Something is happening to the WNBA that has nothing to do with basketball. A league long desperate for relevance got handed a superstar who filled arenas and shattered records, only to treat her like an inconvenience. Now a teammate of that superstar is facing the same treatment, dragged into a fight she never picked. The common thread isn't talent or attitude. It's something else entirely.
So what exactly is Sophie Cunningham guilty of?
But before we get to her, let’s step back a bit. Caitlin Clark arrived in the WNBA as a gift the league didn't deserve, clearly didn’t want, and still doesn’t. She set records, got people in the seats, and turned a struggling women's basketball league into appointment viewing for millions of new fans. She earned every bit of it, and nobody sane disputes that. Yet the league she rescued has spent two years treating her like an unwelcome guest.
Clark, unfortunately, has gone out of her way to appease critics who seem to think she doesn’t deserve her fame because she’s white and straight. "I want to say I've earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege," Clark said last year. "A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it's very important. I have to continue to try to change that. The more we can elevate black women, that's going to be a beautiful thing."
That kind of groveling shouldn't be a prerequisite for playing basketball.
Recommended: Mamdani's Grocery Stores Expose the Democrats' Biggest Voter ID Lie
Cunningham has been pushed into another fight, and she's handling it with a lot more spine than her teammate did. She's become one of the league's most outspoken players by criticizing officials for letting opponents pound on Clark with little penalty. Last month, everything changed when a reporter asked her about biological men competing against women in sports, and she said she opposed it. If that wasn’t bad enough, she didn't back down when reporters asked her again.
That answer was apparently enough to earn her a target on her back. Guardian columnist Howard Bryant used a recent column to brand Cunningham "anti-black" for saying what most Americans already believe: men don't belong in women's sports. What that has to do with race is a mystery Bryant never bothers to explain, but humanity has recognized the difference between men and women for thousands of years, and one WNBA player saying so isn't a radical act.
Bryant claims conservatives originally wanted politics out of sports but have since embraced culture-war politics with Cunningham as their star player. That's rich, considering that Cunningham didn’t even bring up the issue; she just answered it honestly.
The most shameful line in Bryant's piece brands Cunningham as "the right's anti-Black, [sic] anti-transgender culture war ambassador," as if defending single-sex sports makes someone a bigot on two fronts at once. Of course, Cunningham has been the target of multiple media attacks for her comments. It’s quite clear that the media aren't stumbling into this story by accident. They're manufacturing a fight in the next logical ground zero on the issue of trans sports since the Supreme Court settled the Title IX question for college sports.
Cunningham didn't ask for this fight. She just refused to lie about it. Reporters have even started asking coaches the same questions about men in women’s sport, and they don’t have the courage that Cunningham has. But in the end, the media manufactured this fight and dropped it in the WNBA's lap. If the league that once needed saving can't stomach a woman defending women's sports, that says everything about who the WNBA is actually built for these days.
