SEX TOYS ARE WEIRD, BUT LET’S WELCOME THE WNBA TO THE WORLD OF MEN’S SPORTS
Shame on those who throw dildos, including crypto kooks, but in a swirl of recent games, women’s basketball is dealing with the same pranks that have dogged everyone in the big time — even Tom Brady
That was President Trump, standing on the roof of the White House, throwing a neon green dildo into a mob of women’s basketball players. You knew the arena craze would reach this predictable photoshopped point, prompting son Donald Trump Jr. to write on Instagram with three laughing emojis: “Posted without further comment.”
Of course, doinksters should not be throwing sex toys onto courts where WNBA players could trip and fall. It has become an annoyance that brings new attention to a league once ignored and now exploited. “This has been going on for centuries, the sexualization of women,” said Cheryl Reeve, coach of the Minnesota Lynx. “This is the latest version of that. And it's not funny. It should not be the butt of jokes in radio shows or in print. These people that are doing this should be held accountable. They're the problem, and we need to take action.”
Some of the weirdos, including cryptocurrency people who want attention for a coin, should be arrested for creating scenes that have helped impede five games in recent days. One man calls himself Lt. Daldo Raine — remember Brad Pitt in “Inglourious Bastards” — and said the league’s relentless “controversy” forced him to attack with dildos. “It was more or less like an opportunistic approach to, you know, what is already trending,” he told ESPN. “Where is there already controversy and how do we intercept some of that attention? … We wanted to really make memes funny again.”
Well, what they’ve done is bring an age-old problem within men’s spectator sports to the women’s side. Once I realized the sex toys are soft, without metal components that can be detected at gates, the players must deal with the recurring oddity but don’t have to worry about brain trauma. Are we “sexualizing” women? Harassing them? Or are they athletes performing in the big time? What happened when Texas Tech football fans hurled tortillas at the Colorado sideline last year? Deion Sanders told his players to suck it up until water bottles swirled down.
“They were throwing everything but my mama at me,” the coach said.
What happened when fans in Buffalo threw a sex toy at the New England Patriots, when they were trying to score? Tom Brady saw it at the 1-yard line. “I did see it. Yes I did, I did see it,” he said. “I thought it was funny the ref didn’t want to pick it up. He was kicking it. Nobody wanted to reach down and grab it. That was very unusual. That was a first. Only in Buffalo. That was very unusual.”
Was Brady being harassed? He chuckled. In Sweden, as USA Today pointed out, a large inflatable penis appeared in the crowd during an ice hockey game. I’ve covered sports for decades. I’ve seen items of all sorts thrown onto fields, courts and rinks.
Sex toys are not smoke bombs.
“We’ve come to the point where people are using our games to get publicity,” said Chicago Sky guard Ariel Atkins, managing a laugh. “We weren’t doing that a year ago. We weren’t doing that five years ago. So, as terrible as it is, that’s kind of my thought process behind it.”
The women are commanding headlines and blowing off Major League Baseball as an August story. What’s the story when NFL teams are beginning preseason games? Sex toys. At first, players saw comedy. “Sorry. I did NOT mean to throw that so far y’all,” Indiana’s Sydney Colson said. But the crypto people have become scary. The coin has spiked 300 percent in value since last week. The “evidence of our cruelty” is found in the “giant green, aggressive and erect candles we leave behind,” Raine said. The WNBA doesn’t like being targeted by creeps, one of whom wrote, “We will soon buy the league.”
“The safety and well-being of everyone in our arenas is a top priority for our league. Objects of any kind thrown onto the court or in the seating area can pose a safety risk for players, game officials, and fans,” the league said after 23-year-old Delbert Carver was arrested in Atlanta. “In line with WNBA Arena Security Standards, any fan who intentionally throws an object onto the court will be immediately ejected and face a minimum one-year ban in addition to being subject to arrest and prosecution by local authorities.”
With sickening hype, the crypto kooks should move on from the WNBA. Two nights ago, a woman held a green sex toy behind home plate at a Miami Marlins game. “We’ve got lots of funny things planned,” a source told ESPN. “Of a less disruptive nature, but we want to keep people looking for us.”
For now, eyeballs continue to follow the WNBA while Caitlin Clark is injured. The players must perform well and forget about the next tossed toy. “Everyone is trying to make sure the W is not a joke, and it’s taken seriously, and then that happens,” said Indiana’s Sophie Cunningham, a social-media star who almost was hit by a dildo. “I’m like, ‘How are we ever going to get taken seriously?’ ’’
They are. Doesn’t she get it?
The toys are the proof.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.