Local ferry commuters and tourist riders who anticipated The Golden State Valkyries debut here this season were first intrigued by the jersey design unveiled by the women’s national basketball franchise.
For it features a sight familiar to anyone using waterborne craft: The San Francisco Bay Bridge from beneath the iconic structure.
This perspective provides a “v”-shaped angle for the logo designed by Cartwright, an agency which gave the LA Clippers a similar vantage point of a sailing vessel for its branding.
According to the designers, they were aiming to symbolize the connection between San Francisco and Oakland with the bridge cables doubling as wings and the tower doubling as a sword.
The thirteen lines from the sword represent the Valkyries as the thirteenth team in the league, and the wings split the space into five triangles to represent the ten players on the court.
Meanwhile, sports fans may not be too well acquainted with the origins and development of the Valkyries from Germanic paganism to later Norse mythology.
Most scholars believe Valkyries were probably originally viewed as “demons of the dead to whom warriors slain on the battlefield belonged,” and that a shift in interpretation may have occurred when the concept of Valhalla changed from a battlefield to a “warrior’s paradise.”
Richard Wagner first incorporated “Ride of the Valkyries” in his classic musical composition Die Walkure, and San Francisco film director Francis Ford Coppola featured the music in “Apocalypse Now” for a scene where helicopter avenging angels exterminate soldiers and civilians in an enemy jungle village.
When the music comes blaring over the stadium’s sound system – the massive Chase Center jumbotron – it can be unnerving.
Opera, too, is a big deal in San Francisco. We have a world class company dating back to Gold Rush days, led by Asian-American, Eun Sun Kim, the first female conductor to be named music director.
The fact that the Valkyries have an Asian-American coach – Natalie Nakasse – is also a nice bit of synchronicity.
But because women’s basketball has yet to develop the cache our opera has, building an identity remains something of a struggle.
As a consequence, the team has coined the slogan “Put Your V’s Up,” which may or may not have sexual connotations.
The in-game hand gesture encourages fans to hold their index and middle fingers up together. According to the team, the phrase “put your ‘vs’ up” challenges the opponent to Bring It On.
But in another context, it clearly imitates the “V” for Victory popularized by Winston Churchill during the Second World War, and by the 1960s it was used by U.S. students protesting the Vietnam War as a Peace Symbol.
Even today the gesture can arouse anger in citizens of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand where it means “up yours.”
What would Camille Anna Paglia – the Italian-American academic and social critic – would make of this is anyone’s guess.
In her fourth essay collection, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education, she observes that sports and celebrity is a practice that actually harms the self-esteem of those who are not rich, famous, or attractive enough to belong to the group, while further defining women only by a very narrow, often sexualized stereotype.
And from an operatic perspective, what have the Valkyries to do with these sadly exploited women?
So on our way to a recent game via ferry, our informal focus group came up with exotic “V” alternatives like “Vicunas,” “Vixens,” “Vespers,” and “Vestal Virgins.”
Finally, in keeping with the public perception of San Francisco being a lawless city, we suggest that “Vice” has a nice “Ring” to it.
Hojotoho! Hojotoho!