But the ladies are probably still overpaid. They don’t attract enough crowds or ratings to keep their league afloat without subsidies from the NBA.
Oh boy. Another absolutely scintillating discussion about 5th-tier tennis players nobody’s ever heard of and the same numbers I’ve seen ten thousand times before. Oh, hey, let’s have another gratuitous mention of some meaningless 5-decade old cornball TV stunt for good measure. Sheesh, are we already that bored of Lebron James?
Well, I know kstarnes probably isn’t coming back, but he can still read this thread, and, well, he brought it up, and I’m dang well going to respond.
Here goes…
I’ve made no secret that my childhood was pretty damn sucky, if not outright traumatic. And a big part of it was the worthless, sadistic slimeball kids (most, but certainly not all, boys) I was surrounded with on a near-constant basis, virtually none of whom had their despicable behavior curbed in the slightest by anyone. So as you might imagine, I had a pretty big adjustment to make when I entered the bright, new, intimidating world of college. I never was that good a student, but I figured, hey, I’m pretty smart and open-minded, I can make something of it.
I immediately struggled. Horribly. I was damn near expelled after my first semester. And a second time about a couple years later. I was aimless, clueless, half-blind. I didn’t even know why I was there. I eventually (like, after several years) was able to right the ship, but even then was near the bottom of more than a few classes. My last big assignment, the Senior Project…after I’d gotten my head out of my nether regions, after I got completely focused and on track with my degree, after I discovered the power of the Internet, after I made a commitment to sacrifice and work hard…was a royal, colossal clusterfrack, and to this day I find myself fortunate to have escaped with a D.
Now what went wrong? I’m not stupid. I’m not lazy. I’m was thousand, no, five thousand times the student as those wastes of flesh that tormented me for so many years. So why did I struggle so early and so long?
Because the bar went up. Because “better than an obnoxious little snot” wasn’t good enough anymore. Because I was in an adult school, and in an adult school everyone is subjected to adult standards. Everyone. It’s not that they don’t know that miserable childhoods, broken homes, and poverty exist. It’s that it doesn’t matter.
Those snotballs I grew up with? They never even went to college. Hell, there isn’t a college in a world that would accept them. Simply put, they were screwed. (Normally I’d say they’re stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs, but in this economy even that much isn’t a gimme anymore.) And guess what, if I got a sense of entitlement simply because I was superior to this barely-human standard, I’d have been screwed.
I mention all this, kstarnes, because this seems to be exactly the trap you’ve fallen into. “Oh, it’s not fair that Serena Williams makes so much money on the WTA Tour and I can’t!” When you join the league, or the club, or the company, or, yes, the college, you are held to the standards it sets, not some other institutions standards or the standards you think are right. You choose to be a part of the system, you follow the system. It’s that simple. And if you constantly compare yourself to this or that person who isn’t part of your system, who isn’t your competition, who isn’t in any way relevant to the path you are on, all it’s going to do is hold you back.
Hey, remember when all those rumors were swirling about one or both Williams sisters possibly facing John McEnroe? His response was 1. he never asked for this, 2. he didn’t want this, 3. he’d have to be forced into it, and 4. yeah, he’d probably lose. This wasn’t his fight and he resented the fact that the rumormongers acted like it was. Match didn’t happen and the story died. You need to let this die too, or else you’re the only person who’s going to be hurt by it.
Oh, and this is just hearsay, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of feminists are far more concerned about equality in the workplace, relationships, the halls of power, courtrooms, etc. than sports. That and they don’t dig random guys on message boards telling them what to do. Just a thought.
(P.S. You want a completely even-field contest, watch American Ninja Warrior. The setup is “Here are the obstacles. Go for it.” Male or female, old or young, serious or goofy, it doesn’t matter. That sounds like it’d be your ideal. On the other hand, since this is open to anybody, there’s a strong undercurrent of “put up or shut up”, which doesn’t sound like your thing. Well, your call. Mondays at 8 on NBC, replays on Esquire Network.)
I believe his point, as idiotic as it is, is that it is a privilege for Ronda that we let her fight other women rather than making her fight other men.
That said, I could probably say the same about the men of NFL Europe. The NBA subsidizes the WNBA in hopes it will eventually become a profitable enterprise in its own right, just as the NFL hoped (vainly) that it could win European fans for American football.
Sooner or later, the WNBA (like NFL Europe) will have to sink or swim on its own.
I’d love to hear from the late John Wooden no matter what the subject. You are so lucky.
I may have set myself up for that, but my point was valid- Wooden was one of many people who stated publicly that the women’s game was now better than the men’s, supposedly because the women played the game “the right way” and had better skills and fundamentals.
My response is, watch whatever you like- but the premise is absurd. Women do NOT have better skills or fundamentals than men. Not by a long shot.
I was just pointing out Feminist hypocrisy, that’s all. I honestly don’t have a problem with women’s privilege in sports–the privilege of only competing against other women and being shielded from real competition, and the privilege of being able to earn despite being much much worse than male players who will not earn.
But as has been pointed out to you, sports has no real intrinsic value other than entertainment. “Who is better competitively” is important only inasmuch as sports need an aura of integrity in order to be compelling.
To pull up an example you threw out, look at Ronda Rousey. Ronda isn’t the highest paid 135 pound mixed martial artist in the world because anybody thinks she would beat the males in her weight class, but simply because more people pay to watch her fight. Nobody is “shielding” her from “having” to fight men; it’s just that only an idiot or psychopath would want to watch her get beaten senseless by a mediocre male fighter.
You failed at pointing out Feminist hypocrisy. There’s no hypocrisy here. People want to see female athletes compete with other female athletes (in addition to male athletes competing with other male athletes), so that’s what the market delivers.
If millions of people wanted to see female athletes competing with male athletes, then the market would deliver that.
I will add “hypocrisy” to the list of terms you do not understand.
Worse at what?
Let me give you an analogy. A guy plays video games for a living. He’s hired by a video game company to test video games. He’s really good, undoubtedly the best video game player the company has. Runs rings around the other members of the testing team.
His 3 month probationary period comes up and he’s shitcanned. He asks his boss, why, since everyone else (who kept their jobs) is unambiguously worse than he is at playing the games.
His boss says “I didn’t hire you to play games. I hired you to test games. They are better than you at testing games, even though they’re not as good at playing them.”
Women get paid to play sports because they’re not actually being paid to play games, they’re being paid to entertain fans, and get those fans to spend money. The best female tennis player in the world is far better at getting fans to spend money than the #200 male player in the world. That’s why she gets paid, and he doesn’t.
Of course he gets paid. He gets far less prize money and endorsements, but there are far more players than kstarnes realizes.
In what sports besides tennis are both parts of this true - women compete separately and get the same prize money? Certainly not golf; in fact, I have heard LPGA officials say that the fact that the LPGA isn’t nearly as popular as the PGA is a benefit in that they can choose courses without having to worry about whether the course could contain the crowds that would show up for a PGA event.