feature image by Meng Dingbo/Xinhua via Getty Images
A few months ago, my wife texted me that she’d subscribed to LeaguePass, the streaming platform that provides recordings of every WNBA game and hosts many of them.
“Here’s the password,” she wrote. “It’d be fun to watch some games.” I didn’t log in until a week or so later, when I watched the first WNBA game of my life.
A few weeks later my wife walked into the living room at 8 a.m., rubbing her eyes.
“Are you watching the replay from last night?” she asked, a little incredulous.
“Yes,” I said, without taking my eyes off the screen. “YES!” I said again, and gave two sharp claps as Kelsey Plum hit another three from deep.
“Sweetie.” I glanced up and recognized the expression on her face. I’d seen it on the faces of my previous partners, when they glimpsed the full breadth of my obsessive nature as it found a new focus. My wife had seen me obsess about foods, eating the same strange dish daily for months at a stretch, sometimes years; she’d seen me exercise myself into temporary but severe injury multiple times; she’d seen me furiously type for years on books, but she’d never seen me in the full bloom of sports fandom.
She wasn’t upset, merely unsettled by the manner in which, after only a few weeks, I had gone from ignorance about the rules of the game to an ongoing state of total preoccupation. I suddenly had opinions about strategy, sportsmanship, and knew a startling number of the players’ names, even ones on the lowest ranked teams.
“I mean, we’ve been talking about planning a trip to Chicago to see some theater for months, but now you tell me you’ve already booked tickets there and to New York for basketball games?” she frowned. “It’s just…intense.”
I sympathized with her unease. It is disturbing to witness such swift transformation in the person most known to you. The first time, it was candy. We had only been dating a few weeks and when I’d told her that I didn’t really eat sugar, she’d responded that it sounded extreme. “Why not just eat a little bit now and then?” she asked me. It was a sensible question.
“I’m not really a little-bit-now-and-then type of person,” I said. “Not with some things.” I had been in recovery from drug addiction for thirteen years at that time.
She remained skeptical until one evening as we sat on her couch watching a movie. She was slowly picking at a bag of fruit gels and offered me one. I declined. She offered another, and I accepted. At that moment, her phone rang, and she stood up to take the call. Less than five minutes later she returned to the couch, where I sat with a mountain of empty wrappers in my lap.
“I see,” she said.
Whereas indulging in candy leaves me sick, my basketball obsession is pure joy. After games, I feel jubilant, exhilarated. Basketball is a beautiful game, swift and easy to follow, but there are more personal pleasures to watching it. As a former athlete, my body sings with recognition, the vicarious rise of that old drive to win, the simple pleasure of trying. Watching any sport is like traveling to a country where I once spoke the language. The body remembers, twitches with recognition.
I feel this watching men’s sports, too—my last spate of fandom was a feverish three years of American football. But the pleasure of watching women compete is wholly different, more acute. I am riveted. Every roar of celebration A’ja Wilson emits churns an answer in my chest. Every block, every basket, every chest-bump an incitation. It wakes something in me that is part material, part magic trick. Sometimes while watching, I feel about to cry and instead a cheer peals from my mouth like a furious bird.
Perhaps you are wondering if it is because I am gay. The answer is yes, of course. Nothing is gayer than my love for women’s basketball. Do I have many crushes, both on individual players and on whole teams? Yes! Do I find myself googling terms like, “Kelsey Mitchell gay?” “Jackie Young girlfriend”? Of course.
I replay NaLyssa Smith lifting Dijonai Carrington up from the floor again and again.
I lean toward the television to watch Alyssa Thomas screen for Dewanna Bonner over and over.
These pleasures are not sexual but erotic, in the Lordean sense: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women…The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
As a queer girl growing up in 80s and 90s, I desperately hungered for queer women to watch. I worked hard to find them. Mostly, the ones I found were in the pages of books and the women writing them. Others were musicians, but rarely the kind whose videos played on MTV. There was no internet. I never saw my idols like this: aggressive and jubilant, unified and yelling, glowing with sweat and self-satisfaction. These players are not just a spectacle of something I find beautiful, they are proof to that younger self of what is possible.
I never played basketball. My sport was baseball. Partly because I am barely over five feet tall, but also because baseball was my father’s sport. He coached most of my teams, from the age of seven or eight until about thirteen. When I started, there were a few other girls in the league, but by eleven years old, I was the only one. I had an arm and though I was small they put me fourth in the batting lineup. The boys called me Mrs. Babe Ruth. I watched baseball movies obsessively: The Natural, Field of Dreams, and Eight Men Out. I fantasized about being the first woman to play Major League Baseball.
The pleasures of baseball were hours-long catches with my dad, the smack of the ball into my carefully oiled glove, the coo of doves as the sun set over our back yard. It was the satisfaction of finding that current, the one all athletes know because it is the thing we fall in love with, when every throw falls true, as if magnetized. It was a spiritual experience on par with the synchronicity I’ve felt in the deepest phase of creation: true intimacy with something greater, and sometimes with other people. My teammates shouts from the bench. Shouting from the bench myself. My dad’s grin as he shook his hand theatrically from the sting of my throw, “Put some heat on it!”
She’s hot, they say in basketball when a player finds that groove. Jackie hitting threes from her favorite spot. Chennedy Carter driving up the court over and over. A’ja nearly every game, unstoppable. Sabrina Ionescu making 37 points in the 2023 3-point competition. Stewie and Jewel and DT and BG and Clark and Angel and Cloud and Collier, and me in my living room, uncontrollably clapping like a seal, fizzing with glee and recognition.
I didn’t last long in baseball after my body changed. It was so painful to be stared at, running the bases while holding my shirt tented away from my body to hide my new breasts. I was suddenly self-conscious about my shouts of glee and frustration, the aggression I expressed, the sweat I emitted. I had always been more visible, but still just another ball player. Now, I was a girl first, and it changed everything.
When I switched to softball the difference between the leagues shocked me. The coaches had treated the baseball players like athletes; they’d had expectations of us. Now, they hardly corrected the errors the girls made. To them, we were dilettantes, hobbyists, just a bunch of girls passing a Saturday. I quit when I entered high school. Of course, I was ignorant to the realms in which softball players are treated quite seriously. Occasionally I fantasize about having stayed long enough to play at that level, where I might have found more girls like me.
My other sport is one you’ve never heard of: Slaughter. It was a tradition at the punk-rock hippy summer camp I attended as a young teen and, as far as I know, had been invented there. We girls played shirts and skins (aka sports bras) and the rules were simple: we lined up on a field, two teams facing each other on our hands and knees. For a couple of hours, we fought like hell to get the ball in the other team’s net. No biting, kicking, or hitting.
We wrestled for hours, scrambling across the ground like the animals we were, grunting and laughing and sweating. I had kissed a few girls by that age, some of them at camp, but I had never felt the full weight of another girl come crashing down onto me. I rarely have since. It was ecstatic, erotic, not sexual but more profound a pleasure than many sex acts. Call it sublime: the perfect freedom of a body at work, against other trusted bodies. The thrill of using my whole strength and overpowering or being overpowered—I won either way. At the end, we collapsed, grass-stained and mud-splattered, drunk with it. I can’t remember being happier.
I have been watching these summer Olympics more closely than I have since childhood, mostly so that I can catch the women’s basketball team. (I am languishing in the lull of the WNBA season.) Surveying all the women’s sports, you might think rugby a more obvious choice to be my favorite. Rugby is indeed a thrill to watch, but basketball found me first and has my heart.
In some moments, I can’t believe it has taken me this long to find fandom in women’s sports. All the years I missed! But my passion has found me at the right time. I am better equipped now than ever before to understand what it means to that younger version of me, to her hungry queer heart. I don’t think she would have let herself feel it all back then.
Like most obsessions, this one doesn’t feel like a choice, but I’m choosing to yield to it completely. Sometimes obsession is merely the function of an addictive mind, but sometimes it’s a true hunger for something needed. This one, I will feed until she is sated. I will watch them win and win and win.
This essay originally appeared in the author’s Substack, Third Thoughts.
Thank you for this–I also had an overnight obsessive conversion to WNBA fandom, during the pandemic. You’ve described this particular joy so beautifully. I wish you much happy basketball in the future!