Things just ain’t the same. Since she left.
She just ain’t the same. Nothing is.
To see, watch, cheer for, hate, despise, accept Angel Reese playing in an unprecedented Game 7 for a WNBA championship is to have a hyperacute understanding of space and place.
How does Barbie have a Cinderella season? She leaves — or is traded, removed, exiled from, you choose — Chicago.
More societal than game-related. More community — as in area, location, population and populus, media, etc. — than basketball-related. Making her more aligned with ‘‘the dead internet theory’’ than probably any athlete alive. To act like all of the aforementioned hasn’t played a role in the chronicling of Angel Reese’s ascent would be inane.
But, then, why should anything less be expected of us when it comes to her?
Everything from her builds around the ‘‘UNAPOLOGETIC’’ tat that runs down the side of her left wrist. But now the mean mugs hit different, the ‘‘too smalls’’ hit different, the screams, yells, taunts heard differently, the beast-mode play, the F-bombs for further self-encouragement and esteem, the three-finger salutes when they drop, the ‘‘shots fired’’ gestures. All have led to a different type of acceptance by some for and still against Angel Reese, along with a different sense by which society has been forced to view, judge and assess her.
The Empress strikes back.
The major key: impacting winning. Which came with a perceived difference in acceptance by the Dream organization about who she is. By seeing passion in her actions instead of interpreting them as forms of petulance. There’s a silent and almost invisible self-efficacy within her that cannot be seen externally. Atlanta taught her how to hone and still own that in a way believed abandoned, if at all attempted, by the Sky.
The benefit of being around WNBA vets, a coaching staff and an organization that poured into her in a way that seems to have matured her five years over the course of a six-month season. As Angel likes to say: ‘‘This is what it looks like when purpose meets the moment.’’ She literally used the word ‘‘joy’’ to describe what she and her squad needed to play with to win the final game of the Finals.
A word that has not been heard or associated with the Sky since James Wade foretold the organization’s future and nascenced the free fall.
NBC’s Zora Stevenson leaned in on the fact that it seems Reese ‘‘fits with this team.’’ It’s so much more. Reese fits with Atlanta’s culture. She fits with their people, their life mattering in what they both historically and currently represent and their comfort in the skin they’re in. She fits with everything she has grown to believe and mean when it comes to Black success and the strive to find it in America.
Chicago, in many parts and areas, wasn’t (and oftentimes isn’t when it comes to accepting sports leaders) the place for that. The Sky, as they currently stand as a franchise in the WNBA, weren’t the organization capable of cultivating that. The media, unused to seeing an overt-spoken leader of one of our professional teams, wasn’t prepared for a young, cultural, superstar athlete to not conform to or not cower under the demands publicly put upon them to be something and someone different.
Briefly noted, the physicality of the Finals perfectly suited Angel. It showed in the first three games, where ‘‘Finals MVP’’ began to orbit around her name. It showed in Games 4
and 5, where she showcased how much of a not-finished product she still is. The essence of her being the face of a team playing for the championship revealed itself in Games 6 and 7. All that she is, for the world to see, on display on the highest, most coveted stage in the game.
A stage we all must openly admit she may have never seen had she remained here, in this city, unable to shake the proximity of the shadow of Caitlin Clark, had they — the Sky — not gifted her by no longer believing in her.
The basketball part changed. The expectations changed. A different commitment to the game born. The results were a result of those. And anyone believing that she (or Gabby Williams, who was drafted by the Sky in 2018 and has, since being traded in 2021, won silver medals in the Olympics and the FIBA World Cup, become a two-time WNBA All-Star, made three WNBA All-Defensive teams and become the face of a two-year old franchise in the WNBA Finals) would have turned into the player she has become had she remained here needs to be given a Ph.D. in mythomania.
Her aura awareness risen. Defiance, more accepted or less misunderstood? She called this ‘‘the year of simplicity. Less is more.’’ This year of her 24. She’s where she belongs.
She made the world smell her perfume. The deep divide that existed between she and we? She no longer has to battle. The benefit of the doubt that didn’t exist from before she got to the ‘‘W’’ that seemed to carry over to her entire time here in Chicago? Finally decided to bless her with the space and place she craved once she got to the ATL.
Home.
It allowed Angel Reese to finally dream.
