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The issue: dunking. Or, rather, the absence of dunking.

In the three years the WNBA has been playing (and the two and a half years of its now-defunct rival, the ABL), no woman has ever dunked in a game, and only one has even tried to -- although about 10 current WNBA players have enough "ups" (jumping ability) to successfully jam in practice sessions.

This isn't much of an issue for the women in the league. But men just can't leave it alone.

During the week of the All-Star Game, the mostly male sports media became "almost obsessed," in the words of Comets All-Star guard Sheryl Swoopes, with this singular physical act. The New York Times' William C. Rhoden wrote a column the day of the game titled "A League In Search of a Moment," the moment being the dunk. Never mind the fact that even in the men's game the dunk is almost entirely a style over substance move -- not to mention that by all appearances women journalists, the players and their approximately 10,000 rabidly loyal fans a game (70 percent of whom are women) couldn't care less about seeing it, at least for the time being.

The players' feelings were made obvious during some tense exchanges in the locker room following the somewhat lopsided West team victory.

"I don't know why you guys are so overly concerned with women dunking," two-time MVP Cynthia Cooper of the Comets snapped at me when I became the umpteenth male member of the press core to approach her about the topic. "People need to realize that we play a different kind of game. If a woman dunks, great, more power to her -- but it's not what determines whether our game is exciting or not."

The issue's sexual overtones took on comical proportions in the response of another player, the Phoenix Mercury's Jen Gillom, who told me, "It's just different for us. For us to do it, everything has to be just right."

Thanks to her towering stature, the Utah Starzz's 7-foot-2-inch Margot Dydek can dunk with ease -- as she, and a few other women, have done in European leagues, to little fanfare. But she prefers to lay the ball quietly off the backboard. "Why should we care about the dunk?" she said in a phone interview. "Two points is two points. When dunking is worth five points, then I'll think more about dunking."

Of course, women pros also know that a major appeal of sports is aesthetic, and they're the first to admit that no woman now has the kind of leaping ability that would enable them to dunk with the kind of grace worthy of slow-motion replay. They know they look a lot better, and are equally, if not more, effective, banking the ball off the glass than attempting a stilted and risky jam.

It is precisely this all-too-obvious point -- along with the fact that, especially in the sports arena, men have always seemed a little too eager to point out that they have something they think that women want -- that makes me suspicious of pieces like Rhoden's or the one by the San Francisco Chronicle's Jonathan Curiel, who wrote last year that the dunk "could revolutionize the way women's basketball is perceived."

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