Sabrina Ionescu, a guard for the WNBA’s New York Liberty, has been asked multiple times about how Saturday night’s first-of-its-kind 3-point shootout between her and the NBA’s Stephen Curry compares to the iconic 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” between tennis players Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
Ionescu and Curry have long regarded each other as peers and have a mutual respect for each other.
Ionescu chuckled when that question was asked at a news conference Tuesday night. She’s 26. She wasn’t alive when King defeated Riggs in three straight sets. She wasn’t born into the world that the 80-year-old King was, a world where women athletes were treated like they were, as college basketball analyst Jay Bilas recently put it, “lower than second class.”
Ionescu explained that her head-to-head shootout against Curry, a guard for the Golden State Warriors who’s scored more 3-pointers than anybody in NBA history, is much more “friendly” than the antagonistic contest between King and Riggs. In the 1973 tennis match, the man believed the woman was beneath him.
Ionescu and Curry have long regarded each other as peers and have mutual respect for each other. Curry has won the NBA’s 3-point shooting contest twice. More significantly, he’s the most prolific 3-point shooter the NBA has ever seen. This season, Curry leads the NBA with 252 3-pointers made. His closest competitor, the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, has made 181.
Ionescu made 128 threes last WNBA regular season, the most ever in a regular season. She broke the record of WNBA legend Diana Taurasi, who made 121 3-pointers in 2006. This past July, Ionescu set the record for scoring 37 out of a possible 40 points in the 3-point shooting contest during the WNBA’s All-Star weekend. That’s the most points ever scored in a 3-point contest in either the WNBA or the NBA. (Curry is one of two NBA players who’s scored 31.)
There’s obviously many people in our society that still don’t…
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