Hundreds of supporters clad in the team’s signature Statue of Liberty aquamarine lined Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes. Office workers at the windows above dumped reams of shredded paper including some toilet paper rolls, with actual ticker tape hard to come by these days.
The team’s victorious players, including Sabrina Ionesco, Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones, rode on floats north along Broadway towards City Hall as ecstatic crowds cheered them on.
“I’ve been here from the beginning,” said 59-year-old Jocelyn Murphy, a court clerk who lives in East New York. Murphy said she’d been attending Liberty games since 1997 and been a seasoned ticket holder since 2020. “It’s a long time coming. I still can’t really believe it but it’s here: We’re champions.”
The Liberty’s ticker-tape parade was the city’s first since essential workers were celebrated in 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic subsided. It was the first parade for a New York sports team since the Giants’ Super Bowl celebration in 2012 — or the Yankees’ World Series triumph in 2009 if you only count teams that actually play their home games in the state.
The city’s previous ticker-tape parades for women’s teams came after the U.S. Soccer Team’s World Cup wins in 2015 and 2019.
“It was women who brought it here. We got the Nets. You got the Knicks. They didn’t do it,” said Arabia Buckler, 63-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant resident.
Her friend Mahazi Roundtree, 67, Harlem resident butted in: “So now we gotta get them pay equity. They have to make the same amount of money as NBA, as the men, if not more because they are champions.”
Rookies in the WNBA earn $64,000 with the maximum salary for veteran players capping out at $241,984. Many of the league’s athletes also play in international leagues during its off-season to supplement their incomes. Their pay pales in comparison to the NBA, where the biggest stars can rake in as much as $48 million a year and the lowest-paid rookies earn at least a million dollars a season.
Keys to the City
On stage before receiving their keys to the city, players reflected on their team, the city, and their championship.
“Being able to be drafted here and knowing the work that we’ve put in to get to this point today, being at this parade, being able to see so many people just celebrating us” was a special moment, Ionescu said.
“I think I’m a New Yorker now.”
Jones, the Finals MVP, stepped on stage draped in the flag of the Bahamas, where she was born. She called the win was a culmination of moving to the United States to pursue basketball.
“Just look at everybody out here, look at the parade, look at New York City!,” she said, calling the win a culmination of her move to the United States to pursue basketball.
“Comes down to the Bahamas, it’s about to get lit all over again,” she said.
Thursday’s celebration of the Liberty brought full circle a tradition that dates back to a 1886 celebration of the newly installed Statue of Liberty when stock market workers inside the buildings above the Broadway parade route threw out reams of ticker tape to partake in the celebration.
Mayor Eric Adams rode a float in the parade, alongside Governor Kathy Hochul who has reportedly pressured him to clean house in the wake of his historic indictment last month on federal corruption charges.
Tim Pearson, one of his top former advisors who resigned a few weeks ago after his phones were seized by federal authorities, was spotted at City Hall before the ceremony. He declined to answer questions from THE CITY about why he was in the building or any potential federal investigation; he is also named in four separate sexual harassment lawsuits.
“The players of this team personify the energy, the spirit of this city, during a time where so many people are trying to figure out, ‘How do I express myself,’” Adams shouted to the crowd, which greeted him with a mix of cheers and boos.
“They say, ‘the hell with you judging me, we’re gonna be who we are. We’re going to play to win.’ And they were able to play to win. That’s what this is about,” Adams said, quickly pivoting to his own role as mayor, “It’s about the greatest city in the globe having a bald-headed, earring-wearing mayor being able to lead this city.”
‘Girls Support Girls’
But the mayor’s legal woes were far from the minds of parade attendees Thursday. Friends Savannah Goldberg and Ariana Gershkowitz, both 9, traveled with their families to the city from their home in Brewster, N.Y. to cheer the Liberty. They both play on the same travel team and became fans of the team two years ago.
“The playoffs were really crazy,” Goldberg said. Both kids said their favorite players are Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart, who they referred to by her nickname “Stewie.”
A gaggle of tween basketball players with an Orange Country team called “New York’s Finest” ditched school and traveled to Manhattan to support the Liberty because “girls support girls,” several agreed.
“It’s really cool to see that girls just like us who used to watch the WNBA and cheer on and wish to be there, end up going there,” said 12-year-old Drew Moore.
Joan Valentine, 77, and her younger sister Janice Battle, 76, first fell in love with basketball watching Catholic Youth Organization games at Our Lady of Victory parish in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
They went to the first Liberty games in 1997 and became season ticket holders the next year – sitting under both baskets before finally being able to afford center-court seats.
“We went to Radio City, we went to New Jersey, we went to Westchester, we went to the tennis game,” Valentine said, referring to all of the places the Liberty have played home games.
“In all the years we only missed three games – because people died, we had to go to funerals.”
Their emotions had been up and down during Sunday’s game seven victory over the Minnesota Lynx. Valentine, a retired public school teacher who now lives in Harlem, kept repeating her mantra: “Number 1 is gonna be number 1.”
Battle, who’s retired from working on Wall Street and now lives in Bushwick, was more emotional after the Liberty’s overtime win. “After 28 years, I cried,” she said.
