I picked a WNBA team at random and now I'm a lifelong Phoenix Mercury fan
How I stumbled into WNBA fandom and found my team – and my heart – in the desert.
Twice in my life, I have been to Phoenix. Once, passing through, I ate tacos in the shade on an apocalyptic 115º day. The other, my sophomore year of high school. The boys and girls basketball teams both flew to Phoenix to play in a tournament over Christmas break, and the hotel at which we stayed had a rooftop hot tub in which I spent innumerable skin-pruning hours seated next to a particular Lady Cougars point guard I fancied. By the time I left Phoenix, I had a sunburn, an Arizona State t-shirt (my fandom is easily won), and my first girlfriend.
I guess, then, it is true to say that I have some emotional connections to Phoenix. However old, unlikely, and jejune, some piece of my heart still simmers out there in the Valley of the Sun. And so now, today, despite or maybe perhaps because of these disparate, seemingly-deserted desert connections, my arid heart pounds with love once again. For I am a Phoenix Mercury fan.
I became a fan the classic way: I took one small, slightly off-center thing I liked and made it my entire personality. In this case, the thing I liked was Diana Taurasi.
She’d always been there. My relationship with Taurasi goes back farther even than my relationship with my erstwhile Lady Cougars girlfriend. We didn’t start dating until 2002 – by that time, Taurasi had already led UConn to a national championship. Since I was 15 years old, Taurasi has been snarling across the hoops solar system, a basketball assassin, dominating with a simmering swagger all her own. Kobe himself, awed by her ferocity, dubbed her “White Mamba.” She’d been at the top of the sport for over half my life (!), and I always admired – craved, wanted – some part of her cocksure belief.
I’d tried getting into the WNBA before. I live in Nashville, and although momentum for a team has recently reached its peak (or rather, its Summitt), we don’t yet have a franchise. And without a team to follow, my WNBA fandom never stuck. So before the 2024 season, I decided simply to pick a team.
I picked Taurasi’s Mercury. I purchased a jersey of questionable textile integrity (suck it, Fanatics). I went to a local WNBA watch party and befriended a fellow Phoenix fan. And I took that largest of steps in personal fandom commitment: I enabled Mercury-specific ESPN app alerts.
This was an interesting time to board the Phoenix Mercury bandwagon! Turns out, I was about ten years too late. Not long ago, the Mercury were the league’s preeminent superteam – boasting the unanimously agreed-upon GOAT (Taurasi), plus stars Brittney Griner, Penny Taylor, and others. Only three franchises have won more WNBA titles than Phoenix’s three. But 2024, my first season as a fan, ended up being more of a prolonged (and deserved!) victory lap for the 42 year-old Taurasi, who officially announced her retirement after the season.
This was like becoming a Warriors fan this year. Or a Patriots fan the year they got rid of Tom Brady. Or becoming a fan of the Knicks, at any time, throughout history. I’d missed all the joy, all the glory, all the moments of Taurasi blazing the Mercury as close as she could to the sun, and living to tell the tale. And then she left. All I had was a desert-dry heart and a poorly-made jersey. Oh, and those ESPN alerts.
This spring, the balloons from Taurasi’s retirement party were still filled with air, but my Mercury-emblazoned sails were not. Most likely, I’d just forget about them. Read a book. Have a great summer.
It was then that I received a series of ESPN alerts regarding the team. It seemed that the Mercury had pivoted to a new solar system entirely: the notifications heralded trades for All-Stars Alyssa Thomas and Satou Sabally, and the news that Griner had not been retained in free agency.
After a whirlwind week (and a flurry of notifications), Phoenix remade their entire roster. Only two players (!) remained from last year’s team. The Mercury seemed to be attempting an NBA-style Big Three approach with Thomas, Sabally, and returner Kahleah Copper – the kind of absurdly top-heavy stars-and-scrubs offense that never seems to work. They’d be trotting out five rookies! Who would be the point guard? Would a raffle-winning fan be called upon to be the sixth woman? How would any of this work?
As it turns out – incredibly!
Alyssa Thomas plays like a Spanish fighting bull very schooled in interpretative dance. Spin moves that yield gaping, Red Sea lanes. Moments when you, the discerning and smug Mercury fan, wonder: whomst on planet earth could possibly guard this person? She could get a wide-open layup if she was being guarded by a forest.
Satou Sabally is all knives and jabs. Playing on her toes, she has a springing, bounding quality – like if a dolphin could climb like an ibex. Her sashays to the basket occasionally take on a rose-tinted quality, but these forays also occasionally result in wide-open layups. Sabally seems like Thomas’s perfect pair. The electric sizzle to Thomas’s artisan craftsmanship.
After roaring back from an 18-point deficit to beat the Los Angeles Sparks on Sunday, the Mercury are 5-2. And even better, they’re fun. They play fast, and unpredictable, and weird – guards soaring up and down the court, forwards rampaging into the lane, centers flinging threes.
Sami Whitcomb leads with wily athleticism. Monique Akoa Makani hoists three-pointers (at a 47% clip!) that look like time-lapse footage of an insect emerging from its cocoon. Lexi Held hounds with soccer-player doggedness. Kalani Brown booms with around-the-basket touch. Kathryn Westbeld demands attention. Kit Laksa hunts with a languid smoothness.
I care so much about this team I had never watched until very recently!
I am prone, I understand, to write about my sports fandom in a hifalutin way. Like I’m pitching an essay to Oxford American, or currently on-air with Krista Tippett.
It’s in my blood. My mom’s parents had season tickets and they took her to games when she was so small she fit in their laps. My Grandmother watched every Braves game on that old toaster-sized kitchen countertop TV and now so do I. My uncle took me to Titans games in Section 328, and together, we watched a miracle.
All this is true. But I also like hamming it up. Whenever I tell a sports agnostic that I’m a fan, weaving a Faulknerian tapestry – my people loved sports and it seeped into the dirt and I skinned my knee on that soil playing backyard football and now sports-loving is a gift and it is a curse and it is inside of me — it is because I want to seem…smarter! More emotionally in-tune! I long for my values and choices and journey to appear mapped, carved, rooted, embedded. Plus, I’m a storyteller!
Fandom can seem so dumb. So vapid and thoughtless and untethered. And telling a good story makes me seem as if I am not a person with mere whims and flights of fancy, someone who just decides willy-nilly with little soul-level interrogation to like a thing.
When in reality, here’s the deal: I love sports. I am a huge sports nerd. I love it. I love the daily transactions, the uniforms, an intricately-designed play call, someone diving on the floor for a loose ball. I love it all. And you know what? I love the Phoenix Mercury. They have unmasked me. I don’t cheer for the Mercury because my family does. I don’t cheer for the Mercury because of any desert roots, a deathbed promise to a loved one, or decades-old nostalgia for that long-lost basketball-playing girlfriend. I cheer for the Mercury because it’s fun, because I like them, and because I want to.
The storyteller in me is strong, though — and I’m open to the possibility that, after all these years, the stars are aligning, the planets too, that I’m being brought back, closer to the warmth, to the light, to right where I’m supposed to be.