WNBA will lose one of its pillars when Sylvia Fowles retires after 2022 season

Fowles is a four-time defensive player of the year, a seven-time All-Star, a two-time WNBA champion, the league’s all-time leading rebounder and a member of the 25th-anniversary team. At the end of the 2022 season, Fowles will retire, and the game will say goodbye to one of the best centers in women’s basketball history. (More) Kurt Streeter, writing in the NYTimes said,” Bird and Fowles are peers in every meaningful sense of the word. They are basketball greats whose careers primarily overlapped. The gap [between Bird and Fowles] also exists because of societal disparities magnified in sports, where only a small number of women catch the spotlight. When I spoke with Bird, she did not hesitate to enumerate them. Bird is an out, proud lesbian, but she recognized that, to some, “I pass as a straight woman.” She continued, noting that she is also white, “small and, therefore, not intimidating, compared to Syl, who is Black, dark-skinned and of a certain stature, yeah, that is 100 percent at play here.” (More)