I didn’t see this coming, but I probably should have.
When the hype gets as high as it has around Caitlin Clark — hailed not just as a great basketball player but also, more than a little unfairly, as a savior come to rescue women’s sports — there is bound to be backlash and, of course, backlash to the backlash.
And when you add in the elements of race and gender, as we do here, in addition to money and fame, you have not just a basketball story, you have a story as old as, well, personkind.
Michael Jordan can tell you one of the more famous versions of this story, which we’ll get to in a few minutes.
First we go to the recent infamous hip check from Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter that sent Clark sprawling to the floor. That’s the incident — for which Carter doesn’t apologize — that sparked a flaming controversy that, if anything, puts Clark even more into the spotlight.
It’s the incident that moves the conversation past bad ESPN takes — the worst comes, naturally, from Pat McAfee — and into an outraged, if slightly unhinged, Chicago Tribune editorial likening the flagrant foul to a criminal assault.
In a far smarter take, Michael Wilbon said on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” that too many in the media are afraid to discuss Clark in the perspective of what he called “the third rail” of race.
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“The discussion about Caitlin Clark has to deal with — and I mean initially and loudly — race,” Wilbon said. “Race and culture in America. That’s part of it. And basketball is the place where it’s more often discussed historically.”
Wilbon takes us back to Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and their rivalry and how too many people saw that rivalry, which would later evolve into a timeless friendship, through a racial lens.
Clark is, of course, a phenomenon, and not just for her logo-primed three-pointers. She’s got flair and she’s got talent and she has that ineffable quality that stars are made of. By the end of her college career at Iowa, she had been seen in the two highest rated basketball games ever broadcast on ESPN — men’s or women’s, college or pro.
If you’re looking for a way to measure Clark’s magnitude, try this: She was the best known college basketball player, of any gender, last season. That’s a first. And after Clark, there’s this idea that maybe it wouldn’t be the last.
But the question is, would she be this famous — would she have gotten those kinds of ratings and endorsements — if she were Black?
What we know is that when she came to the WNBA this season, she brought with her the cameras and the ratings and the whole package, which included the $28 million Nike shoe deal and all the other endorsements that, from one perspective anyway, did put her in a league of her own.
But more than anything else, she brought attention.
Everyone noticed, including the players in the league she was joining, most of whom had never seen attention like that. No one had ever played before crowds like that. None of them has ever made money like that.
Clark’s Indiana Fever team, which is near the bottom of the standings, sells out everywhere. But something else has happened. Attendance is up — way up — in the WNBA for Clark-free games.
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And yet, even though the Clark phenomenon has done wonders for the league, is there jealousy from some veteran players?
Of course, there’s jealousy.
Does the jealousy have anything to do with race? Who knows? If you’re an NBA fan, you might remember the time that Dennis Rodman, who is Black, said that Bird is only considered a great player “because he’s white.”
Is the physical play that Clark has seen — and not just from the hip check — about jealousy or is it about something else?
You may not have seen the clip showing Angel Reese — who’s Black and who was Clark’s great college rival and who is now a rookie player for the Chicago Sky — being slammed to the floor.
You may have seen the clip, though, in which Reese defended her teammate’s foul of Clark.
The casual fan — and most of the new fans would qualify — may not understand that the WNBA is a physical league. They may not understand that elbows get thrown. Hips get checked. Fouls occasionally get flagrant. They may not understand that female athletes are real athletes. They may not know, because they’ve never watched, that it’s a grown person’s league.
Before Clark played her first WNBA game, future Hall of Famer Diana Taurasi warned that “reality is coming.” And so it has.
But some new fans, who may see the game only through a Clark-focused lens, may not understand that the double teams and the hard contact are how she has to be played. Instead, they may see conspiracy in the fact that Clark has not been great, not yet. She’s good, but she’s still learning.
Some of those new fans don’t appreciate either the fact that Clark can be chippy herself. It runs counter to the image. But what can only help her image is how little she has had to say about the physical defense she’s seen. It’s not only classy of her, but also smart.
Which brings us to the greatest endorser, and not incidentally greatest player, of them all, Michael Jordan, who is, of course, Black and who has sold millions of bottles of Gatorade and millions of shoes and way too many fast-food hamburgers.
In 1985, his rookie year, Jordan played in the All-Star Game in Indianapolis, in what came to be known as the “Freeze Out” game. Jordan scored only seven points and didn’t see the ball very much. One of his all-star teammates was future Hall of Fame guard Isiah Thomas, who, the story goes, resented Jordan’s early fame, resented his huge Nike deal and initiated a plot to keep the ball out of Jordan’s hands. He wanted the spotlight, as the story is told and retold, to remain with established stars like Magic and Bird and Dr. J and the Iceman and, yes, Thomas.
There’s some question whether any of this actually happened. Certainly, from what I know, Magic and Bird and Dr. J seemed above all that. But Jordan did score an un-Michael-like seven points, and the story, which the great NBA writer Sam Smith calls “the stuff of legend,” has become accepted fact.
As the line goes from the great western movie, “Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
As Smith recalls Jordan in his rookie year, he was in awe of his fellow all stars and, in Jordan’s words, he was quiet around them because he didn’t want to appear “arrogant.” He was, Smith wrote, a “Mr. and Ma’am guy” at that stage of his life.
Smith doesn’t believe the story, as he details in this great piece. But you know who does believe the story. Yes, Michael Jordan believes the story.
And many years later when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Jordan would say, “I’m going to thank a couple people that you guys probably wouldn’t even think that I would thank — Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, George Gervin. They say it was a so-called ‘Freeze-Out’ in my rookie season. You guys gave me the motivation to say, ‘You know what, evidently I haven’t proved enough to these guys. I gotta prove to them that I deserve what I’ve gotten on this level.’”
And so he did.
And so might Caitlin Clark, who hasn’t publicly made an issue at all about the physical play. That shows not only class, but also the kind of insight you might not expect from a rookie.
But will she become a WNBA superstar? There’s every chance she will. But what I think I can say with some certainty is that a hip check won’t stand in her way.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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