LESBOS, PSYCHOS, PHOBOS, PATHOS.

Sing unto me, O Muse, of the restraint of Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson.

There are three explanations for the unhinged and nihilistic behavior of WNBA players, staff, and owners.

One, in racist and sexist fashion, these left-wing actors deeply resent being saved by a white, heterosexual player who towers over others in skill—and to such a degree that they are willing to metaphorically strangle the very goose that lays their golden eggs.

Or, two, they feel the more violence and controversy they can spark in trying to neuter and hurt Clark, the more attention—money—they will attract.

The more they gin up racial and sexual-orientation frenzy in World Wrestling Entertainment-style, the more they can inflate profits and gain popular attention.

But these gladiator-like women seem clueless about this possibility: if the battered Clark is permanently injured, quits, or joins another league, the WNBA temple of riches she built could come crashing down upon them.

That passage cries out for unleashing the Furies or the wrath of Hera.  The classical reference comes in his conclusion.  "In sum, the WWE has turned into a Roman Colosseum blood sport. Thousands now watch it nightly, in anger or glee that their popular heroes are bloodied—or may soon be even maimed or killed."

I thought professional ice hockey was for that.  But perhaps the pooh-bahs of basketball without dunking would rather have it that way.

Caitlin Clark just put together one of the best shooting performances of her career, and almost nobody noticed. That tells you everything you need to know about where the WNBA's priorities are right now.

Clark hit eight 3-pointers in a single game on Sunday, a league record that should have dominated basketball headlines for days. Instead, it barely registered. Why? Because the league is too busy stepping on its own rake over the issue of men playing in the league. And it seems determined to make things worse with every passing week.

That's Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis, complaining about how league publicists paid more attention to the Toronto Tempo (didn't that used to be the train to London and Windsor?) rolling out a non-binary snapping turtle mascot, or something.  That made for a "Dana Reads Sports" segment.

Fox News couldn't ignore how badly the league is bungling this. "They're proving that women shouldn't have a league. It's too dramatic," Dana Perino said on The Five this week. "Why can't you just play?"

She made her case by pointing out how she barely knew the details of Clark's record-setting shooting night because it's not even being talked about.

"So nobody's talking about that accomplishment because we have to talk about the non-binary turtle," Perino said. She went further, arguing the WNBA's trouble isn't messaging. "The league has a problem in that, it's not a communications problem, it's a policy problem that starts at the top," Perino said. "And none of this is going to get better until they fix that." She added that the drama might be selling tickets in the short term, but "that's not good for the actual athletics."

The drama might be good for Fox News ratings in the short term, what with oil tankers exiting the Arabian Gulf and no stealth bombers flying.

Ultimately, the league might acknowledge the wishes of Team Reality and call attention to the individual and team records being set.

The league has an agenda — and it isn’t women’s basketball.

Yet the more aggressively the WNBA censors, the clearer the stakes become.

Every ejection, every covered-up shirt, every rewritten message teaches the audience what the league truly values — ideological compliance.

That lockstep conformity is more important to the WNBA than growing its fan base, becoming profitable or creating an environment where all are welcome.

Censorship of this kind always backfires: People notice who is being silenced and why.

They notice that the people demanding silence cannot defend their position in open argument, so they coerce consensus instead.

History is consistent, though: The censors are never the good guys.

There was a time when the sport paid more attention to individual achievements.  Courtney Woods went down with an injury and Mikayla Voigt put up 52 points on Southern Illinois.  That was the way things went for a few years at Northern Illinois, with a team that frequently merited mention among the highest-scoring Division I teams.  Then came the corona shutdowns, and arrests gone wrong in Minneapolis and Kenosha, and performative anthem protests took precedence over winning.  Perhaps that's the way to groom spectators to expect performative wokeness at high ticket prices in the summer.