A growing WNBA means more opportunities for the league, its teams and its players.
It means more entities outside of the realm of women’s basketball will be itching to enter into deals with entities within the W sphere because they understand that investing in the WNBA is good business.
This has also meant that from time to time the entities that may seek to do deals with players, teams or the league as a whole may get those inside the W sphere in a bit of hot water.
Case in point – Breanna Stewart. Stewie is the reigning league MVP and is part of the nucleus of a New York Liberty team that as of this writing boasts the WNBA’s best record at 25-5.
She is also under the Puma umbrella.
Recently, Puma announced the upcoming release of the Stewie 3 in collaboration with Warner Bros. and the Harry Potter franchise. Per the Puma website, a new sneaker along with clothing wear is set to be released early September – September 6th to be exact.
The kicks themselves will be available on the Puma website for $130 and makes references to the Hogwarts School as well as the Deathly Hallows – signature elements of the Wizarding World.
If this was a partnership that was announced some years ago, it likely would be met with almost universal praise. One of the planet’s premier women’s basketball players linking with an iconic book and movie universe? This is a deal that almost would be a dream come true. Welcome to the House of Stewie, indeed.
But there is a glaring problem – and it is exactly the one that was expertly outlined by Frankie De La Cretaz on their website Out of Your League.
The creator of the Potterverse is J.K. Rowling – a woman who become nowadays more known for spewing anti-transgender rhetoric on social media than anything involving said Potterverse.
This partnership does make for strange bedfellows because of the anti-trans views of Rowling that clash with Stewie’s staunch pro-trans advocacy over the years.
Rowling has been tabbed as one of the more well-known “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFs that there is. Not too long ago, Rowling’s TERFdom got her in hot water with Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.
Khelif caused a (manufactured) international outrage at the recently concluded Paris 2024 Olympic Games when a boxing match with Italy’s Angela Carini lasted a mere 46 minutes due to a series of hard punches from Khelif.
This actually led to racist, sexist and transphobic speculation about if Khelif was really a man. Khelif responded to the vitriol by winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Not only that, but both Rowling (as well as X-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter’s resident Emperor Without Any Clothes Elon Musk) were named in a cyberbullying lawsuit filed in France.
Part of the ammunition transphobes like Rowling and Musk (as well as a certain presidential candidate who will not be named) used to vilify Khelif was that she failed an International Boxing Association chromosome test. Except that the IBA has ties to notoriously anti-trans Russia and that country’s history with corruption and doping scandals could fill an entire Potter book.
It is not much of a secret that Stewart is an avid Harry Potter fan so doing a deal such as this has probably always been a dream come true and is nothing short of excellent for the reigning league MVP. But Stewie’s association with the Potter franchise is now somewhat similar to that of the three main stars of the Potter movies.
There have been numerous occasions where when Rowling has espoused her anti-trans views and they have had to be pushed back by either Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) or Daniel Radcliffe (Potter himself).
Puma and Stewart will of course benefit from this partnership as will Warner Bros. And so does Rowling who still receives royalties off anything associated with the Harry Potter brand. And as long as that continues, associating with a brand like Harry Potter whose reputation has been tarnished thanks to the hateful rhetoric of Rowling will raise its fair share of eyebrows. In addition, there is a massive trans fanbase within the overall Potter fanbase.
In addition, the reality is that the Potter brand does not carry the same weight it did in the late 1990s and much of 2000s when the books and movies were being released.
When all is said and done, Stewie will receive backlash for this partnership. But in all fairness, her history of LGBTQIA+ activism is so solid that this will be a minor blip on an otherwise noteworthy history of being one of the best transgender allies in all of sports – and society at large.
What this is illustrates is another case of good eggs like Stewart doing questionable deals with bad actors. It happens in business all the time – including with the WNBA.
Last year, commissioner Cathy Engelbert hinted that the WNBA would consider playing a game in Saudi Arabia if the opportunity presented itself – but it would not be Engelbert’s first option. Those comments came on the heels of news that the PGA Tour would merge with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf operation.
This caused quite a stir among fans given a regressive country with an abhorrent human rights record like Saudi Arabia would even be on the radar of a league like the WNBA that has made progressivism as centerpiece of its own brand.
Saudi Arabia is a country that has been engaged in a phenomenon called sports washing where an otherwise regressive state uses the smokescreen of sports to make its image more acceptable to the rest of the world. Qatar’s hosting of the Men’s World Cup is a textbook example of sports washing.
A nation-state like Saudi Arabia certainly is different from an entertainment entity like the Harry Potter franchise, but the premise remains the same whether it is at a macro (the Saudis) or a micro level (Potter). It can make for weird arrangements and possible pitfalls when money is exchanged between purveyors of dark such as Rowling and beacons of light like Stewie.
Rowling in recent years may have revealed herself to be a card-carrying resident of Slytherin house. But as we know – even Gryffindors are anything but perfect.
