THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL SIDESHOW.

Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham has a history of standing up for herself and her teammates.  That's generally something for the court, but somehow the culture wars crop up.

Now, she's teasing a book.  It's probably not about recognizing junk defenses and providing subtle cues to get a teammate a better shot.

We, unfortunately, have precious few details at this point about what might be included in her "tell-all," but two likely topics are treatment of certain athletes by the WNBA and the delusional backlash at her wanting to protect girl athletes.

All those blue-haired weirdos who are showing up at games trying silence Sophie may want to be careful what they wish for, because if Cunningham really decides to open Pandora’s box, they might not like what comes spilling out.

It's been there all along, only the national media generally doesn't notice. Visualize a bench-clearing, fan-involved brawl at DePaul's old Alumni Hall.

Or consider Chicago Tribune sports pundit Rick Telander's impressions, at pages 84-85 of From Red Ink to Roses, of Indiana playing Wisconsin in the old Fieldhouse, early in the Pat Richter years.

The crowd is different [from that watching the similarly futile men] with many of the early arrivals being young girls and teenaged females with impossibly ratted and curled and moussed hair worn, one must suppose, in the style of rural female jocks.  ... Many of the girls are clearly basketball players themselves, with their sisters and friends and maybe a parent or two in tow. ... There are other women here, too, older ones with shorter haircuts and more masculine comportment.  Some of them, no doubt, are high school coaches and former jocks themselves.

In a sports book intended for a general audience, adjectives like "butch" or more specific allegations of alternative lifestyles get blue-pencilled.  In those days, the women's basketball power was at the Green Bay campus, although even that long ago being a premier team in the North Star Conference generally got you a one-and-done in the big tournament.

Red Ink to Roses precedes the creation of the women's professional basketball league as we currently understand it by a few years.  It might be no accident that the league established franchises in the kind of cities you imagine when aggressive panhandlers or a thriving art scene come to mind.  The mix of fans, though, is still the same.

That meant a smattering of people opined and argued outside an arena on a late Friday afternoon while the wildfires burned out in Oregon and the great Mount Hood stood in a shroud.

Some brought tripods and recorded their own viewpoints. Some called other people "insurrectionists" a time or two. Some accused others of racism even as all did seem to agree racism is vile, which might count as a start. One guy hollered, "Trans in women's sports is the patriarchy!" A man dressed as a frog carried a sign reading, "TRANS PEOPLE JUST WANT TO LIVE." Maybe 50 people demonstrated, and maybe 20 others asked the 50 about their demonstrations.

Quite a few held little posters that read, "Thank you, Sophie," acknowledging the recent words of the 29-year-old Missourian and Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who voiced her opposition to transgender athletes in women's sports to ESPN. The woman who had the 100 posters printed joshed, "You've always got to make a friend with a printer, you know." Some carried golden balloons with the numeral "8," Cunningham's jersey number. One held a tall poster of the 6-foot-1 Cunningham. Other signs read, "Democrats for Single-Sex Sports," or, "Title IX, Hold the Line." People wore black T-shirts with green lettering showing a clearly delineated XX and XY, sold by a company that says it donates part of its sales to help fund "the fight to protect fairness and opportunity in women's sports" and was founded by former gymnastics national champion Jennifer Sey. This all came three days after another, thinner "Thank you, Sophie" demonstration had happened in Seattle, and a Seattle Storm co-owner had wound up suspended for berating teenage girls holding "Thank you Sophie" signs inside the arena. This was the disunited United States in late July 2026.

Well, a basketball game would happen inside the Moda Center in Portland, almost as if from some separate plane. The fourth-place Fever (19-10) would best the ninth-place Portland Fire (11-18) by 112-98 to extend the Fever's WNBA record of triple-digit scoring to five games. A sold-out 19,959 would attend even as the uppermost decks looked either half full or half empty. A sublime Caitlin Clark would go 26-10-10 for her fourth pro triple-double with field goals pretty, her free throws (14-for-17) prettier and her passes prettier still. The Fever outscored the Fire 31-15 off turnovers. How quaint, the stats.

It doen't help that people in responsible positions in the league have absorbed the past thirty years of culture-studies nonsense and turn what used to be as if legacy media are chatting with Democrats on the Sunday shows into a struggle session.

Stephanie White's stance on the Sophie Cunningham-DiJonai Carrington incident has Indiana Fever fans fuming. And, in the eyes of many supporters, rightfully so. Few fans expect their team's head coach to defend an opponent after a Flagrant 2 foul against one of her own players. Stephanie White, however, appeared to sympathize with Carrington's intentions while defending her former player. A stance that has once again put her on the wrong side of a section of the Indiana Fever fanbase.

The coach, who has a permanent scowl, might be better placed doing diversity training at Purdue Northwest.

"She refused to stand up for Caitlin Clark when Caitlin Clark got a fist in her throat," the WNBA analyst said. The accusation refers to the infamous incident involving Phoenix Mercury star Alyssa Thomas and Clark. During a June matchup, Thomas made contact with Clark's throat with her fist during a scramble for the ball. The WNBA later assessed Thomas a Flagrant 2 and suspended her for one game. However, there is an important distinction in White's response to that incident.

White did not defend Thomas' actions on the court. In fact, she called the contact "egregious" and "utterly disrespectful," while criticizing officials for failing to call a foul during the game. The Fever HC later came to Thomas' defense after the Mercury star faced racist abuse and threats following the incident. White condemned that online harassment, arguing that the response had crossed the line into racism and hate.

"As a league, there's been so much more toxicity, racism, homophobia, straight out nonsense. Hate (and) nonsense… And it is absolutely unacceptable. Most of this (is) coming from the online community. Most of this, in my heart of hearts, I believe is not coming from WNBA fans, Indiana Fever fans. I believe that this is people who are using our league, using our players to further divisive agendas," she said.

While White's defense against online harassment was focused on protecting Thomas from abuse, not everyone among the Fever fanbase was impressed. Especially because Phoenix Mercury head coach Nate Tibbetts had publicly questioned Thomas' one-game suspension, calling the league's investigation insufficient and defending his player.

Now, after White's comments regarding Carrington's Flagrant 2 against Sophie Cunningham, that previous episode has resurfaced in the debate over whether the Fever head coach is willing to be as forceful in defending her own players as she is in defending players on the opposing side.

In the common room, that's what the academic types call "contextualizing" a situation.  It's much easeir to put the onus on a subset of the fans or suggest Militant Normal keyboard warriors are at work.  Case in point: Red State's Sister Toldjah.

For a league celebrating its 30th anniversary, it and some of its coaches and players seem hellbent on causing the new fans who have been tuning in to watch games since Clark's arrival in 2024 to turn away from it thanks to woke transgender BS and an inability - or unwillingness - to stand up for players who in the eyes of many are being intentionally targeted for the apparent crime of WrongSpeak (and perhaps the color of their skin).

And deflecting.  Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a tee reading "Trans kids belong" (as if there is any such thing as a "trans kid") but later played a different identity politics card.

However, while pro-trans people lauded Reeve for backing inclusion, it was ironic that less than two weeks ago, she also protested against the WNBA hiring men as coaches and called out the lack of women’s head coaches in the premier women’s pro basketball league in the United States.

In an interview on “Good Game” with Sarah Spain, Reeve said we’re seeing history repeat itself because before Title IX was put in place, there were more women coaching in women’s college basketball than men. However, when that law was enacted in 1972, men instead began invading women’s college basketball because it started gaining prominence, getting more attention and money involved.

“We still don’t have more women coaching in college basketball than we do men,” Reeve said. “So that same thing, apply that same thing when two years ago we lost seven WNBA coaches. They got fired because all of a sudden, this money, the WNBA blew up, valuations of franchises. In comes the NBA folks again, who had cast us aside for many years. In they come again. Now they want their franchises back and all that. It’s more important again and then we have more men, we have NBA people.”

Well, yes, prior to Title Nine, collegiate women's teams were low-budget operations, with no less a luminary than Pat Summitt driving the team van until the budgets got bigger.  Once the athletics programs were put on a legally equal footing, the sports department equivalent of deanlets and deanlings took care of their own.  "Apparently, though, there are other unintended consequences of Title Nine, including the introduction of positional arms races into girls' sport, even before high school.  The old boy network might be only a sideshow."

Well, the Benzini Brothers Circus had a sideshow, and The Greatest Show on Earth had a sideshow, and irrespective of where the show goes on, the sideshow acts (somehow tattooed ladies come to mind) are the same.