The Market Is Going To Pass Judgment On The WNBA, One Way Or Another

There is something almost remarkable about watching a business lose money while lecturing the people it needs as customers.

On Sunday night in Atlanta, the Indiana Fever stood on the floor for the national anthem. The Atlanta Dream stayed in the locker room. Sophie Cunningham stood with her hand over her heart.

That little picture tells a much larger story.

The WNBA has spent much of its existence being financially supported by the NBA and its investors. Even during its recent surge in popularity, reports have placed its losses in the tens of millions of dollars. This isn’t General Motors in 1955. It isn’t the NFL. It’s a league still trying to prove that its popularity can become a durable, profitable business.

And yet it sometimes behaves as though America needs the WNBA more than the WNBA needs America.

That’s the arrogance at the heart of so much of modern progressive culture.

The flag is suspect. The anthem is awkward. Traditional ideas about men and women must be challenged. The people who still believe in those things are treated as backward, unsophisticated, or troublesome.

Then Monday morning comes, and somebody has to buy a ticket.

Somebody has to turn on the television.

Somebody has to buy the jersey.

Of course, somebody has to pay the bills.

And those somebodies are still, overwhelmingly, ordinary Americans who don’t regard their country as an embarrassment.

There is a peculiar insanity in taking a product that has struggled for decades to support itself and using it as a platform to antagonize the very cultural norms held by millions of potential customers.

No businessman in Laurel or Biloxi would operate that way. If your store were losing money, you wouldn’t stand at the front door insulting everybody walking past and then complain that the town wasn’t sufficiently enlightened to shop there.

You’d eventually go broke.

Professional sports once understood something simple. The ballpark was one of the few places where Americans could leave politics outside for a couple of hours. Rich and poor sat in the same stands. Democrats and Republicans pulled for the same team. The anthem played, people stood, and then somebody threw the ball.

There was wisdom in that.

The WNBA is free to become a vehicle for every fashionable cultural cause it chooses. Its players are free to protest. This is America.

But freedom runs both directions.

The customer is free to turn the television off.

The father raising daughters is free to decide that a league hostile to his understanding of women’s sports isn’t entitled to his money.

The veteran is free to spend Sunday evening watching something else.

And the working family being lectured about patriotism by professional athletes is free to say: enough.

That isn’t censorship. It’s the marketplace.

Sophie Cunningham seems to understand something the league ought to understand. There’s an enormous America outside the fashionable institutions that still loves its flag, still stands for its anthem, still believes men and women are different, and isn’t ashamed to say so.

Those people aren’t the problem with the WNBA.

They may be the customers capable of saving it.

A league that still needs Americans to buy what it’s selling ought to think carefully before telling those Americans that everything they believe is obsolete.

You can defy your customers for a while. You can mock their customs. You can sneer at their patriotism.

But sooner or later, somebody has to pay the electric bill.