Rough Notes: The Legend of Chi-Town Barbie
In my feelings about the most epic fumbling of the WNBA's 'hype era.'
I don’t know if you’ve ever been personally fumbled, but it cuts, like, pretty deep. There’s just a particular maddening to losing not what was, but what could have been. In other words, as Emily Dickinson wrote, it “scalps your naked Soul.”
Yesterday, Angel Reese’s trade was announced — to the Atlanta Dream, from the Chicago Sky. For many Reese’s Pieces (Angel’s fans), and perhaps for Angel herself, leaving Chicago is a kind of liberation — she ended last season publicly frustrated with the infamously lackluster franchise. But for many fans in Chicago, her leaving carries an extra layer, more baggage: the scalping awareness of what we once held as naked hope. And I am still in my feelings about it.
I’ll start from the beginning: In May of 2024, I was living in Chicago and had just started to regularly freelance as a women’s basketball writer. That month, the onset of summer was approaching like a manic episode. I’d recently snuck into the WNBA Draft at BAM in Brooklyn (I know my way around a 165 year-old arts building, ok?), where I managed to sit next to Jan Jenson, clumsily introduce myself to Coach Jackie (no, she did not want to “stake out the afterparty with me,” I was a stranger), and screamed my absolute head off when the Sky drafted — as the 7th overall pick — Angel Reese, the Bayou Barbie. Who was, by the way, literally wearing this:
I was so thrilled that I wrote an article about it for South Side Weekly in Chicago. It was called “Welcome to the WNBA Hype Era,” and really, it was just a manifestation of the future I wanted to see (which is a thing I do sometimes.) Below the headline, the ‘deck’ literally read:
In the piece, I described the moment that Angel Reese was drafted like this:
The crowd screamed, and I screamed with them.
We screamed because Angel Reese brings impeccable toughness and resilience to her professional career, and to Chicago. “This is for the girls that look like me, that’s going to speak up on what you believe in,” she once told reporters after winning the 2023 NCAA championship. “It’s unapologetically you.”
The print edition of the article came out on the day of my birthday party that year, a thrilling new beginning.
That rookie season — with head coach Teresa Weatherspoon and once-in-a-blue-moon talent Chennedy Carter — was remarkable to me from the beginning. It felt like a campfire. Like a California rainstorm in the highest heat of fall. Yes, like new love. We all shared the sense of surrounding something special, and rare. It was just a vibe.
And Chicagoans loved Angel. Sometimes I felt like people were ready to leap out of their seats, a flock of fire-breathing dragons, to protect her from harm. And we saw the way Angel dove into the fray, to put the weight of her teammates on her shoulders. “I’ll take the ‘bad guy’ role,” she said at a press conference, defending her teammate Chennedy Carter after she’d been villainized by viral racist media tropes. “And I’ll continue to take that on and be that for my teammates.”
~rookie szn vibes~ That season was also what inspired me to start Rough Notes — and in my fairly unhinged writing (the whole idea of this newsletter/blog was to be a space for the rough, the experimental, the still-taking-shape), I reveled in the arrival of Angel, our young leader, who dove into the fray of every play like a warrior. On June 23rd, she led the Sky to an 88-87 comeback victory over the Indiana Fever. I wrote this:
We’re down by four now and I don’t know how anyone here is breathing, oh my god. The nerve of us sports fans, peaking with adrenaline, expecting these players to keep their bodies within the rules of the game. I could bite my finger off. It’s 2:24pm on a Sunday afternoon and life is still awful and exciting and tragic, but inside Wintrust, we are poured together. I’ve seen hundreds of women’s basketball games but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen something like this. It is a new era, and we are shimmering.
Angel’s fearless play was intermixed with the magic that T-Spoon and Chennedy brought, too. For all noise & chat about Chennedy Carter, what I can say definitively is that watching her play in person was unreal. I mean look at this photo in which is literally jumping as high as A’ja Wilson:
And then there was Teresa Weatherspoon, who carried the WNBA’s history on her shoulders, and who seemed to believe in her players with potent belief. She was basically a motivational speaker at the press conference folding table, and gave these warm side hugs to her players, especially Chennedy and Angel. Her eye contact was revolutionary. It all had me under a spell; my brain was exploding with possibilities.
I don’t think I was alone in this feeling. It was easy to fall in love with Angel Reese and her team. Plus, she was ending every game with a double double, 9 straight in fact, poised to break Candace Parker’s WNBA single-season record with her 10th in a game against the Minnesota Lynx on June 30th, 2024. With less than a minute left, Angel was closing in on breaking the record - she just needed to score one more point. I wrote this:
On the final possession, Angel finds the ball in the paint and the whistle comes quickly, a note of relief. But she misses her first free throw. I grip someone’s shoulder next to me for the second, ducking my head, barely watching. “It’s going to be okay!” another person reassures me, and we hold our breath as the second shot sails through the net, a few feet from where Angel’s mother sits, who had probably been whispering a prayer.
All of Wintrust explodes after the shot goes in. The truth of Angel is that she is our team’s lifeline. Watching her, we are luckier than the first summer day at the lake. Luckier than hitting every green light on Western Avenue. Luckier than a perfectly clear afternoon without wind, when you can see the Chicago River holding downtown like fruit on a tree. Luckier than biking without brakes down even the grid’s smallest hill.
Perhaps we don’t get every gift in Chicago, but Angel Reese most certainly is one. She brings enough pride to the city that, like all the best things here, you’ll even want to share it with strangers. If you haven’t yet, come to Wintrust and watch Angel play. Then close your eyes and imagine you are flying.
… Aaaaaand hard stop.
It’s time to fast forward to the end of the story. Brutal, right? But you already know what happens: less than two years later, the Sky have lost a generational, game-changing player in Angel Reese. Her trade to the Atlanta Dream officially marks a premature departure from Chicago (in the WNBA, rookie contracts are typically three years; Angel just finished her kind of disastrous second year with the Sky.)
To me, all those things that were so exceptional about Angel in 2024 that I’d noticed — her fearlessness, the way she rebounds like she’s saving a baby, her singular presence and celebrity, all of those things are still just as true. She is one of the most important figures in this era of the WNBA. But it’s the Chicago Sky franchise that couldn’t keep up.
It was toward the end of her rookie season that things started crumbling. Quite plainly. Eventually, the Sky’s playoff hopes began to expire a little more steeply than we’d thought, and then T-Spoon was fired after just one season on the job, despite her connection with Angel — poof, like that. That’s when unspeakable things took place.
I’m exaggerating. But I’ll write about what happened at that exact moment later this week — in a much more reporter-ly part two of this Angel Reese appreciate/heartbreak series. Because I’m not over it yet.
I’ll always remember the summer of 2024 for what I witnessed in Angel Reese, her rookie season. She was a gift, a lifeline. The person I thought of as I began writing, in my own voice, with my legs hanging out the living room window, into Chicago’s sky. The summer Angel forever instilled herself as a legend in this city. When she reminded Chicago that regardless of the powers that be, we the people actually have some pretty brilliant ideas. Like loving Angel Reese. And that’s what we can keep.
Angels are portrayed with wings, with wings we feel we can fly, we can spread ourselves across the expanse of the above, and AR brought that to Chicago. Sadly, the Sky snipped at the wings of Angel, sitting her for speaking truth, fumbling her from the nest, and the very proverbial place an angel is supposed to be, amongst the clouds, set to ground her for being the very thing the city, its children, and her calling needed. So, I'm happy Angel has been allowed to grow her wings again in ATL. She deserves, has earned, an opportunity to see herself spread her wings to their furthest reaches and begin again to dream...
as always, Maya, you hit the nail on the head with feel, vibe, of the moment and the memory we all shared!
Heartbroken for Chicago and so happy for Angel. Ugh!