, but UNC has one in their collective hearts every game. And that came from Jaelynn Murray.
That's the legacy she left when the horn sounded Friday night against South Carolina. Deja and 'Lys and Toddy and Anya and Lu and Carlie and Eva and Des and Mo and Alex and Ariel, Teonni and Kayla (even though they didn't get on the court this year). Her joy, her love, sings through everyone on that team. She left it to them, like a precious, secret heirloom. And they'll make sure the next kids who strap 'em up in Carmichael get it too; that they carry it forward.
This magical team we watched this year, and all the other iterations of Carolina Basketball that are coming after them; they're not what they are without Jaelynn Murray, without her vibes and verve and the way everyone else understood that they not only needed, but WANTED that same emotional level, every day, all the time. Thank you, Jaelynn Murray, for everything. Wherever life takes you next, your impact on this team will hang in Carmichael like a banner, which is to say it will be there forever.
South Carolina rolled up in Greensboro and beat our team. That happened, and we recognize it and move on. What this UNC team did this year has been maybe the most joyful, pure thing of my entire sports fan life. They played free and loose and maniacally beautiful offense and absolutely operated on a defensive string on the other end of the court. They fought to the buzzer, always. They loved and scrapped and played together, always. They were a beautiful, almost telepathic collective force of hooping wonder at all times, ALWAYS.
They kicked ass last night. Not enough to pull the dub, but damn well clear enough to put the rest of the nation on notice. South Carolina is, by any sane observance, the best team in the country, and the Heels stood toe to toe with them for four quarters in a Sweet Sixteen game and did not flinch. Even in significant foul trouble, they were aggressive and focused and played the game the way they wanted to play it. There were some trips to the stripe where they could've put the ball in more consistently (this has been a thing all year) and I don't even want to think about the second quarter shooting splits, but even playing an uneven, janky game, Carolina hung with the best in the land.
And here's the thing: This is very much a beginning and not at all a one-off fluke. Deja Kelly went nuclear last night and that's not going to change. Toddy and 'Lys played slightly below their offensive peaks but were killer-murder-velociraptors on defense, like they always are. Carlie and Eva were uneven but brilliant in stretches, and Alex and Anya played their tails off trying to contain the force of nature that is Aliyah Boston.
UNC hadn't been this far in The Dance in a good while, and last night they proved they belong not just in the conversation, but as a main talking point. And the whole world saw and recognized it. This squad put everyone on notice this season. Next year will be transcendent.
A few other notes from my experience last night:
1. Ags was not feeling well so I went to the game solo. I wound up sitting in a sea of South Carolina fans, and I totally get why Dawn calls them "Fams" now. They were delightful, kind, lovely folks who talked hoops and shot the shit with me all game like we'd known each other forever. At the half, I got up to go get a beer and a hotdog, and the woman on the end of the row letting me by said "y'all have a great team, I feel a little bad you're in the middle of all of us by yourself." I told her they were way more pleasant than most of the NC State fans who come to Carmichael once a year and that I was happy to be sitting with them. Her response: "Oh honey, we have to deal with Clemson fans, I get it." That woman is a national treasure.
2. Sports are f***ed up and we all know it. For the most recent example, you need only Google Deshaun Watson. College sports in particular exist on the far end of the horrific, exploitative spectrum. We compromise daily by loving our teams, none of whom are blameless or without flaws, no matter how much we want to tell ourselves otherwise. But when the game ended last night, something really cool happened: The arena staff put then end of the Saint Peter's/Purdue men's game on the jumbotron and every TV in the concourse. Two fan bases who had just spent the past two hours rooting against each other dropped their respective heartbreak and elation in a heartbeat and the whole place was suddenly screaming their lungs raw for a small New Jersey school none of us had heard of two weeks ago. When the Peacocks pulled out that win, we all, collectively, went bonkers. That was a MOMENT, y'all.
And that's why me and every other Tar Heel was in that barn last night. Not for the Saint Pete's thing, but to watch UNC Women's Basketball sweat and grind and work and to watch Deja Kelly become a goddess on a national stage and to watch this amazing team stand tall and take every punch South Carolina threw and to answer, right to the end of the horn. We were there for the MOMENT, and even though the final score didn't end favorably, the MOMENT was special.
Over the last days of August and the first few of September in 2021, I was in the hospital. It was not because of COVID, or any other physical ailment. I had given up. I did not want to be alive anymore. There was my job, where we are ostensibly supposed to help people in dire need but are rarely allowed to actually do so. There was a virus which our country largely did not take seriously because the asshole in the highest office in the land said it was a hoax. There was the country that put said asshole in office and all that said about us as a nation and the awful, shuddering resonance of what that meant. I am immuno-compromised, and have lived the last few years in complete terror every time I cough. And have lived under the shadow of the fact that large swaths of my family (including my parents) voted to destroy our country rather than allow anyone who does not look or love or pray like them to have a home here.
I wound up on an involuntary commit for suicidal ideation because the totality of it all had finally destroyed me. The hospital stay did not make me better, by the way. First: putting someone with a busted-ass immune system on a mental health ward with people whose functional capacity was not conducive to wearing masks was not fucking OK. Second: All I saw was more of the same shit I see at work everyday. People who have been failed, repeatedly, by the healthcare and educational and legal systems of this country and just shoved aside into places where the rest of society doesn't have to think about them.
I am incredibly fortunate, blessed, and privileged that my sister-in-law happens to be an advocate for wrongly-hospitalized/incarcerated mental health clients. I am lucky that my parents, despite their abhorrent political beliefs, dropped everything and came up to North Carolina to be with me. Above all, I am lucky my wife called CHPD Crisis when she did, and that she welcomed me home. I am lucky I got to go home at all, that such a place even existed. My roommate during my stay left the same day I did, because, "the shelter has a spot open for me." I offered him money, and a spot in our guestroom, but he wanted to do things on his terms, and who the fuck am I tell him otherwise?
I came home a mess, of course. I was not functional. Not until we got to Carmichael for the first game of the season. Just being in that barn again, doing all the chants, clapping when the ball went into a free throw shooter's hands ... I can't fully articulate what that meant. Sharing hugs with Ginny and Jean (we've had season tix in neighboring sections for nearly a decade) was so special and healing.
I have a lot of shit to deal with, but this UNC Women's Basketball team is helping me a little bit at a time. This team can't heal me fully. There are probably years of therapy before that. But they have been a mental health salve.
You watch this defense, on a damn string, absolutely flying around and snuffing everything their opponents want to do. You watch KTW just destroying people, you watch the rest follow like they're almost teleporting around the floor. Someone gets hung up on a screen? *BAM* Another defender comes out of nowhere.
And then you watch what they do on offense. Jesus. That transition game, that murderous pace? At it's best, it's the fucking Sistine Chapel. It's Billie Holiday and Aretha and Sister Rosetta Tharpe all rolled into one. They're telepathic assassins and it's awesome.
Most of all, it's the collective joy. This team loves each other, loves hooping together, loves just being on a court so damn much.
Watching this team is a pure delight. Loving this team has kept me alive.
Being in Carmichael this year has been a tent revival. I don't much believe in Christianity anymore, and that's a whole different conversation, but this squad gives me FAITH in something. I can't define it, but I know it's special and important and real.
I know that barn means more to me and Ags than any place other than our home. I know this team is special and that Coach Bang is building something transcendent.
I know this team is capable of pure brilliance.
And I know they've saved me from death because of it.
And I will love and cherish them for the rest of my days for that.
On May 13 2015, Alfred Joel Horford flew into the frame on my television to put back a blocked layup and give the Hawks a 3-2 series lead over the Washington Wizards in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. It had been an incredible year already.
The Hawks had ripped off a 60-win regular season playing beautiful, collective basketball. The following game, Paul Pierce's last second three to tie the game was waved off. I still remember the sick feeling in my gut while that play was under review. I lived in Boston for five years a while back and, being way too broke to afford League Pass, watched a LOT of Celtics games as a way to get my hoops fix. I knew what Paul Pierce was about. I turned to my wife during the timeout before the in-bounds and said something like "do you know how many times I've watched The Truth curl of a screen on a play like this and drain a three?" Which he did. But, mercifully, it was a not-buzzer-beater this time. The clock hit zeros before the ball left Pierce's hand. The Hawks went to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in my life. They got obliterated by LeBron and the Cavs in a four-game sweep, but that season was a hell of a ride.
From then to now, the running joke of Atlanta sports heartbreak has been going strong. The Falcons had 28-3. Angel McCoughtry got hurt mere days before the playoffs in the midst of a truly magical season for the Dream. (We win a title that year if it doesn't happen and you can't tell me otherwise.) The Braves (change the name and stop the chop, please) blew a 3-1 lead to LA in the NLCS. The Dawgs went through 4th and 26 and the next year's SEC Championship Game, both of them heart breakers. If the Five Stripes hadn't brought home that MLS Cup, we'd really have broken the curve on the misery index.
I was born in Atlanta in 1982. My formative sports memories are a horrendous Braves team (minus Dale and Phil, who were awesome), a listless, disheveled Falcons, and the Hawks. The 'Nique, Spud, Doc Hawks who put basketball in my soul probably before I could form a coherent sentence or use the bathroom by myself. Those years were full of awe and splendor. A packed-out OMNI going bonkers when 'Nique threw down a filthy dunk right on some hapless defender's dome. Of course, the apex was still heart break, the first real one I have a memory of; the famous/imfamous Bird-'Nique duel in game seven of the Eastern Conference Semis in '88.
Ever since, outside of the '95 Braves and the aforementioned ATL United run, the litany of "almosts" and "what ifs" is long and gory. Soul-crushing loss after soul-crushing loss. Lather, rinse, repeat. This Hawks season ended in similar fashion, but it felt vastly different.
I keep thinking about the 1991 Braves, and the parade Atlanta threw them after that worst-to-first season that ended in a seven-game loss to the Twins in the World Series. Even in defeat, they had raised the city to heights of ecstatic jubilation that hadn't really been felt before. Even more than the 2015 squad, that was this year's Hawks.
Look at what happened after Nate McMillan took over this team. They were looking at the draft lottery again until that coaching change. Then a supernova bloomed in the heart of the city. Trae Young showed the whole country what Hawks fans have known since the draft night swap: he's THAT GUY. Like 'Nique. Like Dale. Like Julio. It's not just his brilliance on the court, it's the infinite swag. The bow in MSG, the pre-3 shimmy in Milwaukee, that dude is COLD in a way that feels so perfectly aligned with ATL. And the front office put a team around him that just freaking works. Red Velvet (TM @SheBeKoolin), JC, AKA John The Baptist (#PayDaMan TM @femaleatlhawk), De'Andre Hunter, who was having a magnificent season before his injury. Cam Reddish, who, even in a loss, had a damn COMING OUT party last night. Clint, Bogi, Solo, and on down the line. This team is an ideal mixture of youth and experience, insanely talented, and exquisitely calibrated. They will be giving the league hell for years to come, and the last few weeks have been a transcendent proof of concept.
The Hawks came to Atlanta from Saint Louis in 1968. Until this season, they had been to the Eastern Conference Finals once (the Cavs series I mentioned up top.) Until now, they hadn't won a game in the ECF. But this year and this team were special. They stormed out of the NBA's basement after the coaching change and played two epic, seven-game series to take out the Knicks and Sixers. They rolled into Milwaukee and took game one with Trae officially showing anyone who hadn't figured it out yet precisely what a badass he is. Then they took a game in ATL without him after a fluke, stupid injury. That's two more ECF wins than any other Hawks team ever had. He tried last night, the whole team did, but there just wasn't enough gas in the tank, even with the Bucks missing Giannis.
Listen, NONE of that matters right now. NONE. OF. IT. All the joy, the miracles, and the pure, giddy, delirious hope we just experienced are enough today. And it should be. No sane hoops person would have told you in February this is where the Hawks' season would end. They're a mile ahead of schedule with a full off season to get healthy and nothing but possibility and promise stretching as far as the eye can see. Whether or not a banner ever goes up (I think it will), we need to keep this joy close. I've already seen plenty of haters on the TL today talking shit. Fuck those people. Let this team and this season reverberate in your hearts and drown them out. What we feel right now, the hope and delight and boundless optimism, it's rare. Especially in for ATL sports fans. Cradle this moment with your entire souls. It's worth celebrating, even if the rest of the world won't.
We can't stop listening. We've burned through most of the "Disaster" episodes and the live shows and played the last pod at least three times. We've cried at almost everything at some point this past week. The people who made Shutdown Fullcast would not want any sappiness or sentimentality, so I'll try not to get too extra with this.
But: I'm fairly certain my wife and I were more excited driving to the Charlotte live show than we were on our wedding day.
The Shutdown Fullcast cannot be explained, defined, or articulated in any meaningful way. It's just a way to think and feel about college football in podcast form that resembles nothing else connected to the sport. The chaos and irreverence that Spencer Hall, Ryan Nanni, Jason Kirk, Holly Anderson, and their various guests brought to our earbuds for the past several years was absolutely perfect. (It was a perfection of dubious audio quality and deranged musings, but perfection nonetheless.)
What they did was dig into the vast stupidity and sprawling brilliance of the game with eccentric credulity. My wife's best friend lived with us for a bit a few years ago, and she asked me once why I listened to a podcast about college football that clearly thought college football was insane and dumb. (Note: It is. We love it because humans are wired to be sentimental idiots.) I didn't have a response. You get the Fullcast or you don't. Plenty of college football diehards would fall into the latter category. Pity them.
We were sitting in a bar in Ketchikan, Alaska in 2019 on our honeymoon. The bar had good, free wifi. Our first thought was not to connect and catch up on news of the world, but to download the Ann Arbor live episode that had just dropped. We saw so much incredible beauty on that trip; it was a perfect week, but one of our favorite memories is laying in bed very drunk on a cruise ship listening to Ryan explain how Michigan birthed every other college football program and Jason explain how they conquered the entire B1G.
Or we were driving to Charlotte bumping previous 40-For-40 and/or Disaster episodes on the way to the live show. That night, we laughed our asses off for two hours and met the people who actually made this incredible thing and they were so kind and wonderful. We also had a genuinely great time with/made a new friend who happens to work for the South Carolina athletic department and rocks hard with Dawn Staley, which is dope because we are also women's hoops junkies. (S'up Don. You are the gaht-dang coolest and it was truly wonderful to hang with you. Ags and I are gonna get to a hoops game in Columbia and buy you dinner if this shit ends and we still have a functioning country.)
Or we were sitting on the porch talking about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with college football but doing it in our specific language which is at least 30% Fullcast jokes/references. (Oh no! OHHHHH NOOOOO!!!!!)
Look, it's a silly podcast about a silly sport. It's also bigger and more important and funnier and smarter than that. It's the thing I'd save until I left work so I could listen to it on drives home from bad days. It's the thing Ags and I have listened to collectively more than anything else. These brilliant lunatics have given us something beyond words, beyond coherent thought. It just is. It just was.
I have faith it will be back in some form, but if it's not: Y'all are a lovely bunch of genius misfits that taught us a new vocabulary for this game and gave immeasurable joy to innumerable people.
Listening to all these episodes feels like some sort of weird requiem. We're paying respects to something that is gone. But that ain't right. The Fullcast needs to be memorialized in song.
The broadcast cut away to something else. I don't even remember what it was; just that it wasn't the post-game celebration, interviews, trophy presentations, and pageantry the Seattle Storm deserved. Not after clinching the championship of what was quite possibly the greatest season in WNBA history with a Finals sweep of the Washington Mystics. Maybe it was the dynastic rivalry aspect of Lynx/Sparks, but they didn't cut out early in 2016, when Candace Parker gave us one of the most poignant, beautiful, and instant waterworks-inducing moments I've ever seen in a lifetime of watching sports:
But this year, after a playoffs riddled with late starts on alternate networks and overt disrespect for the game, ESPN/ABC/NBATV all decided the final moments of the 2018 WNBA season weren't worth celebrating. This was a final slap in the face, a last evidential stamp on where the W stood in relation to its broadcast partners and, by extension, the viewing public, doubters, haters, and general misogynistic vitriol that has plagued the league since its inception.
There was a palpable enthusiasm and purpose coming into this year. After all, we'd just seen maybe the greatest NCAA Women's Final Four of all time, and there was a concerted push to carry the interest generated by that spectacle forward into the WNBA. Websites were either expanding or springing up out of whole cloth and hiring extremely talented writers to boost coverage. My podcast feed went from having two women's hoops pods to eight at warp speed. Everywhere from established platforms like ESPN's "Around the Rim" to upstart blogs to the truly beautiful and life-giving community that is #WNBATwitter, one mandate emerged: Grow The Game.
Certainly, there are elements of that growth process we can't control. Fans and media won't be in the room for the next round of CBA negotiations. Decisions on revenue sharing and travel policy, the two most critical issues that need significant overhauls for the good of the league, are not things anyone outside the W's power structure can have a direct hand in. But those conversations and the leverage the players hold in them will be predicated on viewership and attendance numbers, which tie directly to advertising revenue, which could increase those numbers even more, and so on. We have reached a critical inflection point for the game, and we all want that graph to curve upward. I have an idea about how to achieve that, or at least to help. It's a small one, and possibly misguided and/or ineffectual, but I've been thinking about it for a while now, so please bear with me.
There was an episode of "Around The Rim" a while back where the guest informed them that Smith College actually played the first ever women's basketball game. I had always thought the first game was Stanford vs. Cal at the San Francisco Armory on April 4, 1896, but that was the first intercollegiate game. (There is a $3 Kindle book well worth your time called "The First Women's College Basketball Game" that compiles student and local newspaper articles leading up to, during, and after that momentous event.) But the first time a woman put a ball through the hoop wasn't a sanctioned college game. Of course it wasn't; college basketball didn't exist when it happened. James Naismith rolled the ball out for the first time on December 21, 1891. The first ever basketball game was a scrimmage at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was an entirely new sport. The first women's basketball game would therefore have been a scrimmage too, not an official intercollegiate match up. And so sometime in March 1892, Senda Berenson, then the newly minted "gymnastics" coach at Smith College, replicated Naismith's experiment with what proved to be raucous and enthusiastic results.
In the context of modern women's basketball, this seems like an incidental piece of trivia, but I think it's actually vitally important. December 1891 to March 1892 is a few months, a tiny blip on the timescale. This is essential because in public perception, women playing basketball is a relatively new thing. Most of the invective thrown at women's hoops is flat-out sexist bullshit, but at least some of it stems from a lack of understanding of the roots of the game. The majority of basketball fans seem to think women's basketball was "invented" by some confluence of Title IX, Pat Summitt, Nancy Lieberman, and the Olympics. This could not be further from the truth. The WNBA itself is new, yes. But a few scant months separate basketball's invention from women embracing it. In the grand scope of history, women have been balling since balling was a thing you could do.
After listening to that "Around The Rim" episode, I read everything I could on the history of women's basketball. There is so much beauty and history. SO MUCH. And we, as fans, have not done right by that history. We can use it, we can reach back to move forward. As part of a larger overall picture, we can use the beauty and courage of past generations and honor them by planting a flag, one of many that we need, but an essential part, of growing this game we love.
The aforementioned "The First Women's College Basketball Game" is essential. But also: read Lydia Reeder's "Dust Bowl Girls" and David McElwain's "The Only Dance In Iowa" and probably most importantly Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford's "Shattering The Glass" and there is a deep, rich, and rewarding exegesis of women's hoops going back well over a century.
The fans have been there from the beginning. They walked miles over dirt track roads in the dead cold of Midwestern winters to scream their throats raw for the young women on the court playing highs school ball on Friday nights. The gyms were heated by wood stoves, sometimes set in the middle of the actual playing floor; sometimes placed where they could heat the building while also lurking for unsuspecting opposing players to run into. A true home court advantage if ever there was one. But they came to cheer for women's basketball, for the pride of their home towns, for the game they knew and anointed as the marker of success for their small communities. Because they loved it. Because it was everything; the way local fans have always congregated to their towns and their teams. Reading the accounts of those games, written long before my parents were born, is no different than reading a write-up of any other sports game. High school football in Georgia or Florida or Texas, basketball in Indiana or Kansas. In the days of sawdust floors and tin bleachers, fans were rabid, passionate, dedicated-to-the-point-of-unhinged over women's hoops. The game has always been here. It has always been loved. It has always mattered.
In the barnstorming era, premier squads packed local civic centers in Philadelphia and Durham and Austin and Dallas. Elite ass-kicking squads of ballin' ladies traveled the country laying waste to everything in their path. It was not uncommon, when a traveling team stopped in a city for a few days' worth of exhibition games against local competition, for the women's team to take on a local men's squad. It was also not uncommon for the ladies to run the men's asses up and down the court and eventually out of the fucking gym.
Throughout all of this incredible and transcendent history, the same bullshit we are still dealing with now was ever present. Organizations rose up to protect the "sanctity" or "modesty" or "propriety" or whatever of women and say that these nice young ladies shouldn't be engaging in the rough and "manly" world of sports. (Gag)
But the game kept on. It has always been a beacon for change. One of the foremost points of pride for most WNBA fans is the league's embrace of activism. But women's basketball has fought those battles literally from jump. The W is fighting for feminism, for the LGBTQIA community, for Black Lives Matter. This is not in any way meant to downplay the significance of those fights, just to say that while tt hasn't always been as soon as it should have, this game has almost always been the first to advocate for important causes for women and POC going way back.
Which brings me to my long-winded point. How can we use this? We are in a fight to protect and grow this game we love, and we have history going back to damn near when the first basketball was tipped and we almost never talk about it. Cant' we make a holistic historical argument here? I understand we have to give professional basketball priority. I understand the W needs our help more because college hoops ain't going anywhere and we have to boost viewership of the W because the league's survival depends on increased revenue to hopefully pay the players what they're worth and get some decent travel channels. I understand that this requires highlighting the current stars of the game. We have a perfect recipe right now. Old vets still kicking ass in DT and Sue, mid-career greats like Maya and Angel ripping it up, and a new generation of Goddesses in Stewie and A'ja et. al. You sell the game on the stars that are there. That's important; it's vital. But I feel like if we showed the world how deep and passionate the history is, how far back it goes, they might sit up and take a little more notice. Why not run ads with faded pictures and info blurbs chronicling important historical moments, all the way back to Senda Berenson in 1892? Why not lobby the broadcast partners for a few E60 segments on Babe Didrikson or Ora Mae Washington (which, on a related note, how the HELL was she only now inducted into the HOF?!?!?!?) If we can show people how great this game has always been, and that there has never been basketball that was not played by women, maybe that would help.
It doesn't solve the myriad problems facing the game. Not close. I'm just asking a question. Would displaying the full beauty and struggle and historical import of women's basketball as a complete entity help to grow the game? And if so, how do we make that happen?
A little before noon on January 22, 2017, my wife and I settled into our season ticket seats in Carmichael Arena to watch our beloved Tar Heels take on Muffet McGraw's Notre Dame. The game was a big deal, nationally televised with The Goddesses LaChina Robinson and Beth Mowins on the call for ESPNU. Our seats are across from the visitor's bench, and we could see them prepping and talking during commercials up in the little crow's nest broadcast platform on the opposite wall if the gym. We were giddy before the tip. We knew Carolina were not favored, having gotten off to a rocky 1-5 start in conference play, but 1. never count Coach Hatchell out at home and 2. "let's see if the Irish can back up the hype of this #6 ranking they've got."
Y'all. They did. What followed was four quarters of absolute scorched-earth basketball. The demolition was keyed by the jaw-dropping two-woman game of point guard Lindsay Allen and forward Brianna Turner. They simply took us apart. Pick literally any high-low action you can think of, any set, those two ran 'em all to devastating effect. Everything fueled off Allen and Turner's telepathic connection, the sort that makes great teams so thrilling to watch. By the second quarter, our defense was playing like they had the Sowrd of Damocles hanging over their heads, which, basically, they did. Allen and Turner were a wormhole, a massive cataclysmic force distorting the gravity of the entire court. Once the Heels' D got sucked into that wormhole, the floodgates opened. Allen had an off shooting night (2/7 from the floor) but tossed up 11 dimes and 6 boards to balance out her 5 points scored. Turner ripped off a monster 24 and 12 with 6 blocks. The rest of the Irish finished the job, including 13 points from Marina Mabrey, 10 from Jackie Young, and 11 from Arike Ogunbowale (whom you may have heard of by now). It's brutal to watch this sort of thing happen to your squad, in your gym, but at a certain point you just have to shake your head and laugh. Watching Allen and Turner cook was a mesmerizing, breathtaking experience. Any time you get to see players with that level of on-court chemistry, who know precisely where each other are and what each other will do at all times, it's special.
Enter this season's Dallas Wings, and the sheer delight of watching Skylar Diggins-Smith and Liz Cambage. I tend to adopt at least one other squad besides my team in any sport to kind of follow and root for over a given season, and this year's Wings were a no-brainer. Cambage and SkyDiggs are what would happen if you plugged Allen and Turner into a guitar amp, dimed out all the knobs, and let it rip. (Call it the Allen-Turner Overdrive. *sorry*)
The Wings have had what could politely be described as a tumultuous season. Plagued by truly horrific injury luck and sometimes erratic play on the court, this has been a burdensome and frustrating journey. But through it all, Cambage and Diggins-Smith have been absolute appointment viewing, playing with a collective alchemy of precision, fury, and outright joy that cannot be contained.
Diggins-Smith has averaged 18.2 points and 6.2 assists this season, a deadly combination of scoring threat and floor general. Even when things were at their shakiest (and that's been too often for Dallas this year), she keeps finding ways to push, to keep her team in it, to find the creases in a defense and slot in the pass or slither in to knock down the shot.
Cambage, obviously, has had a year for the ages. 22.7 ppg, 9.7 boards, 2.3 assists, murderous defense, and obliterating plenty of records along the way. (Plus that All Star Game dunk, y'all.) There's no one else like her in the league. Her presence in the paint is like a tank; you can't move her off her spot, and her firepower will put craters in things. Although, no tank ever built could be as agile and, being an inanimate object lacking a voicebox, could not approach her level of banter and smack talk, on-court or off.
The real magic, though, is their complete and beautiful synergy. It's that wormhole-gravity-warping thing. When they're on, your defense is going to be sucked in and then destroyed. And they love doing this to opposing teams. They Love It. They take such pride and enthusiasm in their work; bending a possession to their will and reveling in the wreckage they leave behind afterwards. It's an expression of art and love attenuated to the highest level of talent. And good grief, is it beautiful to watch.
Despite their brilliance, that beauty and artistry hasn't quite translated to wins. Too little depth via injuries, too much onus on the two of them to keep a sometimes struggling team afloat. All of it led to a late-season nine-game losing skid which included the firing of head coach Fred Williams. Dallas looked to be in free fall, their playoff chances thinned down to a sliver of hope. But they had a chance at catharsis and revival on Friday Night against the Aces, who just happened to be standing directly in the Wings' path to the final playoff spot. What happened next was spellbinding.
The short version is 107-102 Wings, securing a playoff spot and wiping away the tumult and struggle of the year in dramatic fashion. I guess I could write more about the game, but Dorothy J. Gentry already did it so well I'm not even going to try. I'd just embarrass myself. Y'all, just click this link: her piece on that game, this team, and SkyDiggs and Cambage is just gorgeous.
That post-game moment, Cambage and Diggins-Smith in each other's arms, letting out all the frustrations of the year and physically embodying their connection, will be one of the first moments that leaps to mind any time we think back on what has been possibly the best WNBA season ever. It's all there in that photo; the pain and fight, the strength they've drawn from each other all year, the release. This is why we Watch Them Work. Because The Work can culminate in moments like this, and we are better and richer for witnessing them.
And I'm just grateful right now, y'all. Grateful their season isn't over. Grateful this ride isn't done yet. This off season is going to be a true turning point for the W. The issues of pay and travel, which Cambage, along with many others, has so fiercely and eloquently spoken on all year, may cause her to leave the league if serious headway is not made. (Which, to be clear, it's on the league if they lose Cambage and anyone else who decides they've had enough.) Those conversations are coming. But in this moment, grateful is all I can feel. These two women on a basketball court together just torching opponents in the most brutal and creative of all possible ways have been one of the highlights of the summer. For at least a few more games, we get to watch Skylar Diggins-Smith and Liz Cambage perform their special brand of gleefully destructive magic. Happy final day of the regular season. Let's make the most of it.
