The Minnesota Lynx absolutely obliterated the Las Vegas Aces on Saturday, 111-58—the 53-point victory breaking a 1998 record for the biggest road win in WNBA history. While Aces fans didn't get much of a showing from the home team, they were treated to a better effort from the contestants of the halftime baby race.
The baby race is the best: a game in which confused infants attempt to crawl to a parent at the other end of a court. As halftime shows go, it’s up there with Red Panda, little kids playing basketball, and either of the two guys I’ve seen who balance things on their chin. (I prefer Amazing Tyler to the Amazing Chin Balancer.)
I cannot call myself a historian of baby racing, but this may have been the greatest moment in this fine sport’s existence. One baby got to half-court, paused for a bit, and decided to walk the rest of the way. “She’d been standing,” her father said afterward, “but she hadn’t been walking!”
Halftime competitions involving fans are great. Sure, you can get into someone doing some old-timey circus act, but I expect the guy doing the German wheel at halftime of the Big Ten women’s basketball tournament to be good at it. Anything can happen when you introduce some randos to the action. Sometimes you get a guy busting his knee in a game of tic-tac-toe; sometimes you get a baby supposedly taking her first steps.
Yes, I know. My wife was already texting me about it. In her experience, babies do not make an instant breakthrough from exclusively crawling to walking from half-court to the top of the key. Let’s say the baby racer had just never taken that many steps before. Still cool. She pulled off the reveal like Seth Rollins did at SummerSlam. Not only was this cute, but it had quite a bit of showmanship involved. Showbabyship?
And for those stodgy baby-racing traditionalists who believe this little girl should have been disqualified for walking, this sport has always been more about spectacle than actual crawling ability. Back in the 1940s, the Palisades Amusement Park baby races once chose a winner “because he was better-looking.” Look, it’s a small sport. You have to take the attention you can get.
