There are many perks that you receive as a sports team that wins a championship. You get the trophy, you get the victory parade, and you get the bragging rights. However, if you are part of the WNBA-dominating Minnesota Lynx team, you might also just happen to get a Prince concert thrown in your honour. That’s what happened last week when the Lynx won their third WNBA title with a 69-52 victory in Game 5 of the final series against the Indiana Fever. It was the first time since 2009 that the WNBA Finals have gone to a fifth and deciding game, and it was played in front of a Lynx home crowd of 19, 000 people. On this night, one of the supporters in attendance just happened to be superstar Prince, who was born in Minnesota. After the Lynx took out the championship, he performed an impromptu three-hour concert for a select invite-only audience at nearby Paisley Park, and summoned Lynx players on stage to dance with him. Sadly no footage exists of the tiny man dancing with the very tall ladies, but we can all use our imaginations.
Lynx point guard Renee Montgomery will be hoping to transfer that winning feeling to Australia and perhaps experience some kind of three-hour impromptu Cold Chisel concert or similar when she begins playing for the Canberra Capitals in the current WNBL season. However, she might be wishing that she had instead signed with her team’s namesake, the Perth Lynx, after they had a comfortable win over the Melbourne Boomers on Saturday night and moved to the top of the WNBL ladder. Perth Lynx centre Louella Tomlinson had an impressive game and scored 29 points, which is even more notable when you consider that just hours before she had been to hospital with a suspected broken nose after running into monkey bars while getting in some quick quality time with her Melbourne-based nieces and nephews. The nose wasn’t broken, but it’s likely in future Tomlinson will be playing a nice quiet game of hungry Hungry Hippos with the children instead.
Speaking of breaks, get the breakdown of WNBL teams title prospects and key players for each team here.
Still on the theme of breaks, 19-year-old tennis prodigy Ash Barty has further cemented her ongoing break from tennis since September last year, with the announcement that she has signed a one-year contract to play cricket for the Brisbane Heat in the upcoming inaugural Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL). Barty, well known on the tennis scene since winning the Wimbledon junior crown at 15 and making grand slam doubles finals at the Australian Open, Wimbledon and US open a couple of years later, has widely been considered one of Australia’s best tennis prospects. And now she is making waves on the cricket scene, having only started playing cricket in July yet already impressing Heat coach Andy Richards enough to offer her a contract. She is following in the footsteps of multi-sport star athletes Ellyse Perry, who has played for Australia in both cricket and soccer, and Matildas goalkeeper Brianna Davey, who was also the Western Bulldog’s number 1 AFL draft pick, going on to play in the recent women’s AFL exhibition game.
The AFL is keen to capitalise on the success of the exhibition match by establishing a national competition in the next few years. Figures released last week demonstrated that female participation in AFL has risen 46 percent this year, and 163 new female football teams were created. AFL general manager of game market and development Simon Lethlean believes the figures show that the time is ripe for development of the women’s game, saying:
The record growth in female football follows the success of the two AFL women’s exhibition matches this year, the second of which was televised live across Australia, and reinforces the need to establish a national female competition.
Besides as athletes competing in sport, women also need to be considered when discussing issues surrounding men’s sport. In recent years the NFL (like many sports) has been shown to be in dire need of establishing much better handling of players who commit domestic violence and return to the game. The issue came to light again recently after player Greg Hardy spoke to the media before his first game with the Dallas Cowboys. Hardy had been signed by the Cowboys late last year, but missed the first four games of the season due to suspension, after being found guilty of domestic abuse against his girlfriend last year. In the interview, Hardy was unapologetic; calling his time away from the game the most awesome period of his life, joking about the attractiveness of his oppositions wives, and saying that he wanted to come back ‘guns blazing’ (one of the things he was accused of doing was throwing his girlfriend onto a couch covered with guns). He was egged on by some of the media covering the game, and then the entire thing was published on the Dallas Cowboys website.
I would rant about all this, but television host and sports personality Katie Nolan ranted much better than I ever could on her show Garbage Time. You can watch the video here.