Surely by now you’ve heard about or seen the girl who won the McDonald’s All-American game dunk contest.
Like most people, I was very curious, so I checked it out tonight.
It was exactly what I expected. An absolute joke.
Look, I’m not one of these slackjawed mouthbreathers who thinks that women shouldn’t be playing sports. I like women’s basketball. I think Title IX is a good thing.
But women’s sports don’t need to be exactly like men’s. They’re different and they always will be. And that’s OK. Women don’t have to dunk to make their game good. They don’t need to have TV ratings to make their game good. Real sport isn’t about SportsCenter highlights.
Back to Candace Parker. She’s obviously a great, great player, and she’s a great athlete. But she can barely dunk. I’m about three inches shorter than she and when I was her age, I could dunk like her. And believe you me, I wasn’t about to enter any contests against All-Americans. I was just happy to impress the other non-athletic white boys around me.
Clearly, the only reason she got out of the first round was because she’s a girl. Is that really what women want? Do they want people to smile at them and say, “that was great honey, for a girl?” Because that’s what happened. She didn’t triumph, she was patronized. If anything, she set the women’s game back, because actual basketball fans will see through the scam in about half a second.
Update – What Jason Whitlock said.