A'ja Wilson on Money, Privacy, and What Losing Teaches You

A'ja Wilson spent the Friday of WNBA All-Star weekend on stage at the Chicago Theatre alongside Sue Bird and Dwyane Wade, taping an episode of Everyone Watches Women's Sports in front of an audience. The TOGETHXR show is hosted by Ari Chambers and Sam Jay.

J.P. Morgan Wealth Management presented the evening, which is not incidental. All three panellists sit on the JPMorganChase Athlete Council, set up earlier this year to help players handle their money across a career rather than at the end of one. Jalen Brunson, Megan Rapinoe and Tom Brady are also on it.

The lesson she wishes she had learned earlier

Wilson's central point is unglamorous: big cheques shrink. A young athlete arriving in a professional league sees a number that looks enormous and does not yet understand what will come out of it.

Her argument is not for austerity. Players have earned the money and are entitled to spend it. What matters is getting educated early on who to trust, how to establish that trust, and what to actually do with the money, which is the gap the council exists to close.

Not all money is good money

That phrase comes from her mother, and Wilson applies it to endorsements. Opportunities arrive from large brands that a player is not aligned with, and the mismatch runs both ways: the brand will not get her best work and she will not get the best out of them.

She extends the same scepticism to what athletes see on their phones. The optics fool people. Everyone appears to be living well, and she is glad if they are, but social media disguises as much as it displays. What you see is a list of things somebody has, not what it cost them.

Letting the cameras in

ESPN's Life in the W follows her, and she describes arriving at a stage of adulthood where she is comfortable sharing parts of her life, or at least glimpses of it, while still protecting her peace.

The pressure she names is constant and specific: what is she eating, what is she wearing, who is she with, where is she going. She accepts the interest without accepting the obligation to answer all of it.

On the series featuring her boyfriend, the NBA player Bam Adebayo, she hopes people see how ordinary it is. It was very them, she says. They are not built for foolishness, and they back each other.

Why losing is the more useful teacher

What she takes from defeat is a clearer sense of how hard winning is. Winning disguises everything, she says. You decide the small problems you swept aside do not matter, because the result says otherwise. Losing magnifies every one of them.

Her account of leadership follows from that. She does not lead two teammates the same way, because they are not the same people, and the job is working out which role and which version of herself each situation needs.

The part she returns to is not tactical. Last season, she says, she watched teammates heal in front of her, through grief and anxiety, and could see the breakthroughs happening. That, rather than the trophies, is what she describes as the joy of it.