A Tale of Two Teams
Yalonda M. James/SF Chronicle
Life feels hard right now. But a couple of joyous things happened this week. Within three days of each other, against all odds, my two teams both won. One team was purple. The other blue.
Some would say these teams don’t have anything to do with each other. Some would say that one was more important than the other. I beg to differ. In a world beset by trouble and division, both these teams delivered a big shot of pure joy. Both exemplified what happens when humans come together with grit, determination, vision and passion. Both showed how far love and unselfishness and inclusivity can carry you.
I waited a long time for the Valkyries. While other cities got their WNBA franchises, I chafed, thinking: what the hell? We are a sports crazy, progressive, feminist town. Our media market already supports half a dozen pro teams and is hungry for more. Stanford women’s basketball set a 30-year bar for excellence. We have a sizeable, activist gay community, ready to embrace a sport composed largely of queer people and women of color. Who is more ready for this than us? Just when I was getting ready to fly to LA or Vegas or Seattle to get my fix of women’s hoops, Joe Lacob and company announced: the Bay Area was getting its WNBA expansion team. It would be here in 2025. It would win a championship inside five years. How adorable, everyone said. They think they can win in five years.
From the get-go, this organization offered a master class in how to win with grace, class and joy. The owners hired a trio of brilliant women leaders: coach Natale Nakase, President Jess Smith and general manager Ohemaa Nyanin. The owners invested generously, leveraged the Warriors organization, and then got out of the way. The women would play at Chase. (Cue howls of derision: Women can’t fill an arena with 18,000 seats! The Las Vegas Aces, champs 3 out of the last 4 years, still play in the basement of a casino). There was no instruction that the women had to follow anything about the men’s team other than a goal to win. So we got purple, rather than some variation of blue and gold. (Way cooler than our colors, says Warriors guard Brandin Podziemski). We got the Valkyries, a Nordic race of mythical women warriors, fearless and unwavering. For mascot we got Violet, a big purple --- what? Bird? Vaguely androgenous, with gigantic glasses and high heels, Violet minces around the arena, half librarian, half drag queen. Fans have adored her since she “hatched” on Thrive Plaza.
The female leadership team assembled an unselfish, low ego, defense-minded roster that features not one superstar. It’s composed mostly—brilliantly--of players that other teams deemed expendable. Their alchemy was extraordinary and instantaneous. These players don’t seem to care who gets the minutes or who takes the shots. Every game some new star steps up. Do you know how hard it is to prepare a game plan against a team like that? You can’t do it. In every post-game presser, some reporter asks: what’s your secret? Every player answers: We love and trust each other. After lighting up the second half of the championship game with an electrifying 30-point performance, MVP Gabby Williams shrugged and said: If I did that or didn’t do that, I know these guys would have loved me just the same.
The Valkyries are a business juggernaut. Just two years in, the franchise is valued at $1 billion—the first WNBA team to get there and far ahead of number two, the New York Liberty at $600 million. (‘Course, those numbers are easier when your highest paid player makes about 2 percent of what Steph Curry makes). The Valks have sold out every game of their two-year existence. Their merch leads the league in sales and is so popular that the Warriors Store on Thrive Plaza quickly became the Golden State Store, selling both men’s and women’s gear. They can’t keep purple jerseys in stock.
Attending a Valkyries game is a revelation. 18,000 delirious fans, dressed in lavender bling, fill Balhalla—Chase’s Center’s nickname when the Valks are playing there. The crowd is young and old, gay and straight, ethnically diverse. Tickets are affordable compared to the men. People dance. Strangers hug. Win or lose, everyone stands to the end, cheers to the end, stays to the end. Fan love pours down from the nosebleeds.
The players eagerly return it, holding up heart-shaped hands as they race down the court for the reset. Fans who didn’t score tickets throw a watch/dance party outside on the Plaza. Taking a pass on the highly sexualized half-time dancers you see at most sporting events, the Valks’ troupe (called the Violet Vibes) features a wildly exuberant variety of size, shape, age, physical ability and skin color. It’s like a body positivity conference broke out in the middle of a basketball game.
The Valks victory parade also broke the mold. Unlike the traditional Ferry Building to Civic Center slog taken by the Warriors, 49-ers and Giants in their champion years, the ladies started in Oakland where they practice and many of them live. After spreading some love there, they hopped a ferry and crossed the Bay, with coach Nakase and MVP Williams taking turns at the skipper’s wheel. The coach and the MVP guiding the ship where it needed to go -- enough symbolism in that for all of you? Once on the Embarcadero, the players rode in their open air, double decker buses --- for about five minutes. Soon they were hopping off and streaming out into the crowd, hugging fans, signing autographs, admiring babies, dancing their way to Oracle Park. Coach Nakase, known for being so intense that she forgets to eat and drink on game days (she fainted during one playoff game, then popped up and continued charting something on a white board), was asked about the scene. She looked around, smiled and said: Love is stronger than anything.
Valks' Victory Parade SF Standard, ABC7 News
This isn’t a basketball team. It’s a cultural movement. Coinciding exactly with the first two years of Trump’s second term, the Valkyries were called by one pundit a “joyous, whimsical rebuke of Trumpism.”
My blue team’s win was just as joyous. I'll write about that another day, because I am still processing and this essay is already too long. But what happened three days after the Valkyries win was just as much an example of what hard work, vision and belief in each other can do. I think it’s interesting that most of the progressive political organizations I belong to, when asked to explain what happened in the election, used a sports metaphor: we left it all out there on the field.
When times are dark, there can be light. When stakes are high, people can rise to the moment. Also, joy is joy; each one an objective good in this world. Trying to say one is bigger than the other is false equivalency.
So, when the parade rolls by, pick your float and jump onboard. When the wave crests around you, paddle like mad and catch the ride.
Against all odds, both my teams won. This was a good week.
Author's Note: I generally use my own photography for this site. But I didn't have any shots for this piece, and it was impossible to convey the sheer joy and energy of this topic without photos. I have tried to credit images as explicitly as I could.
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