No, the NFL draft wasn’t our first ‘real live sporting event’
It started surprisingly innocently, with Adam Schefter looking to start the hype train for Thursday night’s first round of the NFL draft. He sent out a tweet he probably thought was going to get the juices flowing.
Little problem there: Less than a week earlier, on ESPN no less, the WNBA held its own draft. You can’t say one draft is a sporting event and the other isn’t; you can’t even say ESPN didn’t really note one (though you could fairly criticize the Worldwide Leader for not giving the WNBA draft its due). Really, the only way you can take that is that the NFL — a man’s sport with a long history and massive audience — qualifies as a sport with a “real live sporting event,” while the WNBA is not a real sport.
Schefter didn’t mean it that way. Not consciously. Subconsciously, sure, he doesn’t really consider the WNBA on the same level as the NFL. And that, in a sentence, is the problem.
The responses came quickly. (Schefty eventually apologized.) I retweeted one:
Which meant I saw responses and criticisms about “virtue signaling” and the like. And then today, from a Daily Wire contributor:
Now, listen. The WNBA isn’t on the same level as the NFL. Neither is MLS. Neither are any number of pro sports leagues for either gender. You know why that is? Because the NFL is the predominant sports league in America right now. MLB isn’t even on the same level.
But that doesn’t matter even an itty-bitty bit. Schefter didn’t say “the preeminent sporting event of our time.” He didn’t even say “a major sporting event.” His entire qualification was “a real live sporting event.” And there is literally no definition beyond, “Oh, those silly little girls aren’t playing a sport” that makes what Schefter said true, or what Khachatrian said anything shy of crass sexism.
I don’t watch WNBA. Not really. You know what else I don’t really watch? The NBA. Or the NHL. Or any number of sports. I watch baseball and football, and that’s about it. But that doesn’t make the things I choose not to watch any less “sporting events.” Especially now, when the sports airwaves are absolutely starved for anything at all (which again, was the entire point of Schefter’s initial tweet). “Oh my god, we haven’t had a sporting event in so long” is just not the case. “We haven’t had a sporting event that I care about in so long” might be, but that’s irrelevant.
On top of that, maybe you, specifically, don’t give a crap about the WNBA, whether it succeeds and thrives, whether it lives or dives. But many people do. And part of helping to make that happen is attempting to get it attention on the national stage. Originally, ESPN planned to air the WNBA draft on ESPN2 — despite the fact that, again, there was nothing else to air. After some outrage, they made the only logical decision and bumped it up to the big show … only to fly through the picks, not air some of them, and cut it off after an hour (right? It was something like that). It was blatant disrespect. You don’t have to like the WNBA. But you don’t get to out-and-out disrespect it just because you don’t like it.
It’s not virtue signaling to call out Schefter for being blatantly wrong. And acknowledging that the WNBA had an event a week ago isn’t the same as saying it’s on the same level as the NFL. The most famous sports reporter in the entire world (I think? Schefter is, right) said something that was abjectly false, ignoring something that took place on his own network less than a week earlier. He doesn’t have to be a WNBA fan, and I don’t have to be a WNBA fan, and Harry fucking Khachatrian doesn’t have to be a WNBA fan. But there are many, many people who are, and many, many people who aspire to join the league. And ignoring it because it doesn’t meet your arbitrary (and bullshit) threshold for what qualifies as a sporting event doesn’t make you more manly or cooler or whatever else Khachatrian and the lunks in my mentions think it makes them.
It just makes you an asshole.