My freshman year in college, I had a roommate who played hockey – not upper-crusty kilt-wearing field-hockey hockey, but thuggish pad-wearing ice-hockey hockey. I knew next to nothing about hockey – my parents hauled me and my brother to a Devils-Caps game once, and we had absolutely no interest in hockey, which we made clear by whining the whole way to Brendan Byrne Arena, only to stumble upon Complimentary Devils Athletic Sock Night. We must have led sheltered lives indeed for a pair of team-logo sweatsocks to please us so greatly, but in any case, the socks shut us up until we found our seats, and we obediently sang the national anthem and settled in to watch the clock until we could go home, but seven seconds into the first period, a reasonably violent fight broke out right in front of us, and at that moment my brother and I found ourselves keenly interested in hockey and starting screaming “KILL HIM” and “KNOCK HIS TEETH OUT” and pantomiming uppercuts, and the hapless Cap forward went down at the bottom of a bloody pile-up while we jumped up and down and chanted “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and my horrified parents smiled thinly at other people in the section and muttered, “Those little hooligans? Never seen ëem before in our lives.”

Anyhow. At first, I went to my roommate’s home games out of politeness, but the benefits of supporting a women’s sport soon became apparent. Only a few dozen other people ever showed up, for one thing, so I could sit anywhere I wanted, and my full-throated roars of “HEY REF, I THINK YOUR GUIDE DOG NEEDS HIS ëWALKIES’” could echo around Baker Rink unimpeded by crowd noise. I soon befriended the other faithful – we all began each game huddled around the giant Thermos of spiked hot chocolate provided by the boosters – and we would sit behind the Princeton goalie and menace the opposing team’s offensive line. Almost incidentally, I wound up learning a lot about hockey also. Whereas men’s hockey looks a lot like soapbox derby with all the high-speed collisions, the women’s game looks more like soccer. Because women’s hockey moves a little slower and leaves a little more ice open, I could see how the plays worked, and if the ref called my roommate offsides or busted her for icing, I could tell whether he’d muffed the call and decide how profanely to object. But just watching women excel at their sport gave me a thrill. Fiercely uncoordinated but staunchly pro-Title IX, I’ve seen Quarterback Princess about ten times, and when the “babes on blades” zipped past us and slammed enemy defenders into the partition, I felt as proud as if I’d given birth to them. “KILL HER,” I yelled, and “KNOCK HER TEETH OUT.”

I felt the same way about the WNBA – like, we girls get ours, finally. I’d read glowing stories about the league and about the experience of going to a WNBA game, but I hadn’t gone to a game yet myself, even though the New York Liberty play at Madison Square Garden and I can walk to the Garden from my apartment in about fifteen minutes. Last Wednesday, I heard on the radio that the finals would start the next night, and I made a mental note to try to buy a ticket the next day if they had any left. To my surprise, I snagged a decent seat the next morning. My own experience with hoops consists of sitting out the last half of a phys-ed class because I’d somehow managed, contrary to most of the laws of physics, to hit myself in the face while dribbling down-court, but still, I couldn’t wait.

I tooled over to the Garden at around seven-thirty that evening. The lobby, where about a thousand people had amassed in front of the will-call ticket windows, felt like a sauna, and I fanned myself with my program while checking out the crowd. I hadn’t seen such a diverse group since jury duty. Groups of women my age, wearing team jerseys from college. Dads and daughters. Pee-wee league teams and coaches. Lesbian couples with babies in backpacks. High-school boys and little sisters. Middle-aged couples. Businessmen and clients. At last, I procured my ticket and took my sweaty self up the escalator to my seat, which rested just this side of nosebleed territory in the top of the second tier. The game had already started, and after I located my seat, I had to ask a pinched-looking lady to vacate it, but once seated I could see the whole court, and I settled down to watch the game. Alas, the gaggle of nine-year-old girls to whom the pinched-looking lady belonged seemed hell-bent on screaming themselves hoarse in support of the Liberty, and I appreciate the sentiment – they knew all the players’ names and all the cheers and whatnot – but few sounds in nature will rupture the human eardrum more efficiently than the shriek of a nine-year-old girl, never mind half a dozen nine-year-old girls hopped up on Pepsi and Cracker Jacks and the delirious excitement of watching bigger girls do the bigger-girl things to which nine-year-olds aspire. I began to feel genuine pity for the pinched-looking lady.

I flipped open my messenger bag and felt around inside for my earplugs, and just as my hand closed around them, an unearthly moan arose from the crowd – seventeen thousand people, all saying “Spooooon” at the same time. I looked down to see Teresa Weatherspoon leading a breakaway play. It happened again when Houston’s Sheryl Swoopes took off towards the basket, a weird fragmented groan usually heard on haunted-house rides. A few seats in front of me, a man berated the Liberty for not getting rid of the ball, not shooting, not passing, and not trading for taller players; his girlfriend filed her nails and asked questions. I tried to listen to his answers so I could learn something, but Madison Square Garden is notorious for deafening ambient noise and I couldn’t hear more than a few words at a time. The Diamondvision board led the crowd in a deafening chant of “DE-fense [thump thump] DE-fense [thump thump] DE-fense [thump thump].” A couple of the nine-year-olds clambered over me to buy soda. When they returned, another pair of nine-year-olds went out to buy hot dogs. The nine-year-olds spent the remainder of the first half scrambling over and around my legs and slopping mustard on my Pumas, and I had barely enough room for my legs in the first place without having to give proper clearance to wriggling nine-year-olds (all attired, might I crabbily add, in a completely age-inappropriate strappy tank tops and capri pants), and I would have just ignored them and concentrated on the game except that they kept interposing themselves between me and the game every thirty seconds, and right before I turned to the pinched-looking lady and snarled, “Listen up, pinched-looking lady – I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun here, but the kids can EITHER screech their fool heads off until I go deafer than Beethoven, OR they can trample my lower extremities for the next forty-five minutes without so much as an ëexcuse me,’ BUT NOT BOTH, and by the way, I don’t want to tell you how to raise your kids or anything, but in my day, NINE-YEAR-OLDS did not wear BODY GLITTER to a SPORTING EVENT,” the whole troupe stampeded past me and sat elsewhere, but not before bonking the guys sitting in front of me on the heads with their Sanrio pocketbooks, and the guys and I rolled our eyes at each other.

No sooner could I watch the game in peace than half-time arrived. A lot of people bolted to the concession stands. I chose to stay put and watch the Liberty’s mascot – a beige dog of indeterminate gender with a Statue Of Liberty foam headdress on – recreate Tom Cruise’s dancing-in-Tighty-Whiteys scene from Risky Business while the Liberty cheerleaders twirled ribbons and did cartwheels. What this had to do with basketball, the Liberty, or anything else, I have no idea, and while it wasn’t the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever seen, I’d definitely put it in the top five. Then the Jessie White Tumbling Squad came out with their mats and trampolines, and they turned flips through hoops and over five-man pyramids and created all sorts of nifty sculptures with their bodies. We gave them a big hand because they rocked, particularly in comparison to the beige dog humping the couch, which sucked. The teams reappeared for warm-ups. Meanwhile, Diamondvision showed Patrick Ewing, who waved, and Spike Lee, who also waved, and Tyra Banks, who curled her lip and turned away from the camera, and the Jessie White Tumbling Squad didn’t form a human staircase so that Tyra could get over herself, but they should have.

The second half began. In spite of the nine-year-olds, and the noise, and the relentlessly stupid antics of the beige dog, I loved the game (the Liberty got crushed, by the way). Those women can run – Sheryl Swoopes, whose body looks like eighty percent legs, booked down the court like a big old waterbug. Obviously, the women can shoot, too, although the Liberty gave the Comets’ defense too much time to set up before they drove to the basket, and they can pass like hell, and it pleases me to report that they don’t think twice about knocking each other down. I liked the crowd the best, though. Every time the Liberty made a basket – free throw, three-pointer, whatever – the crowd screamed and howled. Every time a Liberty player broke away, everybody stood up to watch – everybody. I have to admit that the game itself, and whether the Liberty won or lost, mattered to me less than the fact that the game got played at all. When the WNBA first started, I heard it said that people wouldn’t pay to see women play basketball, but people do pay, and not only do they pay, but little girls will figure that out. Little girls will go to games and say, “I want to do that when I grow up,” and nobody will laugh at them or pat them on the head, because they can do that when they grow up, and they can earn a living at it, and they can become role models for other little girls. True, the nine-year-olds worked my nerves, but they gave me hope also.

See, I love baseball, but women have no part in it. Women don’t play baseball; they did once, but only because a lot of the men had gone to war. Women don’t coach, women don’t manage, women hardly ever call games on TV or on the radio, and the one woman who almost made it to the big leagues as an umpire had a nervous breakdown and had to quit. I listened to hundreds of baseball games as a kid. I read every book about baseball my father owned, and he owned dozens. I umpired Little League, and let me tell you, you don’t strap on shinpads and a chest guard and stand in the hot sun for three hours, watching kids throw the ball over the backstop and swing at dirtballs while the parents make catty comments to you, because you need the five bucks – you do it because you love the game. I throw like a girl and I can’t run fast and Ray Charles has better hand-eye coordination than I do, but even if I had had the skills, no hope existed of my ever playing baseball at the professional level, because I have ovaries. The stereotype that women don’t like sports infuriates me – um, hello, welcome to the end of the twentieth century – but on the other hand, why should we like sports? Most of us grew up hearing that we couldn’t play professional sports because we’d never play as well as the men, and besides, who would want to watch us anyway? In the end, why should we take an interest in something that will never take an interest in us?

I want that to change in my lifetime. If I have a daughter, and my daughter says, “Ma, I want to play right field when I grow up,” I don’t want to say, “Oh, honey, you can’t, because girls don’t do that.” I want to say, “Great, honey. Let’s go to the park, and I’ll hit you fly balls so that you can practice,” and ten years later she’ll get a big old signing bonus and buy me a car. The WNBA makes me think it could happen, because if we can slam dunk, we can throw a buttonhook pass and lay down a bunt too, so give us the damn ball already.

The WNBA.

The girls of summer.

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