“It Was Like Nothing I Ever Experienced”: NY Liberty Owner Reflects on Team’s Ticker-Tape Parade
September 30, 2025
After a near two-decade run in Washington D.C., the Atlantic Festival – the flagship event of Atlantic Magazine – moved its slate of bold, dynamic programming to Lower Manhattan for the first time. For two days in September, across two theaters in the Perelman Arts Center (PAC NYC), festivalgoers were treated to idea sessions and panel discussions featuring some of the country’s most influential voices in politics, culture, business, technology and media. Session topics leaned towards the macro, raising questions with global, occasionally existential, implications: what role does A.I. play in the future of humanity? How have societal expectations shaped things for women? Can technology and art coexist?
But some conversations hit closer to home. In a session dubbed “The Future of Women’s Sports,” which examined the booming business of women’s sports fifty years after the passage of Title IX, Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill spoke with Clara Wu Tsai, the owner of the New York Liberty. Though the Liberty have been playing in New York since 1997, the team’s popularity has been on a steady rise for the past few years, culminating last season with their historic WNBA Championship win.
When the Liberty defeated the Minnesota Lynx in October of 2024, the victory triggered a beloved and long-standing New York City tradition: the celebratory ticker-tape parade. Before that, a ticker-tape parade — which the Downtown Alliance teams up with the city to help produce — had not been held in New York since 2021, and had never before been held for a New York-based women’s sports team.
Wu Tsai reflected on the Liberty’s whirlwind victory lap on stage at PAC NYC. “The winning, the feeling on the court, the confetti, and then the parade was like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and nothing really that the players – even those who had won championships – had ever experienced,” she said. “Just the way the city came out and really supported and treated these players like rock stars… it still brings me chills.”
You can watch “The Future of Women’s Sports” session from the 2025 Atlantic Festival in full on YouTube, and relive last fall’s ticker-tape festivities on our Instagram.
