Column: A hothead male coach sent to coach girls basketball as punishment? Come on, Disney Plus. Read the room.
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Psst ... Disney Plus: Candace Parker has a regular gig on TNT’s “Inside the NBA.”
Parker’s return home to Chicago to play for the Chicago Sky was hailed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “truly a great day in the city of Chicago.” Because it was. Anybody who knows anything about women’s basketball knows it was a big deal.
Women’s basketball, in fact, is a big deal. The USA Basketball Women’s National Team has won six Olympic gold medals in a row. When Sue Bird, who has four Olympic golds, signed on for her 20th year on the Seattle Storm this week, Seattle Times sports columnist Larry Stone wrote of Bird, “The entirety of Seattle sports — of Seattle, period — got immeasurably better with her arrival.”
Bird, as you may know, is married to Megan Rapinoe, winner of the World Cup Golden Boot and Golden Ball and considered by many to be the best soccer player — not just best female soccer player; best soccer player — on the planet.
Women’s soccer is also a big deal. Maybe Disney Plus has heard?
As the New York Times points out in this story about players’ fight for equal pay:
“The United States Women’s National Team is the best in the world and has been for decades. Since the FIFA Women’s World Cup was inaugurated in 1991, the United States has won three of the seven titles, including the most recent one in 2015. Since women’s soccer became an Olympic sport in 1996, it has won four of six gold medals. The team has been ranked No.1 by FIFA for 10 of the last 11 years and has produced some of the biggest female sports stars of the last several decades.”
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Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.
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When the U.S. Women’s National Team was competing for the 2019 World Cup, my son and his friends walked around wearing Alex Morgan jerseys.
I wrote a column about it at the time because I thought it was kind of remarkable. I never remember boys wearing female athletes’ jerseys when I was a kid. My kids could not have been less impressed with this “progress.”
“Do boys wear Women’s National Team jerseys at your school?” I asked my daughter at the time, about her giant Chicago Public Schools high school.
“Yeah, why?”
One sentence. Yeah, why? Like I was asking if people still need oxygen.
This is the world to which Disney Plus is gifting, “Big Shot,” a new David E. Kelley series starring John Stamos.
“After getting ousted from the NCAA, a hothead men’s basketball coach must take a job at an all-girls high school,” reads the synopsis. “He soon learns that teenage girls are more than just X’s and O’s; they require empathy and vulnerability — foreign concepts for the stoic Coach Korn (John Stamos). By learning how to connect with his players, Marvyn starts to grow into the person he’s always hoped to be. The girls learn to take themselves more seriously, finding their footing both on and o 1/4 ufb00 the court.”
Mmmmmkay.
Disney Plus recently started tweeting promos for the series.
They went over about as well as you’d imagine.
“Chock full of every garbage trope you can imagine,” Hemal Jhaveri, race and inclusion editor at USA Today Sports Media Group, tweeted in reply. “Girls don’t take sports seriously. Male abuser using women as a path to redemption. Coaching women as an undesirable, last ditch option. This is one hot mess.”
Other tweets: “How does this get greenlit in 2021?” “‘Coaching girls = rock bottom’ is how this reads.” “Story about the man coach having a crisis rather than the story of the talented female athletes? (yawn emoji) Come on Disney! Get us some Serena Williams fire power for us to watch!!”
“Disney,” Jhaveri continued, “I could get a group of incredible writers who know everything about women’s sports and we could give you a better show by the end of the damn day.”
I called Jhaveri.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “It says his last shot is coaching women, which is an undesirable option for men trying to rehabilitate themselves so they can get a real coaching job, which would be coaching men.”
Jhaveri is used to having conversations with dinosaurs who diminish the value and prowess of women athletes.
“Invariably when I talk about women’s sports, within 30 seconds someone will say, ‘It’s women’s sports. Who cares?’” Jhevari said. “It’s the default, knee-jerk reaction from people who think because women’s sports don’t have as large a share in the marketplace they are not of value. It’s incredibly frustrating.”
It also says more about the dinosaurs’ inability (or unwillingness) to read the room than it does about the popularity of women’s sports.
But Disney Plus, home to Disney classics, Pixar movies and Marvel movies, skews young. It’s unfortunate that in their search for original programming, they’d settle for a concept that so wildly misses the mark.
Even if “Big Shot” winds its way toward a feel-good lesson about the folly of underestimating female athletes, it will be delivering that lesson to a bunch of folks who didn’t realize they were supposed to be underestimating them in the first place.
Besides, haven’t we watched enough stories — fictional and non — in which girls and women serve as little more than a leading man’s opportunity for personal growth? What are Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences these days, if not that?
We’re going to pass on this one. I have a feeling a lot of people will. And if Disney Plus decides to head back to the drawing board for a series that belongs in this century? I’ll check if I can pass along Jhaveri’s number.
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