August 07, 2002 News & Views » Cover

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The Sting will stay in Charlotte for now

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"He is helping a property we believe in," says NBA spokesperson Tim Frank. "He's working hard and doing a good job. That's encouraging. He's proving to us he can do the job (of running a team), which never hurts."

But Frank and Carr both note that successfully running the Sting will only be "a" factor in whether the nine-person ownership group Carr is affiliated with gets the NBA nod. How important will it be? "There are too many factors to try to put a figure on it," Frank says.

To be as successful as Carr has been in getting sponsorships in such a short period of time -- he's only been on the job just over two months -- it's obvious he isn't just going through the paces. He's become an apostle for women's basketball. If a private ownership group is established, he's said he would like to be a part of it, or he'd love for his NBA ownership group to run the team.

Carr, who played for the Boston Celtics in the 1980s and is from the tiny town of Wallace in eastern North Carolina (Duplin County), says his fervor for promoting the women's game comes from "having been around women who play." When he cites one of his favorite players -- Nancy Lieberman -- anybody who knows the women's game realizes that Carr, who played collegiately at Guilford College, has followed the women's game as far back as three decades, when Lieberman starred at Old Dominion University in the late 1970s.

He calls the lesbian issue "a copout" and says it hasn't been a major deterrent to marketing the Sting.

"Do you not go to work or other places you want to go because there are gay people there?" he asks.

Women's basketball equals or betters the men's game in all but eye-popping athleticism, Carr says. "We are conditioned to the "spectacular' -- what they show on ESPN SportsCenter -- but what the women play is basketball in the purest form -- the game men played before it was above the rim," he explains. "The women's game is about ball and body movement. . .finding the angles, as (Celtics' great) Bill Russell used to say. There is an enormous amount of passing, while in the NBA there is a great amount of one-on-one isolation. A WNBA team often makes four, five, six, seven passes before a shot goes up, and there's more teamwork."

WBTV's Robinson -- who played with Sleepy Floyd on the Gastonia Hunter Huss High team that won the state championship in 1977 -- agrees with Carr.

"The quality and purity of the women's game is unparalleled and the perception that women don't play at as great a level as the men is completely unfair," he says. "Anybody with 6-9 height and great hops can dunk, but not everybody can play the fundamentally sound way women do. I think Andrea Stinson is phenomenal."

Where are the women?

The Sting also would benefit if more women came to games.

"We were disappointed initially with that (female turnout)," says the WNBA's Hanson, "but we realized that women have so much going on in their lives, especially in the summer with kids and vacations. That's one of the reasons we came up with flex books (ticket packages), which allow people to attend, say, any 10 games of their choice. We've had a very good response to that." But many women also aren't aware of the quality of play and haven't been to games.

The Sting has to find ways to educate fans to the quality of the game. "We have not done a good enough job introducing people to the product," Carr says.

"It is an education process," says Jeff Beaver, executive director of the Charlotte Regional Sports Commission. "People need to experience it. It's easy to sit back and diss something without being involved."

With the progress in corporate interest in the Sting, they are likely to be around at least another year, but the question remains about who is going to run the team. The WNBA has used this summer to begin learning about how a non-NBA entity could run a WNBA team, given that there are places around the country interested in the concept. But league officials say they haven't determined what level of investment an outside group would have to make and how it would operate.

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