Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese Deserved Better

Racist and sexist trolls almost took over the conversation of the W this season, despite the great play from the women who populate the league, including rookies, Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark.

I’ve avoided talking and writing about the WNBA like I would avoid a new strain of COVID-19 because the chatter about Catlin Clark and Angel Reese, two of the most popular and important players in the W this season, has been stupendously stupid. Clark, 22, is the transformative star of the Indiana Fever. A first overall pick out of the University of Iowa, Clark has taken the league’s popularity up several notches on account of her classically magnfiicient skills; an undeniable fact, despite the uneasiness it has brought to the discourse surrounding the league, a complicated discourse which wasn’t particularly pretty to begin with. (Does anyone remember the Skylar Diggins and Diana Taurasi beef?) If basketball is an offensive game about scoring, then balancing out that scoring ability with timely and creative playmaking, then Clark should hoist promotional videos for families looking to teach their young girl the basic adeptness. It can be fantastical to hear the giddy chatter about her game; The WNBA has had some truly excellent players — women who are the barometer for Clark herself, women who are in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, women who are the originators of the league itself — play in the league, but Clark’s ability still outweighs the hype. She fires indiscriminately, pushes the ball with vigor, and plays with a bratty confidence that would make Kobe Bryant, Regina George, Luka Doncic, and Tracy Flick equally as proud. Reese, 22, is initiated in the secret society of rebounders that are so elite at that one skill that it overrides their other minor limitations. Watching her is like watching a shark look for blood. Her peerless beauty, it-girl fashion and round wagon off the court is startling, perhaps because of her reckless abandon on the court; abandon that takes Dennis Rodman’s nose for the ball and wonders how it would look like with a decent low-post game. To see her is to see basketball in the form of an urban city: mighty, intense, passionate. Both women have had ridiculously fun rookie seasons: Clark, for all the rightful talk about her shooting, is an excellent passer, and she has had games where she thoroughly dominated the offense, dropping what I like to call, the cosmopolitan double-double — when you do the accomplishment using points and assists. She made it to the All-Star game, where Clark and Reese made plays together, and won the Rookie of the Year. Where Clark personality shines on the court (Clark’s an underrated trash talker), Reese is a talker on it, and an innovative and gregarious self-promoter off of it. Reese, when asked by Holly Rowe why she was successful with 25 points and 16 rebounds against the Fever, said “I am a dog. That’s why. That’s what I do.” Reese’s Insatgram is populated with outfits; like Serena Williams, she has become a fashion-forward persona, using her page and tunnel photos to show a unique fit every week. Clark is a hooper in the form of Kobe Bryant or Diana Tarausi; For Reese, basketball is the main course in a glamorous persona. Presently, both women are no longer playing. Clark was bounced out in the first round, while, after a hairline fracture in her wrist on September 6th, Reese missed the rest of the season. As the W season ends, we glide through, watching players that have taken an unfortunate backseat throughout the season because of Clark’s aggressive and sincere stardom, and Reese’s unfiltered charisma. The season may very well finish with the hometown Liberty, who are 32-8, winning the championship; the league has generally been amusing to watch the past couple of years — the Aces’s A’ja Wilson is one of the greatest scorers the game has ever seen — however, this season it has belonged to Clark and Reese, and the chatter, plus differentiating identities, that surrounds both of their orbits. 

Much to the dismay of basketball fans, the caustic and troll-filled talk that have followed both women — but particularly Reese — has been cripplingly disappointing. Consider, for a moment, the Catlin Clark fan circle: pure fraternity bro blusters, or midwestern celebrities, such as Ted Lasso’s Jason Sudeikis who got famous by executing a kind of comedy that caters to an annoying underbelly of wholesome white males. The annoyance has seeped into broadcasting: Pat McAfee speaks about Clark as if she is his long-lost daughter, or even worse, her niece that he barely sees but is somehow fiercely paternally protective of. (At one point, on June 3rd, he described Clark as a “cash cow.”). Although he said that the other players don’t have to treat him differently, he was weirdly not saying much of anything at all — only obfuscating the truth about Clark’s whiteness and identity with an awkward attempt to compare her to the phenomenon of Eminem. McAfee’s gift, perhaps one of his few, is that he is relatable and has an apolitical but still unabashed whiteness within him, someone who might have worked next to your cubicle, and could not stop talking about his and your female boss and her looks. He doesn’t speak english; he speaks “bro speak”, and he’s adept at it, so much so he makes Kendall Roy seem like someone who has read Moby Dick. If McAfee, and his more politically charged bedfellow Dave Portnoy — who has rallied around Clark for reasons that would obviously make sense if you took one look at his Twitter profile — are strident defenders of the white athlete, then they have found their match with Clark, despite this not necessarily being her fault. 

My consciousness of both of these women and their existence started during the 2023 NBAA Division 1 Women’s Basketball National Championship Game, where Reese’s LSU Tigers trounced Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes. I had not seen either woman play much before this game, which I decided to watch because of the hype leading up to the game. (The game would have a peak viewership of 12.4 million, the largest for a women's college basketball game ever). Reese, a transfer from Maryland (she hails from Baltimore), was incredible throughout the tournament. Playing for legendary coach Kim Mulkey — an intense, passionate, and frustratingly controversial figure in her own right — Reese was a fascinating bully, racking up points, rebounds, celebrations, and glances from opponents with ease. My favorite thing, which was slightly missing from her game in the W this season, was when she would exploit a mismatch on the top of the free throw line, or the elbow, blowing past Iowa’s Kate Martin, or even Monika Czinano, and finishing with a smooth lefty layup. She was unstoppable, winning the Most Outstanding Player award for the entire tournament. Clark, too, was electric, carrying Iowa until the roster of LSU took over. Although she would get her revenge against Reese the next season, Clark’s dominated LSU in the Sweet 16 the next season, people walked away from the game appreciating Clark’s game, because her game is much too excellent to truly oppose. 

It was the celebration by Reese that became infamous, sending the internet into a tailspin. Towards the end of the game, Reese did the John Cena “you can’t see me” celebration, which Clark started doing throughout that tournament. After the game, Reese was called “classless”, an obviously loaded term, while floods of defenses came in, defending Reese from this coded claim. So intolerable was this indeed, that Reese, after the game, began to defend herself. “So this was for the girls that look like me, that’s going to speak up on what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you”, said Reese. Yet, calling Reese a victim would be vain: she did this in front of Clark, towards the end of a blowout, and in front of the camera, twice, for everyone to see. Reese was trying to make a statement, or perhaps only trying to show her characteristic exuberance, in a way that brought the exuberance to a .180 degree of cockiness. Whatever the reasoning, she knew what she was doing. It was not only within the parameters of the game, but rather a purposeful celebration of having defeated Clark and her team. This is a good thing: swagger doesn’t have to fit within any perfect scenario; it can exist in a way that can be annoying and brash as well. The Fab Five didn’t always celebrate in the most opportune and friendly way. Sometimes, to be charismatic is to also get underneath people’s skin to do it. 

What Clark’s fans have now done is even more narcissistic. By far the greatest quality of Clark is her passion for the game, which does not always make her enjoyable to play with and watch. (I relate to her on many levels. ESPN Senior Writer, Wright Thompson, once called her “Kobe with a ponytail”). She is hard on her teammates, and even in the W, has ruffled feathers because she refuses to back down and “be humble”, as Kendrick Lamar would advise. She is not lacking in confidence. She seemed unfazed when Diana Taurasi spoke about her not being ready to take over the WNBA. Clark wouldn’t want success without battle; victory without war; awards without criticism. Almost certainly, she likes proving people wrong, sending opponents in a fury when they realize this Catholic school girl is as brilliant as the media makes her out to be. Portnoy discussing her as this angelic figure who should not be harmed, and antaognizing Reese — and everybody else — in the process, does more a disservice to Clark than any of the fans of Reese, or the other WNBA stars, could do. It takes Clark to be someone protected by a media class of powerful men, and not the youthful basketball star that she is, figuring out her fame with the rest of us. It makes her out to be a basic lily-white angel, when she is much more brash and entertaining than that; it makes her fanbase emboldened, trolly, and without any self-awareness at all; it makes people distrust her, because they see people who root for her, and look like her, trolling Black athletes and their fans, out of sheer privilege and bluster. Furthermore, identity plays a part in this. Identity groups root for themselves all the time, and that is part of being human because there is nothing more viscerally affecting than seeing people who look like you achieve things or suffer things (those identities rarely root for Black athletes, but that’s another conversation) but it usually only turns into racist pot stirring when white athletes, thus white fans, are involved. Why is this the case? There are many reasons; but it has turned a great story into an exhausting ones. 

Clark deserves better; Reese deserves much better. There’s been a small subset of people who want Clark to speak out against trolls, something that I am less convinced of. For starters, athletes are athletes — not congresswomen. LeBron James wanted to be more than a basketball player and now, there are endless conversations about non-basketball things related to his career, and power plays that I am not at all interested in. Still, Clark did end up saying something, albeit small, about the racist comments from “fans.” (“It’s definitely upsetting," Clark said on Friday, Sept. 27 in a video shared by James Boyd of the Athletic. "Nobody in our league should be facing any sort of racism, hurtful, disrespectful, hateful comments and threats," she continued. “Those are trolls. Those are not fans”). That’s a solid statement, even though it’s embarrassing that anyone has to make a statement about racism. Soon, Reese and Clark will be back on the court. It’ll probably be naive of me to hope that trolls won’t be there with them.

ONE NOTE ABOUT AARON JUDGE:

Last night, the New York Yankees had an opportunity to give starter Carlos Rodón a cushion, and they failed, starting when slugger Aaron Judge struck out on a 2-2 fastball. It’s been a rough first two games for Judge, whose team will go as far as he takes them. Judge had a show stopping regular season, a fancy one equivalent to a mutton chop steak at Keen’s Steakhouse. But, so far in the postseason, he’s museum food, not catching up to fastballs and missing his trademark timing. It’s upsetting for Yankees fans, this writer included, who know what he is capable of, and know that the team desperately needed his bat to give them some breathing room in a game against the scrappy Royals. 

Is being clutch an actual feature? It’s been a topic of much debate, a topic that start nerds might want to eradicate from conventional thinking. Sure, the Skip Bayless’s of the world used that word to discriminate against some of the game's greatest players, but I do believe you would be naive to think that every human being knows how to relax the most when their team needs it. Judge hasn’t yet been able to carry us, when he has the ability to do so. His comfort at the plate isn’t as braggadocious as it was in the regular season. Furthermore, compare that to the Houston Astros, whose stars never failed to come through for them in their run for the past seven seasons. Compare that to legends like Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, who were nearly impossible to get out when October rolled around. Baseball is a game of failure; tremendously so, for Judge, so far, who’s been lousy with runners on base. The Yankees play at Kauffman Stadium tomorrow night, and Judge has had success in that park. The time is now; fans have been wondering whether he is a loser, or a winner, the past couple of nights. That binary is not perfect, but if he drives in runs, then we wouldn’t have to worry about perfect binaries; we’d be winning crucial games.