It got phonetically frustrating last summer when Candace Parker and Candice Wiggins were invited to train with the United States national team. Someone would call out their name, both would look up, and Parker, a Pat Summitt protégée, was not going to put up with that.
Post player and problem solver, she issued a brash rookie proclamation. “Hey,” she told her new teammates, the stately professionals of the W.N.B.A. “She’s Ice, I’m Ace.”
On the court, Parker’s stoic demeanor is actually icier than Wiggins’s, whose bubbly persona could melt a glacier much faster than global warming. But both were indisputable aces in leading Tennessee and Stanford to the national championship game here Tuesday night.
Ice versus Ace: Might it become a natural rivalry for the women’s basketball ages?
On the day before Wiggins and Stanford tried to dethrone Parker and Tennessee, someone dared invoke the legend of Magic and Larry (no surnames necessary) that was born when Michigan State and Indiana State squared off for the men’s national title in 1979. Wiggins, a Southern California girl, knew enough Lakers history to recognize a point that was being stretched from Los Angeles to Boston.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “It just seems that I’ve known Candace forever. I look forward to continue playing against her in the W.N.B.A.”
It never makes sense to me to draw parallels between the women’s game and the men’s with regards to business potential, the art of inducing people to reach into their pockets or turn on their television sets. We are still talking about a women’s movement in diapers.
Magic and Larry had a foundation of decades to build upon when they forged a historically symbiotic union and pulled countless new fans to the N.B.A. The women are establishing their own model, their own way of doing things. Here, the itinerary might be cramped, but less than 24 hours after concluding their college careers, Parker and Wiggins will be drafted Wednesday into the W.N.B.A.
Although a good case could be made for the 6-foot-6 Sylvia Fowles of Louisiana State, Parker will probably go first to the Los Angeles Sparks. She is more marketable, more multiskilled, and whatever doubts there were might have been erased in the semifinals Sunday night. With a separated left shoulder, Parker dribbled the length of the floor, drew the defense and made the pass that led to the winning basket by Alexis Hornbuckle as Tennessee eliminated Fowles and L.S.U.
“Just the versatility of a 6-4 player, you don’t see that very often,” said Wiggins, who that same night was called “the best player in the tournament” by Connecticut Coach Geno Auriemma.
At my annual Final Four breakfast Tuesday with an old friend, Fordham Coach Cathy Andruzzi, I reminded her of a call she made to me four years ago from Atlanta, where she was helping to promote one of those high school all-star showcases.
“You’ve got to see the talent down here,” she raved. That class, now graduating, will be one of the deepest the college game has sent to David Stern’s 11-year-old women’s annex, which began conducting its draft the day after the Final Four in Boston two years ago.
Why not tap into its own marketing symbiosis, asked the W.N.B.A. president, Donna Orender? The spring/summer league is changing, evolving, occasionally flailing, but alive, kicking, unlike its women’s soccer counterpart, which was short-lived and is in the process of reinvention. Half the W.N.B.A. teams now have ownership that is independent of the league’s corporate big daddy.
“We are going into the next phase,” said Orender, who in the 1970s played for Queens College when it was a national power, long before the major state universities found gender-equity religion. So Orender has a sense of where this sport was, how far it has come, where it may go if the powers-that-be can continue to whittle away at old perceptions and stereotypes.
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She acknowledged that the W.N.B.A. was started more on the exuberance of the late 1990s women’s sports push than on the ready-made quality of the product. These days, her mantra sounds like a cut off the “Sgt. Pepper” album: “Getting so much better all the time.”
It is more than the talent infusion, Orender said. It is the privilege of looking out into the draft audience now at the expectant families before she announces the picks, knowing these are players who, as 10- and 11-year-olds, were given hope for something beyond college when the W.N.B.A. tipped off in 1997.
Wiggins, for her part, said she needed to pinch herself last summer when she was around the veterans Lisa Leslie and DeLisha Milton-Jones, whose jerseys she wore when each played for the Sparks. Maybe the back of hers will just say Ice, in tandem with Candace Parker’s Ace. Their college careers are over. Time to market and make some money.
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