Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
Candace Parker retired in April, on the same day WNBA training camp began. On her Instagram, she shared a sepia-toned photo of herself as a kid, holding a basketball bigger than her small torso. The caption was thankful and considered; Parker had known in her body for some time that her tenure as a professional basketball player was over, but her mind needed a beat for it to sink in. But Parker’s team, the Las Vegas Aces, didn’t know, nor did her competitive contemporaries in the W. New York Liberty star, Breanna Stewart, was visibly shocked when the announcement broke during practice. “Wait, right now? She’s not playing any more [games]?” Stewart said, mouth slightly agape and pointing at the court.
I was as shocked as Stewart. Partially because we’re never prepared for our titans to leave us, their excellence having become a constant, something like gravity. And because there had been zero hints it was going to happen, which is surprising given basketball media is a world of leaks, scoops, and inside sources. That no one but Parker and her family knew what she’d been mulling over throughout her final season is a unique accomplishment in this industry, and it would have been incomprehensible if it were a male athlete of her stature, like LeBron James, who would never quietly post a goodbye and move on. There would have been suspicions and intense scrutiny, not to mention a huge production budget. The basketball world would stop. Which makes me think about how much easier we’ve made it for women, no matter how big the professional shadow they cast, to walk away.
Watching Parker play in college feels like standing in a funhouse where the floors subtly tilt downward; she made the entire game spin around her. There was that same lurching feeling in her drives, her stutter-stepping spins, her deep three-pointers, where the ball seemed to find the basket like water hurrying to a drain. She knew, too, how to use the momentum of a game to her advantage and deliver in crucial moments. She had that rare ability to manipulate time, which the best ball players have: to draw time out or jam it forward. That was what Parker did when she was the first woman to dunk in an NCAA game.
Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.