It’s highly unusual for any professional athlete to be the subject of an editorial published in a major American news, not sports, outlet—even more so for a rookie basketball player in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Unless, perhaps, if they had committed some horrific crime or some egregious sin. I hadn’t expected to be writing about Caitlin Clark so soon after my post last week, or ever again. But an editorial in the Chicago Tribune changed my mind. Clark’s crime, her sin? Her popularity.
Harkening back to a more violent time in the National Hockey League, comedian Rodney Dangerfield once joked, “I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out.” This past Saturday I watched a WNBA basketball game—and hockey game broke out.
With the third quarter winding down in Saturday's WNBA contest between the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, the Sky’s Chennedy Carter leveled Clark with an intentional and clearly premeditated body check that belonged not on the hardwood of a basketball court, but the ice of a hockey rink. Clark was ambushed from behind and sent reeling to the floor. Replays show Carter apparently saying “You Bitch,” and then slamming her shoulder and hips into the smaller and unsuspecting Clark.
In the break between the game’s third and fourth quarters, a flustered Clark diplomatically described the incident to a reporter as “not a basketball play.” That was an understatement. At the time, Carter was assessed a “common” foul, but later the league upgraded it to a Flagrant 1, which is defined, in part, as “unnecessary and/or excessive contact committed by a player against an opponent.” In addition to the foul, Carter also got a high-five from Sky teammate, and frequent Clark antagonist, Angel Reese, when she returned to the bench.
Is this the WNBA or the WWF?
For her part, Carter remains unapologetic, saying she had “no regrets,” and "I’m going to compete and play 100% hard no matter who it is or who we’re playing." Carter, it seems, needs someone to explain to her the meaning of competition—at least competition in the WNBA, not the WWF. In a statement released on Monday, Carter’s coach Teresa Weatherspoon said, “She and I have discussed what happened and that it was not appropriate, nor is it what we do or who we are.”
“The foul committed by Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter was egregious. Outside of a sporting contest, it would have been seen as an assault.”
“The foul committed by Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter was egregious. Outside of a sporting contest, it would have been seen as an assault,” the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board wrote, “Even within a sporting context, it was bad: before the ball even was inbounded, Carter came up from behind Clark, shoving her at the hip and knocking her over. Lip readers simultaneously construed a five-letter epithet dancing on the Sky player’s lips. She should have been ejected from the game.” Incidentally, the Tribune is the home paper for Carter’s Chicago Sky.
In her short time in the WNBA, Clark—the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer, women or men, and two-time National Player of the Year—has unwittingly become a lightening rod in the WNBA’s struggle to attract a wider audience, and for the role that some believe race plays in the league’s failure to capitalize on the nation’s obsession with sports programming.
In a league where the starting rookie salary is $76,000 and most WNBA players play in obscurity, it has been widely speculated that Clark, who recently signed a $28 million endorsement deal with Nike, and is White in a predominately Black league, has become the target of over-the-top physical play.
In her column in the Washington Post just days after the Clark-Carter incident, sports columnist Candace Buckner mocked those who believe that the WNBA is turning a blind-eye to overly aggressive defense on Clark, or that she’s being treated differently than any other league newbie. “We should all protect Caitlin Clark,” she sarcastically writes, “She is the white knight galloping in to save the Dark Continent known as the WNBA, the singular star uplifting an entire women’s sports movement that only now matters because men are watching.”
And speaking of men. “The male-dominated sports media apparatus is stumbling over Caitlin Clark. It is trying to pretend that it hasn’t ignored the WNBA for decades until the superstar rookie came along,” writes CNN Senior Business writer Allison Morrow, “But rather than admitting its blind spots, several male commentators are parachuting themselves into a league they barely understand and dismissing anyone who suggests they could do better.”
Ummm, OK. First, I thought that the WNBA WANTED male sportscasters and fans to pay attention, it is a business after all. Second, is there something so intrinsically unique about women’s basketball that men, “parachuting” in, couldn’t understand? Do women play basketball so differently that a man couldn’t comprehend? Do they play by different rules? No, no, and no.
I know I don’t understand a lot of things about women, there are a few who could tell you that, but I do think that I have at least a rudimentary understanding of basketball, even women’s basketball. And I would think that most male sportscasters do as well.
“The league those women built has always been a physical one,” Morrow writes, “a fact that Clark herself acknowledged in a postgame news conference.” Morrow’s misleading implication; that Clark is OK with the level of physicality directed towards her. She’s not.
Three days before Morrow’s post, Clark said, “I think everybody is physical with me, they get away with things that probably other people don't get away with." Following the Fever’s loss to the Seattle Storm, on May 22, more than a week before Morrow’s article appeared on CNN, Clark told reporters, “"I feel like I'm getting hammered." Not “I feel like getting hammered,” though she might. But, “I’m getting hammered.”
There are those, like Buckner and Morrow, that think that Clark, and her fans, including some sportscasters, are whining. That being used to success—so far Clark’s short tenure in the WNBA has been a struggle—she’s complaining. But during a recent broadcast of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” hosts Michael Wilbon, who is Black, and Tony Kornheiser, who is White, both former columnists for the Washington Post, spoke to the unique challenges facing Clark.
“I’ve watched some of, or all of, almost every game she’s [Clark] played in the WNBA,” Kornheiser began, and “she’s being deliberately hit…it’s a little bit more sinister than a hard welcome to the league.”
“I’ve watched some of, or all of, almost every game she’s [Clark] played in the WNBA,” Kornheiser began, and “she’s being deliberately hit…it’s a little bit more sinister than a hard welcome to the league.” He went on to say that “it appears that the intent sometimes is to injure her,” and warned that “this season cannot be the hazing of Caitlin Clark.”
While Kornheiser spoke to the physicality directed at Clark, Wilbon disabused the idea that her popularity is unearned because many of the new WNBA fans, including sportswriters, are White.
"You have people with all kinds of agendas and people are afraid," Wilbon said. “The discussion about Caitlin Clark has to deal with, and I mean initially and loudly, is race. Race and culture in America. That's part of this."
“It’s OK for people that they identify [with Caitlin Clark],” Wilbon continued “I identify with people…people of color…it’s OK to identify with that…you’re not gonna find that White American star in men’s basketball. Caitlin Clark is that [in women’s basketball]. She brings people in…because she’s great…and she’s unique.”
But let’s get back to where I started, the Chicago Tribune's editorial. “Let’s be clear,” they wrote, “Clark has done nothing to deserve this other than bringing attention to her sport and playing it superbly well…Sure, players on competing teams have no obligation to go easy on Clark, and you might argue that some jealousy is inevitable, but the Saturday incident went beyond any of that, especially since Carter’s teammate Reese appeared to applaud the foul.”
Despite what Buckner and Morrow might believe, it’s not just late to the game, literally, male fans and sportscasters who see the double-standard when it comes to the level of physical play brought to bear against Clark. Geno Auriemma, the Hall of Fame coach of the UCONN women’s basketball team, told ESPN’s Michael Voepel on Wednesday that Clark has been “targeted” with physical play. Oh, and Ms. Morrow, Auriemma didn’t just “parachute” in to the woman's game, he's been coaching the powerhouse UCONN women's program since 1985.
"Is she facing the rookie challenge, the rookie hardships that are inherent with being a rookie? Yes," Auriemma said, "She's also being targeted." He told reporters that he didn’t “remember when [Larry] Bird and Magic [Johnson] came in the league and elevated the NBA, them getting targeted and getting beat up just because of who they were and the attention they were getting.”
Auriemma also called Carter’s telling reporters that she wasn’t going to answer any Caitlin Clark questions at the press conference after the Fever-Sky game "junior high stuff."
The WNBA and its players can’t have it both ways—they can’t want the attention of male sportscasters, sportswriters and fans, and then complain that they don’t like what they’re saying, or grumble that they “don’t understand” women’s basketball. I think the real problem is that they do. If Morrow is right, and the WNBA has “built” a league on “physicality,” maybe they have to come to terms with the fact that it’s not working, and that what the WNBA has been offering isn’t capturing the attention of sports fans, men or women.
And while it’s easy to blame the players and the coaches, ultimately it’s up to the league to decide how they will—or won’t—enforce the rules of the game. If the targeting strategy against Clark works, and they’re permitted to do it, players and coaches will. But it won’t be a successful strategy any longer when their players are amassing fouls and sitting on the bench, and Clark is sinking free throws—or when the fans and attention they've been courting for so long abandon the WNBA.