NFL Sunday makes space for the WNBA
Getting to watch women’s sports in a bar on a day reserved for football is just the latest ‘what the heck?’ moment for longtime fans
Polite service is something you always want when you go into an establishment, but I was particularly struck by the service I got at a bar on Sunday afternoon.
NFL Sunday. The first Sunday, no less. No Chiefs or Packers but the Bears and Vikings were playing. Yet a couple friends and I were there to watch … women’s basketball.
Somewhat sheepishly, I asked the bartender what TV the Indiana Fever game was going to be on in a few minutes.
“What TV do you want it to be on?” she replied.
Stunned by such a question, I almost couldn’t respond. Because part of me is still trying to get used to this New World Order – one where watching women’s sports has become … dare I say it? … normal.
For the record, the place was Bevy’s Tavern just off the 50th Street exit off I-235 in West Des Moines. But this isn’t a commercial for Bevy’s, which is fantastic at this but not the only player. And basketball isn’t even the only draw. In December, I met friends at The Station on Ingersoll in Des Moines to watch the NCAA volleyball national championship game (sorry Husker fans in the group).
And even though NCAA basketball season is over, Big Grove Brewery (with four locations statewide) continues to have watch parties that involve women’s sports – Olympics and Indiana Fever. Over the years here in Iowa, these kinds of requests have usually been honored and if they weren’t it was because the place didn’t have whatever streaming service or cable channel that was required.
This isn’t some sort of declaration that the WNBA is now somehow more popular than the NFL. Bevy’s has 30 TVs and many if not most of them were tuned in to the Bears and Vikings, with fans decked out in their teams’ sweatshirts sitting nearby.
What struck me was that women’s basketball was there in addition to the NFL. There’s no way to measure it but I’d hazard a guess that if you were to walk into 99.8% of the bars in America two years ago on a fall Sunday and ask to watch a WNBA game, you’d have been laughed out of the joint. (In fact, a woman on social media told me she was once told at a bar that they would tune in to women’s basketball for her if she could guarantee that 12 people would be watching.)
So when I asked about watching a WNBA game on NFL Sunday, even at a place that hangs an Indiana Fever flag and has watch parties for every game, I still felt like the little girl asking the boys at recess if I could play basketball with them and being laughed off.
Moments like this continue to blow me away. Part of me, admittedly, doesn’t quite understand the sudden, maniacal obsession with women’s basketball or why it is I’m now talking basketball with friends who two years ago didn’t know A’ja Wilson from Woodrow Wilson. All I can think is I’ve been too close to it for so long to now feel the rush of the newly converted, the wonder of discovering a new, cool thing.
What I can grasp, though, is this moment. I feel a bit like people who were contemporaries of other big social changes in the world, though there certainly have been far more dramatic social changes in the world than watching women’s basketball in a bar on football Sunday. But what strikes me is that feeling of knowing there was something you wanted to see your whole life, something you believed in and part of you always wondered if you’d ever see it in your lifetime.
I get why there are sports bars that specialize in women’s sports; I’ve been to two of them and loved them. For those places, it’s not just about sports but also building community. That’s exciting. Yet I always hoped people would love women’s sports because they were good and deserved the attention. (I feel this way about most non-revenue/Olympic sports, men’s or women’s; if there’s a good story, give it its due.) That you could pick up a sports page, tune in to SportsCenter or walk into a bar and see women’s sports living right there with everything else.
This is Iowa, we have a tradition of giving female athletes their due. And this is Caitlin Clark’s hometown. I can’t say the experience would have been the same in, say, Joplin, Missouri, or in Minneapolis if the Vikings and Lynx were on at the same time.
But it happened here. As it should. Even so, to have a bartender tell me that a women’s basketball game would be on wherever I wanted it to be on has been enough to make me smile for days.
Cheers.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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This reminds me of a trip I took with four women friends north of Duluth in 2015. The trip had been long-planned before the Lynx made the playoffs. We didn’t have a TV in our cabin so went to a very small bar between Grand Marais and Tofte. Two TVs, both playing broadcasts of the NHL preseason hype (the Wild began their season that week). Bar was pretty crowded but I asked the bartender if we could watch the Lynx in game two. He was a bit hesitant but did put the game on for us. Several of the men grumbled about women’s sports for a while. Soon, Simone, Rebekah, Maya, Lindsay, and Sylvia had them practically mesmerized. We had such fun that night and we hoped that wasn’t the last of women’s sports in that bar.