Activism in Women’s Basketball (Since I First Published MURDER BY MASCOT)

Good news, bad news. Both inspired my women’s basketball mystery, Murder by Mascot, when Alyson first published it in 2006. And both are on my mind as I publish a third edition of the novel and reflect what has changed since then.

This post will focus on good news, on activism and progress, on the ways women basketball players and coaches are using their platform to empower women, to challenge homophobia and racism, and to make the world a better place.

But to celebrate progress, you need to understand why progress is needed. To appreciate good news, you need to understand bad news. So I’ll start with the bad news that impelled me to write Murder by Mascot.

Bad News

Rape culture. More specifically, actual events that occurred in my own town, Iowa City. Information about these events is easily accessible to the public and and familiar to longtime fans of Big Ten basketball. I detail them here for the same reason I wrote Murder by Mascot: to protest the fact that (high-profile) men so often get away with raping women.

In September 2002, Pierre Pierce, a forward on the University of Iowa men’s basketball team, was arrested and charged with rape. He pled guilty to a lesser charge and received no jail time. Under the “leadership” of Coach Steve Alford, he did not lose his place on the team or his scholarship. Despite petitions and protests, he enjoyed a red-shirt year and returned the following season as the team’s leading scorer.

In 2005, he was again arrested because he choked, stripped, and threatened his ex-girlfriend with a knife. He also damaged her apartment and stole from her. Facing felony charges, he was finally dismissed from the basketball team, but he was still allowed to keep his scholarship.

He spent only a year in prison. He served 11 months of a two-year prison sentence and then later another month for violating his parole. After this violation, the Iowa Supreme Court allowed him to leave the state so he could play basketball in France, where he signed a contract worth $120,000. 

In my novel, Murder by Mascot, the murder victim, UI hoopster Dave Devoster, is loosely based on this real-life rapist.

What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you about Pierce is something that nearly every longtime Iowa women’s basketball fan knows: the woman he raped in 2002 was a player on the Iowa women’s team. So the special treatment he received not only demonstrated our culture’s disregard for rape victims—and for women in general—but it also starkly and nastily epitomized our culture’s tendency to glorify male athletes and to dismiss or even vilify female ones.

Why does our culture often undervalue women’s sports?

The key reason is obviously that our culture devalues women. It seeks to control, rather than honor, what women do with their bodies. (Can we say Handmaid’s Tale?) But such extensive misogyny is beyond the scope of this blog post.

Another reason that women’s sports receive short shrift is homophobia. Prejudice against lesbians and negative recruiting are other bad news that inspired my novel.

(I did a lot of research on homophobia in women’s sports, but let me be clear: all the women in my novel—straight or queer—are purely fictional. Although I depict the Iowa women’s basketball team, none of my characters on that team are patterned after any actual individuals, past or present.)

Good News

What, you might ask, was the good news that inspired my novel?

Protest. Many people raised their voices to say that it was wrong to give a rapist a mere slap on the wrist. This protest is featured on the cover that Morgan Ortmann designed for my new edition.

Such protest was, I believe, a precursor to the Me Too movement. Although powerful men—men much more influential than Div I basketball players—continue to harass and rape women, more and more of them are being called to account.

In the long run, protest makes a difference. Resistance matters.

Listen to Connecticut Sun point guard, Layshia Clarendon, the only publicly out gender-nonconforming WNBA player:

“One of the biggest forms of activism and resistance we can do is show up and authentically be ourselves every day.”

Before I further celebrate this powerful activism in the world of women’s basketball, I want to bring up one last bit of real life that shaped my novel.

The murder weapon in my mystery is based on an actual statue of Iowa’s mascot, Herky the Hawkeye. This statue, however, was no ordinary Herky, but part of a public art project called Herkys on Parade. In 2004, it was the largest public art project in the Iowa City area, featuring 74 Herkys, all decorated in different ways. My murder weapon, Marilyn MonHerky (created by the staff of MC Ginsberg, a downtown jewelry store) pays playful tribute to Marilyn Monroe. One of my characters, Vince, calls it Drag Queen Herky, and there is no denying that the statue is queer in every sense of the word.

Initially, I chose Marilyn MonHerky to be my lethal statue because she is campy. But now, the academic in me is also drawn to the symbolism of a rapist lying dead at her feet. DeVoster, who represents male privilege and rape culture, is silenced by a queer figure that represents Monroe, an early Hollywood silence breaker.

It’s a bizarre juxtaposition, but a hopeful one: the death of toxic masculinity, the triumph of previously silenced voices. It shows the power of art, the power of using your own voice however you can.

Murder by Mascot  is me using my own voice. It is fan activism.

In the world of women’s basketball, many women—fans, players, coaches—have used their voices to lift up others and create positive change. The rest of this post celebrates their patience, persistence, and courage.

The WNBA

When the WNBA started in 1996, it saw its many lesbian players and fans as liabilities, and it attempted to render them invisible. The announcers droned on and on about marquis center Lisa Leslie’s modelling career and her treasured off-court femininity. But last season all the teams in the league hosted Pride nights, and the announcers dished about Seattle Storm point guard Sue Bird dating soccer star Megan Rapinoe.

In 2014, the WNBA became the first pro sports league in the U.S. to openly recruit LGBTQ fans. 

What caused this happy change? Or rather who caused it?

Queer fans and players themselves. They showed up game after game until the money-people finally realized it would be in the league’s best interests to recognize a huge part of the W’s fan base.

(Important side note: Here’s hoping that the league’s money-people will also realize that the league needs to expand so that rookies like University of Iowa’s Megan Gustafson, the consensus Player of the Year, have an opportunity to continue wowing their many fans.)

In 2002, Lesbians for Liberty staged a kiss-in during a televised Liberty game at Madison Square Garden. Sports columnist Ira Berkow’s response inadvertently suggests why the protest was necessary. In the New York Times, with a headline reading “A Lesbian Group Protests Too Much,” Berkow ends his column with these words: “…when you see a W.N.B.A. point guard make a spectacular drive, you don’t think, great gay drive. Who cares? Who needs to? And that is as it should be.”

In a way, Berkow is right. We shouldn’t need to care about the sexual orientation and identities of public figures. But the fact is some of us—in this case LGBTQ folks—do need to care.

Why? If you have to ask, you’re probably not going to understand the answer. But I’ll offer it anyway because too many people keep asking stupid questions like these: Why do LGBTQ people need Pride celebrations? Why do we “flaunt” our sexuality? Why do we have to talk about it?

Here’s the thing. All people long to see other people “like themselves.” All people are eager to be represented and celebrated.  If you’re straight, this happens for you all the time, but it does NOT happen for many LGBTQ people—especially those living in conservative places.

So when we queer folk see Diana Taurasi make yet another game-winning three, we don’t think Great gay trey! But later, when she courageously comes out and publicly announces her marriage to her former Mercury teammate Penny Taylor, we might think something like this: The leading scorer of the WNBA is a lesbian! The player who won three NCAA championships, three WNBA championships, and four Olympic gold medals is a lesbian! She is out, proud, happy, loved—and celebrated! The world is becoming a friendlier place for people like me! I’m much less alone than I thought! My people rock!

Do I need this boost?

As a 55-year-old queer woman, I sure am heartened to see how much LGBTQ+ visibility has increased since I was a kid. But what about today’s LGBTQ+ kids? What about ten-year-old lesbians who are bullied every day? Do they need publicly out sports heroes like Taurasi? What about twelve-year-old lesbians who are shamed by their religious leaders? Or fifteen-year-old lesbians who are disowned by their families? What about all the LGBTQ+ kids who wonder if it will ever get better?

By being publicly out and by being her amazing self, Taurasi is saving lives. And so are many other WNBA stars.

Publicly out WNBA players are defeating homophobia by voicing their own truths, proudly claiming their identities, working hard, and excelling. In the Adidas Breaking Barriers campaign, Clarendon says,

“I want to be the kind of person I wanted to see on TV when I was younger. I wish I could have looked up an interview on YouTube and been like, ‘Wow! There’s a gay black woman who’s gender non-conforming, a Christian!’”

In an article for the Players Tribune, Clarendon discusses her intersecting identities, and she calls out WNBA players who refused to wear Pride t-shirts:

“It’s not about morality. You could save a life. You could make some long-suffering kid—who’s been made to feel less than, discriminated against and possibly full of self-hate—feel seen. And maybe, for a second, feel loved.”

In addition to her activism of presence, Clarendon also engages in more overt forms of activism. She is an effective voice in the Me Too movement. As Lyndsey D’Arcangelo explains in an interview with Clarendon, the player filed a civil lawsuit against the regents of her alma mater, UC-Berkley, because she was sexually assaulted by an athletic department employee when she was eighteen. Clarendon wanted “the shame not be her own anymore.” The employee she named in her suit was fired.

Seattle Storm forward Breanna Stewart has also shared a powerful Me Too story. It’s heartbreaking to read about childhood sexual abuse, but Stewart’s story also shows that you can sometimes save yourself and others by voicing your pain and working hard at what you love. When Stewart was eleven, she told her parents about the abuse, and then she insisted on going to basketball practice.

WNBA players also lead the way in protesting racism and police brutality.

A couple months before Colin Kaepernick bravely took a knee, four Minnesota Lynx players wore Black Lives Matter warm-up shirts that honored Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men murdered by police officers. (Castile had lived and died in Minnesota. The shirts also honored police officers who had been recently murdered in Dallas.)

In a press conference, Maya Moore denounced all violence—including violence against police officers—and Rebekkah Brunson (the only WNBA player with five league championships) spoke powerfully about a time when she was a child playing in her own home and cops pulled guns on her and her playmates.

When the WNBA took the outrageous step of fining the Lynx, other teams quickly had their backs.

As Christina Cauterucci details in Slate, “The next day, during warm-ups before a game, the New York Liberty wore black T-shirts that said ‘#BlackLivesMatter’ and ‘#Dallas5.’ In the following weeks, players on the Liberty, the Indiana Fever, and the Phoenix Mercury wore plain black shirts by Adidas, the WNBA’s attire sponsor, for several game warm-ups in an attempt to continue their political statement without violating a rule that require players to wear standard warm-up outfits that bear their teams’ logos.”

The league issued more fines, so players and teams ratcheted up their protest. Liberty center Tina Charles accepted a Player of the Month award wearing her warm-up outfit inside out. She denounced the league for supporting “Breast Cancer Awareness, Pride and other subject matters” while attempting to silence players on racism. Washington Mystics guard LaTasha Cloud reminded everyone that 70% of WNBA players are African American. The Liberty, Fever, and Mystics engaged in media blackouts, refusing to answer reporters’ post-game questions unless they related to Black Lives Matter or other social issues. Players from the Lynx and the Seattle Storm tweeted photos of their teams in black shirts.

The league soon rescinded the fines. But, as Cauterucci writes, the WNBA players’ “actions are remarkable and commendable for more than just their immediate effects. Rarely have so many players and teams in a league stood together across racial lines on a matter of social import. Several NBA players, including the entire L.A. Lakers team, wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts in memory of Eric Garner in 2014, but it never spread to half the league, as the WNBA’s stand for racial justice has.”

The College Game

What is more remarkable is that WNBA players were not the first women’s hoopsters to participate in the Black Lives Matter movement. In December 2014, two college teams, Notre Dame and UC-Berkley, both did so.

And more than two years before that, a lone Division III player engaged in her own powerful protest. According to The Nation, the first athlete activist in the Black Lives Matter movement was Ariyana Smith.

Smith was a junior at Knox when her team was scheduled to play at Fontbonne, a university near Ferguson, days after a Grand Jury failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson for murdering Michael Brown. After the national anthem played, Smith raised her arms in the hands-up-don’t-shoot gesture and lay down on the court. Although her trainer and coach attempted to move her, Smith remained prone on the floor four and a half minutes to protest the four and a half hours that Brown’s corpse was left on the street. Then she got up and raised her fist in a Black Power salute. She kept it raised as she walked off the court. And away from her basketball career.

Later, Smith explained that her protest was not simply about Ferguson, but also about her college’s failure to address sexual assault and campus racism. “I laid my body on the ground and held up that game. That was a last resort. That’s what I had — a last resort.”

As a young black woman at a Div III school, Smith courageously used her limited power. On the other end of the activist spectrum is an older and much more privileged woman—Notre Dame coach, Muffet McGraw.

As a straight, white, married highly successful coach, McGraw uses her platform to lift up all women. McGraw has spoken out on the dwindling number of women coaches in the women’s game. She has also denounced the fact that there are very few African American women coaches, and only three coaches who are publicly out as lesbians.

If you haven’t yet watched McGraw’s speech on women’s equality at this year’s Final Four, you’re in for a treat.

University of Iowa Women’s Basketball

Lastly, I want to honor my own beloved women’s basketball team, the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, and its three graduating seniors: Tania Davis, Hannah Stewart, and consensus  Player of the Year Megan Gustafson.

When I first started writing this post, I was planning to conclude with a celebration of both Gustafson and the WNBA. But since then, there has been good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Dallas Wings, the WNBA team that drafted Gustafson, waived her. The good news is that she responded with her usual grace and determination. She is going to play for Iowa United in The Basketball Tournament, an annual 64-team, winner-take-all summer event with a grand prize of $2 million. Gustafson will be the first active professional women’s player to participate in the mostly male TBT.

Gustafson’s tenacity and resilience have only increased my admiration for her. But I feel much less positive about the WNBA.

Despite the league’s slowness to publicly embrace lesbians, I’ve been an avid fan of the WNBA since it started. But now in the spirit of my blog’s title, Midway, I feel ambivalent.

So as I celebrate Gustafson and her team, I want to add to the conversation about why Iowa fans were so upset by the waiver of Gustafson. There is more to the story than shock that a player with Gustafson’s numbers and awards would get waived—and more than simple loyalty to our team and our state.

It’s important to remember that Gustafson is from an incredibly tiny town: Port Wing, Wisconsin (population 164). So people like me, from small Midwestern towns, see her as one of our own. She shows us that no matter where you’re from, even an itsy-bitsy town, if you work hard to develop your talent, you can excel on a big stage.

It’s also important to note that the one current WNBA player who is actually from the state of Iowa, Kiah Stokes, is not from a small town by Iowa standards. She is from Cedar Rapids, the second largest city in the state. And despite the fact that her father played basketball for Iowa, she chose to play her college ball at UConn. You don’t have to be a sports analyst to see that most WNBA players come from perennial powerhouses like UConn, so it was refreshing and exciting to see Gustafson drafted. She was always positive about being an Iowa Hawkeye even though her team didn’t make it to the NCAA tournament until her senior year. Gustafson’s immediate success in the WNBA would have shown that talented individuals can excel in the league even if they don’t come from a top tier college team.

So when the Wings waived Gustafson before the season even started, they weren’t simply rejecting a super talented and hardworking player; they were rejecting the hopes of small-town girls and the dreams of people who want to believe you can succeed no matter where you’re from.  

They were also rejecting a supremely nice young woman.

Now we all know that nice doesn’t win basketball games. But it does win hearts. The fact that Gustafson is a remarkably lovely human being made her waiver a lot more painful.

It also makes her—and her two fellow Iowa seniors—extra worthy of praise.

Being a good role model is an incredibly important and effective type of activism.

Want proof? Check out this photo by Brian Ray. In it, schoolkids swarm Gustafson as she leaves the Iowa State Capitol. Notice the girl Gustafson is hugging, overcome with awe and joy. Notice Gustafson’s own joy. And notice the large group of boys in the distance gaping with admiration at the Player of the Year.

All three of Iowa’s seniors excelled at role-model activism. They inspire not just the young girls who emulate them and their game, but all of us.

They teach us that if you persevere through tough times, you can earn your chance to shine. Stewart received little playing time her first three seasons at Iowa, but Davis persuaded her to stay. She kept working, and this year she was a key starter who will soon play on a pro team in Australia. Davis herself returned to the starting lineup after coming back from not one, but two, torn ACLs. Davis, Stewart, and Gustafson led their team to a Big Ten Championship and the Elite Eight.

If you want a perfect portrait of grit, check out Gustafson’s new blog. Her WNBA setback has only strengthened her resolve to grow as a player, achieve her dreams, and honor her small-town roots.

Like her team itself, Gustafson also shows the beauty of selflessness and teamwork. Iowa has long prided itself on these qualities. This year it nearly led the nation in assists, second only to Baylor, the team that won the NCAA championship. But when a standout like Gustafson is also selfless—when she consistently puts her team first, when she constantly shows her gratitude to her teammates and coaches—that is something special.

Check out this Cliff Jette photo of Iowa’s starters during a victory against Maryland.

When you see the way that Gustafson unites her teammates, you’re reminded that relationships are more important than accomplishments. Personal success is sweet, but friendship is even sweeter.

One last photo of Megan Gustafson, this one with yours truly. This past April, she was scheduled to be at a sporting goods store in the mall, signing merch to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House. I arrived too late to even have a place in line, so off I went to shop in another store. As I was heading back to my car, I saw that Megan was still there closing up shop. Even though she must have been really tired and eager to leave, she cheerfully posed for a photo with a little girl and then with me.

That’s what I call relentless kindness.

What about you? How have you been inspired by the world of women’s basketball? What athlete activism would you like to celebrate?