(FORTUNE Magazine) – On June 21 the National Basketball Association will launch its riskiest experiment ever: the Women's National Basketball Association. Positioning this new league is no easy task--five prior women's leagues have melted down in the past 25 years--but if women are ever to have a league of their own, now is the time. Why? Because America--particularly corporate America--finally seems ready.

Encouraged by the idea of fresh programming for the lazy days of summer, NBC, ESPN, and Lifetime have each signed five-year revenue-sharing packages to telecast the games. And the WNBA has landed big corporate players, who sense a trailblazing way to reach young women and soccer moms. General Motors, Sears, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and Nike are among the dozen companies that have placed three-year, approximate $10 million bets, deals that provide exclusive sponsorship in national and local markets. Anheuser-Busch, for example, won't have to share airtime or courtside signage with any other brewer. Moreover, players cannot endorse products by non-WNBA companies. "This level of exclusivity gave us a very nice comfort level, considering this is a league that hasn't played a game yet," says Tony Ponturo, Anheuser-Busch's sports marketing chief.

Players like Lynette Woodard have waited a long time for such a moment. Woodard, 37, has played on pro women's teams in Sicily and Japan, as well as for the Harlem Globetrotters--but the WNBA offers her her first chance to play on a full-fledged pro women's team at home, as a guard for the Cleveland Rockers. "When I was in college in the late 1970s, women's basketball was a little box score in the corner of the newspaper," she says. "Now we'll be on NBC and ESPN."

For all the muscle behind it, however, the nascent league faces some tough challenges. To succeed over the long haul, it will have to draw a substantial number of male fans, who make up the overwhelming majority of America's sports audience. The NBA is optimistic that half of the new league's fan base will be male, but in truth it's impossible to tell whether men will tune in once the novelty wears off. And it's not a foregone conclusion that women will watch in vast numbers, either.

Another issue: the WNBA has a rival, the American Basketball League, which played its debut season this spring. One women's league is going to be tough enough to establish; can two coexist? Sports history has not been kind to duopolies. In the 1970s, the American Basketball Association was unable to keep up with the NBA, and called it quits. A similar fate befell the U.S. Football league in the 1980s. (Remember Donald Trump's New Jersey Generals?) With the NBA name, the TV deal, and the corporate money, the WNBA is the clear favorite to survive.

Mere survival, of course, isn't the WNBA's goal--it wants to be a thriving (if smaller-scale) counterpart of the men's league. Ironically, its best chance for success lies in being everything the men's league is not--namely: accessible, affordable, and stocked with down-to-earth athletes who lack the ego, greed, and boorishness of their male counterparts. WNBA CEO Val Ackerman naturally resists such a comparison, but with $15 tickets and family-oriented promotions, the WNBA is positioning itself to be the kinder, gentler hoop experience. Says Woodard: "That's how the NBA is going to assure us a future. It's our ace card." It had better be: Should the WNBA fail, it will be a long, long time before anyone else puts up big bucks for women's basketball.

--Edward A. Robinson