Column: There’s nothing wrong with trash talk in women’s sports — it’s the reactions to it that sometimes turn ugly

The WNBA always has had rivalries. But this season seemed different.

On Sunday night, I went to popular Chicago baseball bar Nisei Lounge with an out-of-town guest, and the bar was relatively quiet, save for us and a few regulars. TVs were tuned to either the “Sunday Night Football” game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Miami Dolphins or the all-Texas American League Championship Series between the Rangers and Astros.

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As we sat and sipped, a woman at the bar started telling us about a WNBA segment on the Peacock series “Brother From Another.”

“I didn’t realize there was all this drama behind the scenes in the WNBA!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I watched the games but I didn’t know all that was going on.”

In the segment she referred to, host Natalie, culture commentator Dawn Montgomery, Fox Sports Radio’s Kelsey Nicole Nelson and Grow the Game founder Subria Whitaker discussed the trash talking in this year’s WNBA Finals between the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty.

The four women recalled previous instances of trash talk from the Liberty and detailed how the teams’ rivalry was “personal.”

Last week the Aces became the WNBA’s first repeat champions in 21 years. In the celebration that followed their 70-69 victory in the decisive Game 4, Aces superstar A’ja Wilson was overcome with emotion while sitting on the court.

For the entire season, Wilson and the Aces had been on what felt like a collision course with the Liberty. New York held a 3-2 edge in the regular-season series, including the in-season Commissioner’s Cup tournament, and the Finals matchup was one of the most highly anticipated in league history.

Liberty star Breanna Stewart was named the regular-season MVP in what most saw as a three-person race between Stewart, Wilson and Connecticut Sun triple-double queen Alyssa Thomas. Wilson received a single fourth-place vote; otherwise, they were the top three on every ballot. Thomas received the most first-place votes, but Stewart won the award on the weight of 23 second-place votes.

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So the stage was set for the Finals and the beginning of a rivalry I hope we’re talking about for a lifetime.

The Aces won the first two games and were looking for a sweep when the series moved to Brooklyn for Game 3 — but the Liberty said not so fast. In what felt like a last-ditch effort to do something, anything, at home, Stewart, former Chicago Sky veteran Courtney Vandersloot and 2015 Sky draft pick Betnijah Laney helped the Liberty beat the Aces to force another game.

At the end of the Game 3 comeback win, Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu mimed the “night-night” celebration gesture and social media started buzzing. Could the Liberty, who added Stewart, Vandersloot and former MVP Jonquel Jones in the offseason, even up the series at home?

Taunting your opponent down 2-1 and facing a second elimination game was certainly a bold choice, but in sports it’s simply the mark of a competitor who is feeling it. And some fans of the game really enjoyed it.

“Oh, they were messy,” one bargoer said Sunday. “They have real beef.”

The conversation at the bar was lively — one you’d hear about other sports in any sports bar in America. Everyone in the small group had an opinion. The discussion turned from the Liberty to the Aces.

After winning a close battle in Game 4, the Aces seemed to have built up a dossier of things said about the team that they now were responding to. Guard Sydney Colson grabbed the mic from ESPN’s Holly Rowe and said: “People wanted to count us out because we had two of our starters down, but they don’t know we got some dogs on this team. So I have two words to say: night-night!”

Colson, who was not-so-subtly trolling Ionescu, later revealed the Liberty star had told her to “take her ass to the bench” during Game 3.

After overcoming injuries and bookmarking trash talk all season, the Aces, who were favored to win all along, clapped back. In the days between the final game and the championship parade, the players took to social media and let everyone know they saw and heard it all.

And some fans just couldn’t handle it.

The Aces were called “classless,” “uneducated” and a bunch of other insults. But people, whether they liked the Aces or not, were watching. They were talking about it. The rivalry, the trash talk, was good for the league.

Because let’s be clear: There’s nothing wrong with women talking trash. This idea that women’s sports are delicate is ridiculous. These are athletes competing at the highest level of their game blowing off steam.

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As we’ve seen for years, athletes can take any perceived slight and use it as motivation. Colorado football coach Deion Sanders said Colorado State coach Jay Norvell “messed around and made it personal” when Norvell made comments before the teams’ game in September insinuating Sanders wasn’t raised right.

Also, just because they play in the same league doesn’t mean players have to be friends. I’m sure we’ve all worked somewhere we didn’t like a co-worker from another department.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out another level to how the trash talk was received. The Aces have more Black players than the Liberty. Women’s basketball content creator Lauren Dreher said she saw this kind of thing happening from the beginning of the season.

“The trash talk is fine,” she said. ”The response to the trash talk is the issue. In women’s sports we often point out male fragility and we can point out misogyny with a fine-tooth comb because we understand the basis of it.

“But we can’t understand racism. We can’t understand that when you have a women’s league that is dominated by Black women, it comes into play. You can’t have one without the intersections. It played out at the end of the women’s college basketball season, and I see it here.”

Dreher was referring to the discourse that took place after the 2023 NCAA Tournament final. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese became the faces of the trash talk as people asked whether it was acceptable for Reese to make gestures while seemingly ignoring that Clark had previously done it.

Dreher went on to say when she points out the intersection of race and misogyny, it upsets others because they view the discussion as an attack on white players. But, she said, “it’s not an attack on the players, it’s an attack on the system.”

As women’s sports continue to grow their audience, we as viewers must grow along with them. We need to understand it’s impossible to separate the game from the humans playing it. Trash talk, on its surface, doesn’t hurt. It’s the ugliness underneath we should fight.

Back at the bar, the lively conversation around the WNBA continued.

“So, y’all think the Aces can run it back next year?”