(ten – fifteen minute read)
The league is not aspirational. I’ve made the argument that paying the women will solve a lot of the problems with interest. I was told that it isn’t that simple to which I replied, “Yes, it is.” Why? This is a nation of people who aspire to be rich. You have entire industries of motivational speakers who in reality are repeating the same things over and over and people are buying their books and buying their merchandise all in the hope that they will go viral or be rich. TMZ is one of the biggest media companies because they talk about famous people who may not be rich, but they are assumed to be. In the sneaker world kids watch millions of YouTube shows of dudes buying sneakers. People literally watch dudes buy kicks because they want to buy lots of kicks. We love rich people. Rich gets dummies into the White House. I mean if you’re rich, you can sing songs and rape underage women… and folks will still play your music and go to your concerts (R. Kelly) or watch your films (Not so much thanks to #MeToo), or support your endeavors… okay I’m getting extreme, but my point is we live in an aspirational culture. We want to be rich. There is a reason so many boys compete for spots on high school basketball teams. They want to be rich. There is a reason why men will watch other men play basketball, they want to be the men who are playing the game. Guys want the women the NBA player’s date. They want the cars and the jewelry and the lifestyle. Men want to be LeBron, women want to be with LeBron.
To a lesser extent men want to be sportscasters because of Stu Scott (RIP). Men want to have legendary sportscaster careers like Bob Costas and host sports shows like Bryant Gumbel. People know that those guys made lots of money talking sports. In other words, they got paid and people paid attention because that’s just what we do when fame and money are involved. Now let’s go back and do this same discussion for the NFL and you get the same result. The dudes are rich, they are on tv all of the time, they drive fly cars and have beautiful wives. Men want to be NFL players and women want to be with NFL players. The same goes for Major League Baseball. A Rod dated J Lo.
We see the shows about sports wives and the lifestyle is aspirational. Even when the shows are kind of ignorant. Everything about men’s sports is aspirational.
Not so much for women’s sports. Quick, name a woman sportscaster? Name a woman sportscaster who is not a sideline reporter? I obviously can’t see you since this is a post, but you’re Googling right now. In the history of sports if there is an epic, memorable moment tied to a sport, the call was done by a man.
Women have been held out of sports at every level and therefore the sports industry is not aspirational for women. This doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile, but it does mean that without an infusion of cash the women’s sportsworld won’t ever become an aspirational life for girls and this means that the WNBA and other women’s sports will remain difficult to grow financially. This is where some dude comes in and does what I would do, you can’t throw money at a problem and fix it… BULLSHIT (Yep, I cursed here because it’s bullshit). I wrote a book called
