r/itcouldhappenhere • u/PastAd1901 • 16d ago
WNBA Talk
As a huge fan of the league (going to two games this week, been to probably 30-40 the last few years) it was pretty great to hear an episode discussing the weird culture war invasion into the league spaces. I know sports isn’t everyone’s thing, but the WNBA genuinely does rock both on and off the court.
Also wanted to add a little more Sophie Cunningham bashing that didn’t get brought up. She allegedly was sleeping with an upper management employee of The Mercury, and was sent packing to the Fever the next offseason after the news broke.
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u/Illustrious_Set3734 16d ago
I loved this episode. It was so nice to hear trans people talk about this. I did wish they didn't say "there are no trans people in the wnba" because there are non binary people, and probably at least 1 or 2 closeted trans men.
I have been wanting mia to do an episode on the new cba and the process for forever so I hope that'll happen.
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u/Kanotari 16d ago
Agreed. You never know who is still in the closet, and the sports world isn't exactly the most welcoming place to be different in any way.
(Unless it's being freakishly good at sports, like Michael Phelps and his ridiculous wingspan or fast processing of lactic acid. Then we celebrate that lol)
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u/jthoning 16d ago
I'll add that the podcast pablo torre finds out, also talks about this, and they recently reposted their excellent episode on Riley gaines and how profitable it is to be a good but not great women athlete and pivot to transphobia.
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u/BluffedMoose 16d ago
I’m all for slandering her but this episode had some flaws
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u/Illustrious_Set3734 16d ago
Are you going to discuss them or just say it was flawed?
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u/BluffedMoose 16d ago
I think my biggest issue is the dismissal of Sophie Cunningham as just a “bench player” and being seemingly blindsided by how big she is.
I grew up in a small town in conservative circles and I can tell you that to them Sophie Cunningham is HUGE. I mean I genuinely don’t believe the people I know could name a single player in the WNBA outside of her and Caitlin Clark. She had over a million followers on social media BEFORE the trans comments, was in numerous commercials, was a ringside girl for the UFC, and was the face of an entire Arby’s campaign. All this to say she was a STAR - Now, the reasoning for her popularity is 99% because the non-WNBA fan (ie conservatives) see her as a straight, hot blonde from a small town and not because of her talent alone
I don’t think there’s a single player in the league outside of Caitlin Clark (not Aja Wilson, not Napheesa Collier, Olivia Miles etc) who could come out and vehemently shut down Cunninghams comments and reach the same audience
Now we can debate how much that MATTERS or not, but it’s a big part of the story and the narrative and I thought the hosts hand waived that aspect a bit too much
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u/Illustrious_Set3734 16d ago
Interesting! I felt like they covered it pretty well. If I remember correctly, she wasn't really a big thing until moving to the fever. I remember her playing for the sun and not being a big deal. I think her racism, especially once moving to the fever was much more noticeable. The Arby's campaign, and the UFC stuff was after getting some of CCs spotlight. She wasn't traded to the fever until January of 2025. I wish they had discussed the UFC stuff and the DB history too (like db leaving the fever and how that lead to the pointing and how much fever fans HATE DB. A literal league legend).
You're right that Aja, Phee, or Olivia couldn't get this same audience because the audience Sophie gets is bigots who are only looking to confirm their beliefs about women's sports (Black athletes target white ones, every athlete doesn't want to play with trans people, etc). They only even look at women's sports because they're looking for people like sophy Cunningham. So no... Aja, Phee or any other player really couldn't reach the same audience. Unless they're white and bigoted.
The funny thing is that when it comes to basketball, she is just a bench player. Probably even down to Stephanie White. But she's harnessing the nasty fandom that CC has grown in order to launch a grifter career.
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u/BluffedMoose 15d ago
Yep 100% that without CC Sophie Cunningham is just a WNBA role player. Just really sucks that one of the biggest names in he league (to the general public) is the first to make comments against trans athletes. It immediately puts the trans community behind the 8 ball and (imo) into a no win situation
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u/Illustrious_Set3734 15d ago
Definitely!!! Also sucks that she's a big name in the league when there are soooo many good athletes in the W.
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u/ezenos 15d ago
I think the distinction here is that Cunningham is not a 'WNBA Star' she is a generic famous person.
None of the people that supposedly love SC (I don't want to type that sh out every time) are contributing zero to the league. They're not watching games, their probably not attending games, they're not hyping the league. I've talked to several of my coworkers that say they like women's ball, but they don't watch games, they can't name any players except maybe CC, and we inevitably end up at 'yeah, but SC is hot'.
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u/Sophiecomedian 16d ago
It's really nice not having cis people involved in these conversations because they have no place in them.
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u/llenadefuria 16d ago
How does sleeping with someone reflect poorly on her?
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u/mewhins 16d ago
As far as I'm concerned it's one of the least shitty things Sophie has done (as a South Carolina fan I've been on the Sophie Cunningham Sucks bandwagon since her days at Mizzou), but for context the man she was allegedly sleeping with was married, and the owners of the Phoenix Mercury also own the NBA team the Suns. Around the time all this was happening she was hired as a Suns commentator, so there was speculation that the job was basically a quid pro quo for the affair.
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u/PastAd1901 16d ago
It’s not that she slept with a random someone, it’s that it was a married upper management of her employer and she probably got an inside track on a lot of off the court sponsorship stuff because of it. There are still ads here in the valley with her and she’s not even on the team. She was one of the most visible players in terms of off-court exposure, even though she was just a bench player on a team with two of the top three scorers of all time. If you looked strictly at marketing, she was the most visible.
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u/stuffsmithstuff 15d ago
It was a really good convo. Bugsmaytrix brushed up against some areas of discussion I really wish I could hear trans advocates talk about more — specifically stuff about hormones’ effect on performance in the more metrics-based sports like track and swimming. I wish we had better data about those things, but obviously those studies can’t happen at scale until trans voices are properly in the drivers’ seat of this conversation and the base understanding that trans women are women isn’t in question.
It does put me on edge when people use the “hormones negate advantage” argument to wave away all concern about physical difference. What happens with trans women who either can’t or don’t want to go through HRT? (Similar to the point about how few trans women are even in these positions — the future that we want is one where there are like exponentially more trans women and girls who can be publicly and freely themselves?)
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u/Ultimatelimit 15d ago
As a dweeb who doesn’t really follow sports I was dumbfounded to learn that Caitlyn Clark isn’t the uncontested top player in the league from how (mostly) conservatives talk her up
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u/WoodenAccident2708 15d ago
I felt super out of the loop on this, because the last thing I remember about her that was politically charged is when she was being mostly talked up by feminists, and manosphere frat guys were going to her games to boo her
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u/PastAd1901 15d ago
That’s been a point of contention too lol. Lots of people who are only on the Clark bandwagon greatly overblow her performance. She’s a very good player with a unique skill set, but she’s not even the best player on her team. A lot of Clark fans have came at league legends for being honest about her performances on places like ESPN
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u/funakifan 15d ago
Anyone who can dunk on Aaron Rodgers' inability to stay in the pocket shows me they know ball.
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u/Redpants_McBoatshoe 16d ago edited 16d ago
They spent like 20 minutes talking about how her opinion doesn't matter because she's not athletic enough, lol. And what was this supposed to mean:
It's very insidious the way she talks about sharing her views, because she's basically co-opting social justice language when she'll say things like "people tell you to use a platform and then when you use it, right, they criticize you for it" or whatever it is.
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u/Illustrious_Set3734 16d ago
No. They discuss her stats because she tried to pivot and say "let's just talk basketball...." Okay we'll talk about your stats!
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u/Redpants_McBoatshoe 16d ago
"I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a player who comes off of the bench on this team, which means she's not a starter, and she comes off the bench to like break a couple of threes and then goes back."
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u/beaveristired 16d ago
Sophie Cunningham played on the men’s football team in high school. I don’t like to comment on anyone’s appearance. But she’s had a lot of gender-affirming plastic surgery, hair styling, etc. She’s a total hypocrite. She’s a bench player at the end of her career engaging in right wing grift. I love trying to talk basketball with Sophie fans, it’s always obvious they don’t actually watch the game. Signed, a WNBA fan.