Rick Reilly Experiences the WNBA

Rick Reilly in an old Sports Illustrated article writes about his participation in the 2000 WNBA pre-draft camp in Chicago:

Now, I may not be Billy Blanks, but I'm not Tyra Banks, either. I'm 6'1", 180 pounds, sturdy in a 42-year-old kind of way. But when I went to my power-forward spot and a woman named Frankie Boyd, 6'4" and 180 pounds, senior, Ole Miss, got the ball in the post, yo-yoed it, slammed her butt into my intestines and her elbow into my teeth (sending me skidding back on my shorts), and laid in the uncontested bunny, I wished very much that I had stayed home and rotated the tires.

Why must women be so violent? They grabbed me. They shoved me. They pinched me. They held their ground. They were huge. At one point I was guarding 6'4", 250-pound UCLA center Janae Hubbard, a woman who on the court didn't seem to care in the least about Maybelline. I came out, and my coach, Greg Williams, an assistant with the Detroit Shock, said, "Son, you couldn't play dead in a cowboy movie."