Her team in Russia, UMMC Ekaterinburg, is paying her a million dollars not to play in the WNBA, to keep her fresh for their season.
A million dollars!
A million dollars!
That's how much an NBA rookie makes, I think.
The comments on the article are rather hateful, I think. "Who wants to watch women play basketball.:" (Well, obviously a lot of folks in Russia...) "She should get a nose job with that money.:"
Of course those are just teenage boys thinking they're being clever.
But the point is the WNBA is losing money every year, in part I think because girls and women do not watch. Pace the troglodytes on the message board, lots of men do watch the WNBA, precisely because they do want to watch women running around - I'm talking about the sexual aspect. Whereas women will watch college women's basketball because of their favorite college team in their town, that interest doesn't hold over, for many, once their favorite players leave for the WNBA.
I remember many years ago being excited when the first issue of Sports Illustrated for Women magazine came out. At first it was just like Sports Illustrated, only covering women's sports. Pretty soon it devolved into articles on how women athletes did their makeup and lost weight. Presumably the editors/publisher did this in an attempt to get a female audience that wasn't interested in straight sports reporting. (I've always wondered if that was the case - did the one cause the other? I mean - was it failing so they switched the emphasis to make up and weight loss, or was it successful until they made that switch?)
In any event, the magazine stopped publication after four issues, if it even had that many ...so you can't blame SI for not publishing something for the female audience, you've got to blame the female audience for not caring about women's sports...
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