I Can't Stop Thinking About Gabby Williams' Final Three Shots in the Women's Olympic Basketball Final
I can’t stop thinking about Gabby Williams’ final three shots in the women’s Olympic basketball final. It’s been almost two weeks and I can’t stop thinking about it—the heartbreaking poetry of an athlete performing a truly epic, unrepeatable feat of talented glory right when she needed to, just when time was about to run out, and it didn’t matter. She was still a point short.
The USA women’s Olympic team was bombastic and cocky. Kelsey Plum is the annoying little fly who won’t go away no matter how many times you swat at it. Breanna Stewart is like a medieval knight reincarnated to be perfect for basketball, all long swishing hair and limbs that extend into the crowd. A’ja Wilson hardly has to hop off the floor to defend her team’s basket, she’s just always there when she needs to be.
But Gabby Williams is elegant, fluid. You don’t even notice she’s there until she’s doing something beautiful, like those last three shots. France was ahead of USA most of the game, though not by much, and even though I was rooting for my country I found myself kind of wanting to root for them, because don’t you want the home team to win just a little bit? But they were sloppy; kept catching fouls and giving away easy points. But then they’d get one in too, and it was like ping pong for a while there—score on this end, score on that end, back and forth, back and forth—until there were less than two minutes left on the clock, and neither team had any time outs left, and USA was up by three, and Williams sank a two-pointer right over Stewart’s too-long arm and it was like everyone backed off and just let her have it. But then it went back and forth again (Do you like how I’m describing the action of sports? Am I doing a good job?) and there were only ten seconds left, and USA was up by four, and Williams ran from her team’s basket to the three-point line on the other end in, like, two great strides, where she floated off the floor a few inches and just sort of encouraged the ball in the direction of the basket with one arm. Now it’s a one-point game with five seconds left, seems like not enough time for magic to happen, but it keeps happening. This is women’s basketball. These are witches.
In those five seconds USA manages to sink another one, so now it’s 64 to 67 with, like, two seconds left. One three-point shot and we’re in overtime. She’s done it countless times like it was nothing, she can do it again. She immediately starts running for that basket, waiting for her teammate to lob the ball at her. And she does, and she catches it, and she throws her body towards the basket, launching the ball through the air in a perfect arc that should be studied in math classes, her body a weightless comma in the middle of a phrase, waiting for the conclusion. And she sinks it. She sinks the world’s most beautiful basket quite literally in the last possible millisecond. But it doesn’t matter because her foot was on the line. Her foot was on the line.
Imagine being Gabby Williams that night. You just played the best game of basketball you’ll ever play on the greatest world stage available to you, but your foot was on the line. You don’t get the glory.
Except she does because guess what? I like sports now. So many women and girls and gays and theys and people who otherwise felt alienated by sports discovered sports this Olympics because of all of the outrageously good women athletes competing. Williams and Plum and Stewart and Wilson and Grenier and Biles and Chiles and Ledecky and and and and and. Since these Olympics I’ve started watching men’s sports more, too, mostly basketball and soccer, and they’re great and everything, but they’re not as fun to watch as the women. It just seems like there’s more at stake for the women, more to prove. They’re more passionate and desperate and they use their bodies more—their strong, striking, sinewy bodies. They throw them around like they’re willing to die for it, for the glory. It just seems like it means more to them. They’re putting their feet up on those lines every chance they get because even if they don’t win, they have to try.
Her foot was on the line. God. I can’t stop thinking about it.