The New York Liberty defeated Sophie Cunningham and the Indiana Fever 109-102 on Saturday night, picking up their 23rd win of the season behind big performances from Breanna Stewart and a returning Leonie Fiebich.
Despite the win, the Liberty are now dealing with a very different kind of headline off the court.
Advertisement
Martina Navratilova Calls Out Liberty’s Scoreboard Message Vs. Sophie Cunningham, Fever
During halftime of Saturday’s game, messages showed up on the Barclays Center jumbotron welcoming and supporting transgender fans in the building.
The timing mattered, since the Fever were in town with Cunningham, who has spent weeks at the center of a heated national conversation after saying she doesn’t think transgender women should compete in women’s sports.
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova didn’t stay quiet about it. She reposted the halftime messages on X and made her feelings pretty clear.
Advertisement
“Wow. Pretty sad… I am old enough to remember when the WNBA totally shied away from anything LGB, when the cameras would make sure to show only ‘straight’ people… how far we have come,” Navratilova wrote on X.
This comes right on the heels of another controversy involving the exact same halftime slot. A video from Outkick surfaced before the game showing a Cunningham supporter explaining that she’d paid to have her own message shown on the scoreboard at that same Liberty game, only for the team to step in and change it before it aired.
The fan, Julie Potter, said she’d submitted a message thanking XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey, and Liberty approved it and took her payment days before the game. Then, less than 24 hours before tip-off, she received an email saying the wording had been swapped for something softer, with no real explanation.
Advertisement
“I wanted to put up a message to Jennifer Sey and thank her for everything that she’s doing. And it got approved. I paid for it. That was five days ago. And then 24 hours before the game, I get an email that said they’re going to alter my message and gave me no reason or recourse.”
“Yeah, so my original message was, ‘Thank you, Jennifer Sey. XX-XY Athletics will save the day.’ Then their response was, or their altercation of this was, ‘Thank you, Jennifer Sey. Thank you for all you do for XXXY Athletics.’ Yeah, they said it was not in the spirit and it wasn’t positive. I don’t understand it. I’m celebrating someone who’s doing amazing things for women,” she said.
From her point of view, there was nothing in what she wrote that should have raised a flag. She never used Cunningham’s name or referenced the “Save Women’s Sports” movement. She just couldn’t understand what made her message different from anything else that gets approved.
Advertisement
So now critics have a pretty easy comparison to make. One is a fan’s message honoring a women’s sports advocate that got edited down at the last minute, while the other messages celebrating trans fans ran unchanged during the same game.
For people already skeptical of how the league handles this issue, it’s another data point. For others, it’s simply the Liberty being inclusive at a game where tensions were already running high.
This article originally appeared on Pro Football Network.
