Byline: Lonnie Wheeler
Brooke Wyckoff flew to Greece this week for a big fat wedding. The betrothed was her teammate, Katie Douglas, whose agent is Greek, which tells you something about the WNBA.
Let it be noted that Kobe Bryant, once again, spent the offseason somewhere other than Thessaloniki. Nor did Allen Iverson, for bucks and a better game, make the basketball tour of the Baltic states.
The professional women, though, find themselves in the stage of fiscal development that baseball players roughly occupied in the radio age, when they scrounged up some insurance to sell in the snow. Wyckoff, for instance, has plied her trade in Spain during the last several offseasons, not for the European competition, especially, or the rain in the plain, but because 'you can make a lot more money over there,' she said.
This year, the former Lakota High School star is headed to Florida for an internship with the Women's Tennis Association, doing something or other; she isn't sure what. It was arranged by the WNBA. The league even has a grad-school program.
Needless to say, what these able women do for a living 'is not the glamorous culture or lifestyle of the NBA,' as Wyckoff will readily attest. 'I mean, there's definitely some divas in the league, like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes. They have the name and the endorsements, and they're making money. It's good to have superstars that people can recognize. But the rest of us are regular girls, leading regular lives but being able to live out our dreams at the same time.'
Maybe that's why television ratings were up this year. In the recently concluded championship series, in which Sacramento got the best of Wyckoff's Connecticut Sun, the numbers were up 27 percent over last year; for the season, the increase was 9 percent. (Average attendance, however, was down a bit to 8,173.)
Another cause for the increasing camera-friendliness could be the rapidly advancing ability of the women to play off the dribble and hang in the breach, if only briefly, without a surrender of fundamentals. Consider Wyckoff, for instance. At 6-foot-1, she is an athlete of such caliber that, as a teen-ager, she ran 400 meters in less than a minute. She could have played volleyball in college and possibly beyond. In a particularly memorable prep basketball game, she blocked Mercy's first eight shots.
And you know what she did at the buzzer to tie Game 2 of the WNBA finals, the only game Connecticut would win? She nailed a 3-pointer from the corner, which takes on more weight when you consider that, back in high school and even for a while at Florida State, shooting 3-pointers was about the only thing she couldn't do. She just decided she didn't want to be 'the dork who missed at the end with a wide-open shot.'
Her resolve to make threes resulted in a 42 percent accuracy rate this season, coming off the bench for a team that won more regular-season games than any other. Wyckoff's role, in the wake of a 2004 season lost to a knee injury, consisted mostly of defense and rebounding. 'I've been a starter in this league, and that's great,' she said, 'but right now, I actually prefer coming off the bench. It's more my personality. There's a lot of pressure when you're a starter on a team like this.'
The state of Connecticut, of course, maintains an uncommon standard in women's basketball. Plus, there's not a lot of other stuff going on in Uncasville -- other than the casino, which is where the Sun plays. The team is owned by the Mohegan Indians. It's one of three WNBA franchises not brothered by an NBA affiliate. That counts Chicago, which will begin operation next year with Dave Cowens as the coach.
Those two interesting items -- the non-NBA dynamic and the involvement of Cowens, a Newport native -- naturally raise the question of whether a WNBA team would be an appropriate tenant for U.S. Bank Arena, which continues to have hard luck finding one. The facility is big enough and professional enough, and girls' basketball flourishes in its immediate vicinity (women's may, as well, with the University of Cincinnati joining the Big East). But there's nothing happening on that front.
There's a certain reluctance to say here that there ought to be, for ridicule would surely ensue from the dunk-drunk mainstream. But there ought to be.
Maybe Wyckoff could go back to Spain and save up.
Contact Lonnie Wheeler at lwheeler@cincypost.com.
