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From the San Diego Herald-Tribune in 2017:
Wiggins: WNBA’s ‘harmful’ culture of bullying, jealousy
Candice Wiggins, La Jolla Country Day alumni and WNBA Woman of the Year recently described the WNBA as a “very very harmful” culture where she was bullied throughout her 8-year career.
By TOD LEONARD
FEB. 20, 2017 6 AM… Wiggins, a four-time All-American at Stanford, asserts she was targeted for harassment from the time she was drafted by Minnesota because she is heterosexual and a nationally popular figure, of whom many other players were jealous.
“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply.
“There was a lot of jealousy and competition, and we’re all fighting for crumbs,” Wiggins said. “The way I looked, the way I played – those things contributed to the tension.
“People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’ “
There is no published data on the percentage of WNBA players who are gay. In a 10-team league that employs 120 players annually, at least 12 current and former players have come out publicly in various forms of media.
Wiggins said she was disheartened by a culture in the WNBA that encouraged women to look and act like men in the NBA.
“It comes to a point where you get compared so much to the men, you come to mirror the men,’ she said. “So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite. I was proud to a be a woman, and it didn’t fit well in that culture.”
Of the league as a whole, Wiggins said, “Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game.”
The WNBA, whose teams are subsidized by the NBA, said after the 2016 season that the announced average attendance of 7,655 was its highest in five years. (Attendance peaked at 10,800 in 1998.)
Candice Wiggins is a daughter of Alan Wiggins, one of the more unusual baseball players of the 1980s.
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Is anyone surprised?
Wiggins said she was disheartened by a culture in the WNBA that encouraged women to look and act like men in the NBA.
Yes, this. And bravo for her.
The way too many female athletes ape the coarsest of male tropes would be pathetic if it weren’t sad.
Knowing nothing else about her this immediately sends out a positive vibe.
For those admirers of long legs, the women in the ongoing netball World Cup are surprisingly feminine to the eye.
“Candice Wiggins is a daughter of Alan Wiggins, one of the more unusual baseball players of the 1980s.”
That rang a bell. I appreciated the Padres’ Alan Wiggins as a savvy, tactical baseball player. (His type has declined with MLB’s cynical decision to turn the game into Home Run Derby. Boycott Ba$hball!) The team I followed played in the National League, so I hadn’t even thought about him much for decades.
Curious about his career (and my recollections), I popped over to Wikipedia for the basics. The sympathetic article has a lot of information about his struggles in life, a largely upstream swim.
“The Orioles once gave an IQ test, and Wiggins scored higher than everyone except for Weaver. Wiggins’ agent, Tony Attanasio, said that Wiggins’ intelligence had caused problems in his relationships with teammates. He said that Wiggins had always been reserved and had a difficult time trusting other people. Wiggins enjoyed stubbornly engaging in debates with his teammates, particularly Padres pitcher Eric Show, just to provoke reactions from them. He liked to read books and newspapers, and his teammates were turned off by these displays of his intellect.”
Based solely on this blog entry, it seems that daughter Candice shares some of his qualities.
That rang a bell. I appreciated the Padres' Alan Wiggins as a savvy, tactical baseball player. (His type has declined with MLB's cynical decision to turn the game into Home Run Derby. Boycott Ba$hball!) The team I followed played in the National League, so I hadn't even thought about him much for decades.
Curious about his career (and my recollections), I popped over to Wikipedia for the basics. The sympathetic article has a lot of information about his struggles in life, a largely upstream swim.
"The Orioles once gave an IQ test, and Wiggins scored higher than everyone except for Weaver. Wiggins' agent, Tony Attanasio, said that Wiggins' intelligence had caused problems in his relationships with teammates. He said that Wiggins had always been reserved and had a difficult time trusting other people. Wiggins enjoyed stubbornly engaging in debates with his teammates, particularly Padres pitcher Eric Show, just to provoke reactions from them. He liked to read books and newspapers, and his teammates were turned off by these displays of his intellect."
Based solely on this blog entry, it seems that daughter Candice shares some of his qualities.Replies: @Steve Sailer
While Alan Wiggins’ life was mostly a disaster, he was a junkie who died of AIDS in 1990, my vague impression is that people in San Diego remember him as an intelligent, interesting guy.
Wiggins may have had intelligence, but common sense was lacking.
If I recall correctly, Galton used reaction time as a proxy for intelligence and surely base stealing has a lot to do with reaction time.
Are reaction time and general intelligence correlated? Waiting behind people at stop lights makes me think so.
OT:
Dude, where’s my 75 cars?
OT
To deter crime, thirty parks try tinny tweeters to target troublesome teens
I happened to catch some of the women’s college softball championship on TV a few days ago. It was as entertaining as MLB with the added attraction that many of the players, like the LPGA were attractive young females.
Like it or not looks matter. QBs and pass receivers in the NFL get more endorsement money than linemen not just because they are better known or better athletes but because they have a more appealing body shape. Arnold Palmer was more popular than Jack Nicklaus because Palmer had a more pleasant appearance, at least until Nicklaus grew his hair and became the ‘Golden Bear”
Women’s Tennis seems to have caught on. Long hair is probably a hindrance on the court but Simona Halep or Maria Sharapova just tie it up in a bun. They want to look like females not Roger Federer.
Upsides: better cooling; better 'header' control & power; (slightly?) more speed.
Downsides: less protection from head injuries; fewer endor$ements for not being a pretty boy/girl. (And, yes, endorsements in the shallow world of soccer fandom are a 'performance' metric).Replies: @c matt
To deter crime, thirty parks try tinny tweeters to target troublesome teensReplies: @Henry's Cat, @Stebbing Heuer
Is the Galton whistle racist?
I thought this was an exaggeration until I found out Candace Parker left her husband for a Russian female basketball player
NBA and NFL players and league executives are often forced to buy 500 or 1000 tickets for a game when the local WNBA team makes the playoffs or even the finals.
We need to convince Amy Harmon that the dog whistle, invented by Sir Francis Galton, is a dog whistle used by racists to alert other racists.
In other news from the new-and-improved Amerika, a female high-school football player was run over by a drunk driver with an Indian surname while riding her bicycle:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1025796
I don’t know about the NBA, but I think a lot of the machismo in sports is fake. It’s a caricature of masculinity. I suspect most men just want to play the game, but trash talk and swagger are what sells.
this behavior, esp of the women’s soccer players, must be pharmaceutical.
An ex played netball at county level at school, it’s a reasonably girly game though she did say you’d get a few elbows and pushes (she played GS – the scoring position).
By tradition in the UK all male PE teachers are resolutely heterosexual (not necessarily the cricket or tennis coaches, though), and all female PE teachers (who teach netball) are lesbian. At my school ‘Miss’ had the nickname ‘Beefy’.
As per my handle, I used to commute via NJ Transit from NYC’s Penn Station, which is right below Madison Square Garden. Used to be fun to try and figure out the event scheduled each evening from the crowd. Lots of white guys in Ranger’s jerseys was easy, obviously. But sometimes it would be tricky.
Lots of well dressed older black ladies with nice hats? Rev. Creflo A. Dollar revival speech.
Huge concentration of really suburban middle aged white couples? Billy Joel’s monthly gig.
Tons of tough looking lesbians with ink and piercings? WNBA
"WNBA is in town for the finals," he replied.
Lots of well dressed older black ladies with nice hats? Rev. Creflo A. Dollar revival speech.
Huge concentration of really suburban middle aged white couples? Billy Joel’s monthly gig.
Tons of tough looking lesbians with ink and piercings? WNBAReplies: @David, @Louis Renault
In 2006 or so, after walking down 5th Ave to work at Rockefeller Center, I came into the office and said to my boss, “There’s a lot of lesbians on the street today. I wonder what’s up.”
“WNBA is in town for the finals,” he replied.
I wonder what the stats are for college basketball? If one had an unusually tall daughter, a college basketball scholarship would seem like a reasonable path to guide her towards. But the lesbian culture would be an obvious deterrent.
Dude, where's my 75 cars?Replies: @Jack D, @International Jew
Apparently the ride sharing company felt that their screening criteria were too tight and that they were turning away (vibrant) customers as a result. So they loosened them and this happened.
Gee, I didn’t know Women’s Basketball was a thing. It’s also shocking that one would be so out and proud about being straight.
Dude, where's my 75 cars?Replies: @Jack D, @International Jew
Lol. I wonder about the bike and scooter sharing operations. How do they avoid losing their equipment to scrap metal scavengers? I just don’t get it…
Like it or not looks matter. QBs and pass receivers in the NFL get more endorsement money than linemen not just because they are better known or better athletes but because they have a more appealing body shape. Arnold Palmer was more popular than Jack Nicklaus because Palmer had a more pleasant appearance, at least until Nicklaus grew his hair and became the 'Golden Bear"
Women's Tennis seems to have caught on. Long hair is probably a hindrance on the court but Simona Halep or Maria Sharapova just tie it up in a bun. They want to look like females not Roger Federer.Replies: @International Jew, @mikeInThe716, @Marty T
Dress those WNBA gals for beach volleyball. That should stimulate ticket sales.
You’re projecting. Trash talk comes quite naturally in male competition. It has to be rooted out in youth via good sportsmanship. It certainly sells though—which is why it’s not penalized so heavily at pro levels.
Is this lesbian culture or merely young black female culture?
To deter crime, thirty parks try tinny tweeters to target troublesome teensReplies: @Henry's Cat, @Stebbing Heuer
I once encountered a shopping precinct that played Baroque and Classical music for the same reason – and to good effect.
Lots of well dressed older black ladies with nice hats? Rev. Creflo A. Dollar revival speech.
Huge concentration of really suburban middle aged white couples? Billy Joel’s monthly gig.
Tons of tough looking lesbians with ink and piercings? WNBAReplies: @David, @Louis Renault
Truly “A League of Their Own”.
“They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game.”
Ask universities about this, and their women’s basketball teams.
With all of the crap written about male athletes being role models, why don’t moms and dads look at the female athletes placed in front of their daughters?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8artGnm5h-s
A handful of notables contracted AIDS from transfusions– Arthur Ashe, Isaac Asimov, Tom Fogerty. How many got it through shooting up?
Wiggins may have had intelligence, but common sense was lacking.
A lot of the bikes and scooters have GPS trackers embedded so that they can be found. But the real answer is that most of the companies are VC funded Ponzi schemes that lose money hand over foot, so having the equipment stolen is no big deal in the midst of all the other losses. Making a profit is not the (ostensibly short term) goal to begin with.
If you’ve do research you will find that everybody disagrees with her and the truth is that the WNBA is a wemvlomibg inclusive league
Like it or not looks matter. QBs and pass receivers in the NFL get more endorsement money than linemen not just because they are better known or better athletes but because they have a more appealing body shape. Arnold Palmer was more popular than Jack Nicklaus because Palmer had a more pleasant appearance, at least until Nicklaus grew his hair and became the 'Golden Bear"
Women's Tennis seems to have caught on. Long hair is probably a hindrance on the court but Simona Halep or Maria Sharapova just tie it up in a bun. They want to look like females not Roger Federer.Replies: @International Jew, @mikeInThe716, @Marty T
Regarding hair, wouldn’t soccer players’ performance benefit from shaving their heads?
Upsides: better cooling; better ‘header’ control & power; (slightly?) more speed.
Downsides: less protection from head injuries; fewer endor$ements for not being a pretty boy/girl. (And, yes, endorsements in the shallow world of soccer fandom are a ‘performance’ metric).
Yes, this. And bravo for her.
The way too many female athletes ape the coarsest of male tropes would be pathetic if it weren't sad.Replies: @Lurker
Never heard of her, so I looked up her images and it was good to see she doesn’t affect the grim, strong womyn thing. Very easy on the eye, mostly smiling.
Knowing nothing else about her this immediately sends out a positive vibe.
Won’t all these operations – Uber, AirBnB as well – eventually fall afoul of the unstoppable force of diversity crashing into the immovable object of, well, diversity? Without screening [raysicsms!] won’t it fall apart?
The heterophobia in the WNBA has got to come to a screeching halt!
You think? VCs are supposed to be smart.
I spoke to a guy from one of the scooter companies and I tried, but failed, to get a straight answer out of him about how they hoped to make any money. (This was at a city council meeting held to debate whether we should let that company operate in our fair town.)
Better yet, pull my finger.
;-)
So all those depictions in movies and TV shows of gays being bullied and made fun of all the time in school was really what the gays wanted to do themselves.
SJWs always project.
Have you ever seen even a few seconds of a WNBA game? That would not help.
Okay, now pull my other leg…
Better yet, pull my finger.
😉
When this story broke two years ago, the WNBA with help from ESPN was quick to put out propaganda refuting the bullying culture. They questioned if she ever reported any bullying to league and made comments saying they hoped she got the help she needed. The story appears to have died off and I doubt anything has changed.
Its hard to say much about the WNBA, since its an artificial creation of a few NBA execs. Nobody really cares except for lesbians and a few sports-fanatics men who will watch ANYTHING.
BTW, isn’t it interesting that almost no one cares that the US Women’s BB team has dominated the Olympics? Since 1996 we’ve won 6 out of 6 Gold Medals. Can anyone name one woman from those teams? But the US Soccer team is somehow, America’s sweet-hearts. Maybe its because of race, or maybe its because no one in the USA cares about women’s BB, which is how most of the world feels about Women’s Soccer.
They ARE smart. They are working on the “Greater Fool” theory of stock bubbles.
The opposite. AirBNB has too much racism. They have to hide information from their customers in order to Crimestop racism.
If the stats are true that somewhere near 98% of WNBA players are lesbian, one has to wonder about the biological component. If a woman is much taller than average, are her odds of being a lesbian higher? Maybe excess testosterone or something like that?
How hard could it be?
“Candice Wiggins is a daughter of Alan Wiggins, one of the more unusual baseball players of the 1980s.”
What made Wiggins so unusual? Black guy with a high IQ?
I think he got AIDs from being on ‘the down low,’ though Wiggins was a doper and may have shot heroin off and on for a few years. Nothing unusual about the part time gay ‘down low’ of black male athletes.
Are you here to discredit the website? Or just high on racebait?
Candice Wiggins, La Jolla Country Day alumni
I infer that the writer supposes “Wiggins” to be plural.
Too many of them look and act like Serena Williams.
i’ll pay $1 if anybody can find a televised regular season WNBA game with an attendance of 7655.
talk about papered numbers.
regular season NBA games often have less people than that in the stands.
Sporting good hair didn’t help Candice Wiggins either, I figure! Imagine if she’d been a straight white “Becky”!
Is it like wind energy generating companies, where a certain % of income is selling taxes losses to high income investors?
I’ll bet we could convince her of just that, good sir.
One can imagine that there are cities around the world where they do. But what do those cities look like?
The car-sharing program we were in was a non-profit. And it’s not as easy for someone to carry off a Prius.
This sentence is from Wikipedia’s bicycle sharing article:
Wonder why that is.
Bicycles are left unlocked on the street in Japan.
Having been involved in sports up through the college level, I can tell you one thing for certain: lesbian athletes are the most foul-minded, foul-mouthed group you could ever not want to be around. They can make merchant sailors blush.
“We’ll just recycle the scooters after the cities pull ’em out of whatever river or lake they end up in. It’s a gear-rahn-teed winner!”
Happy Bastille Day, everybody. The Marquis wants his culture back.
A woman ordered a ‘Moana’ cake for her daughter — but the baker heard ‘marijuana’
Lashana Lynch will play 007 in new James Bond movie: report
Being completely unaware of father (or daughter), I searched for Alan Wiggins and found that he holds one of the highest single game stolen base counts in MLB history (5 for the Padres against the Expos on 5/17/1984).
If I recall correctly, Galton used reaction time as a proxy for intelligence and surely base stealing has a lot to do with reaction time.
Are reaction time and general intelligence correlated? Waiting behind people at stop lights makes me think so.
What a scurrilous thing to say in such a cowardly way, “Jake.”
Are you here to discredit the website? Or just high on racebait?
A woman ordered a 'Moana' cake for her daughter -- but the baker heard 'marijuana'
https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/lashana-lynch.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1Lashana Lynch will play 007 in new James Bond movie: reportReplies: @Steve in Greensboro, @TWS, @c matt
George Lazenby smiles.
I would highly doubt that that is possible as the WNBA players, like all women’s sports, has WAY more than 2% male participants.
A woman ordered a 'Moana' cake for her daughter -- but the baker heard 'marijuana'
https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/lashana-lynch.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1Lashana Lynch will play 007 in new James Bond movie: reportReplies: @Steve in Greensboro, @TWS, @c matt
This is so woke. I can’t wait to give this a pass.
Americans know a lot about basketball, which perhaps makes them less appreciative of women’s basketball.
“Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game.”
What other sport does that resemble, sound like? Minimal viewership, low revenues, etc.? Oh yes!
Women’s soccer!
Is the WNBA in the Olympics like the NBA? Perhaps that would help generate interest. Or maybe not.
Ask universities about this, and their women’s basketball teams.
With all of the crap written about male athletes being role models, why don’t moms and dads look at the female athletes placed in front of their daughters?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8artGnm5h-sReplies: @Honesthughgrant
If you think that’s Gay, stay away from women’s rugby!
Yes, and women’s basketball suffers from one extremely obvious, highly-focused point of comparison with men’s hoops: dunking. The dunk is basketball’s signature ‘exciting’ play, and although a few women can sort of dunk, the absurd celebrations that are carried out when one actually manages to do so only serve to illustrate how inadequate women’s dunks are compared to what men can do.
Size it all down for the average tall woman like the men's court is for the average tall man.
Who cares if women dunk, anyway? It's better to see great passing and shooting than some big galoof slamming the ball down with barely a jump. Watch Tacko Fall dunking and you realize it's pretty boring.
Interesting. I didn’t realize that Alan Wiggins was bright. My only recollection of his baseball career was that he fell for the hidden ball trick, so I assumed the opposite.
You never see anyone try the ball trick anymore, except for Miguel Cabrera when he is just clowning around, and I've always wondered why. It seems like it would be somewhat effective given how many of today's players seem to lack the ability to concentrate. Maybe they think they'd get their ass kicked if they tried that trick today.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V8sJ8AAKag4Replies: @Steve from Detroit
Bergman was a fan favorite. He stayed in the area and coached kids for a long time after he retired, in addition to (I think) doing investments, and was universally liked and respected.
You never see anyone try the ball trick anymore, except for Miguel Cabrera when he is just clowning around, and I’ve always wondered why. It seems like it would be somewhat effective given how many of today’s players seem to lack the ability to concentrate. Maybe they think they’d get their ass kicked if they tried that trick today.
Upsides: better cooling; better 'header' control & power; (slightly?) more speed.
Downsides: less protection from head injuries; fewer endor$ements for not being a pretty boy/girl. (And, yes, endorsements in the shallow world of soccer fandom are a 'performance' metric).Replies: @c matt
Headers would not be better, in fact, less so. You do so much running and sweating, the ball would tend to “skip” off the slick bald head. Hair acts as a sort of grip (like wide receivers use) to give more control. Also, if long enough, the snapping motion just before contact with the ball throws the long manes into your opponents face obscuring his vision. Admittedly, that takes quite a bit of skill and practice, and reached its peak with players in the ’70s such as Mario Kempes.
A woman ordered a 'Moana' cake for her daughter -- but the baker heard 'marijuana'
https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/lashana-lynch.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1Lashana Lynch will play 007 in new James Bond movie: reportReplies: @Steve in Greensboro, @TWS, @c matt
I thought they said a woman was cast for JB?
You mean, because they don’t play as well as the real NBA? Well, female beach volleyball isn’t nearly up to the men’s standard either, and yet people watch the female version at least as enthusiastically.
Yeah, but that’ll end when they start playing in bikinis. Think selective pressure, man! Or think, radio stars vs TV stars; when TV started replacing radio as the home entertainment of choice, a lot of good voices from the radio era lost out to nicer faces.
The hoop is too high for women then.
Size it all down for the average tall woman like the men’s court is for the average tall man.
Who cares if women dunk, anyway? It’s better to see great passing and shooting than some big galoof slamming the ball down with barely a jump. Watch Tacko Fall dunking and you realize it’s pretty boring.
Like it or not looks matter. QBs and pass receivers in the NFL get more endorsement money than linemen not just because they are better known or better athletes but because they have a more appealing body shape. Arnold Palmer was more popular than Jack Nicklaus because Palmer had a more pleasant appearance, at least until Nicklaus grew his hair and became the 'Golden Bear"
Women's Tennis seems to have caught on. Long hair is probably a hindrance on the court but Simona Halep or Maria Sharapova just tie it up in a bun. They want to look like females not Roger Federer.Replies: @International Jew, @mikeInThe716, @Marty T
College softball isn’t terrible to watch, but it is not one of the more attractive sports on average. And the girls that are attractive are wearing so much you can’t tell. Lacrosse girls are much better on average.
Volleyball and rowing might be better bets.
I played soccer at the tail end of the “mall bangs” era, and my school was quite WASPy and upper middle class and dropped the big hair styles at least a year earlier than many others. We joked among ourselves that the other teams had an unfair advantage for headers with their several inches of hairsprayed bangs.