Kelly Loeffler Just Lost Her WNBA Team to a Player She Refused to Meet

Source: The Nation

Kelly Loeffler Just Lost Her WNBA Team to a Player She Refused to Meet
by Dave Zirin

By any measure, it should be the biggest story in sports: A franchise owner runs a racist Senate campaign, throwing their own Black players under the bus in the process. Meanwhile, one of those players takes the year off from playing ball to dedicate themselves to social justice concerns. That player asks to meet with the aforementioned franchise owner to discuss those concerns and is denied. The franchise owner refuses to meet and respectfully engage with someone who disagrees with them for political reasons. After the franchise owner faceplants their election campaign, ending in ignominious defeat, the players, the union, fans, and eventually even the league pressures them to sell the club.

That in and of itself would be a hell of a story. But this one goes to the next level: The aforementioned player joins an ownership group and buys the team. It’s positively cinematic. But this story isn’t getting the media attention it should be. That’s because it took place in the WNBA. Sexism is a hell of a drug, and it’s a damn shame because this is a story for the ages.



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The move by Montgomery creates a hell of a line in the sand across the sports spectrum. Once again, the WNBA is ahead of the game politically. It was when it embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is again in forcing out a bigoted franchise owner and replacing her with a player’s voice. Donald Sterling was forced to sell his stake of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 after racist recordings surfaced, but he was bought out by tech billionaire Steve Ballmer. Given the repellence of Sterling, that wasn’t exactly “old boss, same as the new boss,” but it didn’t solve a fundamental problem across the sports world: the near-total absence of Black franchise ownership—let alone Black women in positions of ownership. Now, franchise owners know that their long-standing practice of taking public funds while bankrolling this country’s right-wing political apparatus will be under scrutiny, and when they cross the line—as Loeffler gleefully did—from paying for racist dog whistles to taking up the practice themselves, players will not be silent.

Read full article: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/kelly-loeffler-wnba-montgomery/