Keyboard Quarterbacks

From the P.T. Barnum school of all publicity is good publicity, I’m thinking Malice at the Palace II is less a black eye for the WNBA than a great opportunity for it to cash in on more fans.


Face it, after 12 years the novelty of a women’s pro basketball league has worn off. The league hasn’t figured out how to successfully market to draw crossover fans. Amid newspaper cutbacks that have sacrificed sports other than football and baseball, the WNBA is struggling to get what little coverage it can. Game attendance has been steadily dropping after the first few seasons exceeded expectations.

Now, it's a whole new brawl game. Since Tuesday’s fracas between the Detroit Shock and LA Sparks, the league has gotten nearly unprecedented attention -- for better or worse -- from all media. Sports fans and non-fans alike have seen or heard about the melee and are talking about it.

Maybe a combined morbid curiosity and a true desire to see what the league is all about will make them tune in to a televised game -- or maybe they’ll check out a game in person. And what they’ll find is honest-to-goodness, straight-up good basketball. There’s astonishing athleticism, crisp passing, high-arcing threes, hard-nosed defense and, most importantly, exuberant athletes who revel in the pure joy of playing the game they love. And it’s just plain, good, clean (usually) fun.

Unfortunately, there’s not much time for the WNBA to capitalize on its 15 minutes of brawl-induced infamy. The season will come to a screeching one-month halt next week for the Olympics break.

So, I’m imploring the WNBA to take advantage of the attention: Ditch those “Expect Great” ads that feature Candace Parker (pre-fight), Tamika Catchings and Cheryl Ford (pre-ACL tear in the brawl game) making tongue-in-cheek derisive comments about the women’s game. They had about as much traction as Nikes on sweaty hardwood. All they did was further enforce the beliefs they were trying to knock down. Replace them with tape of the fight, then a fade to black and the words: “Got your attention?” Then a thumping blast of the lyrics “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never going to keep me down” and a reel of Parker dunking, Leslie dunking, a Ticha Penicheiro no-look pass, a spin move to the hoop by Shameka Christon, Becky Hammon cutting through defenders up the lane, a scoop shot by Janel McCarville, monster threes by Sue Bird, Tina Thompson, Candice Wiggins, a steal by Alexis Hornbuckle and rifle pass to a streaking Deanna Nolan, who finger-rolls it in. Then the words, “This is the real WNBA. Come see for yourself.”

Hey, I’m no ad exec, but there are plenty of ways to capitalize on this unfortunate event, despite league President Donna Orender’s protestations as she doled out suspensions Thursday.

“There’s no doubt that there has been a tremendous amount of attention, but it’s not the type of attention that we seek,” Orender said.

OK, but now that you have it, use it.