AS MULKEY FINDS A NEW TARGET — L.A. TIMES — CLARK WANTS REVENGE
An all-time showdown awaits in Albany, where Mulkey takes on a new site — which referred to her LSU team as “dirty debutantes” — while Clark wants “you can’t see me” props in search of a championship
What we have on Monday evening, which deserves SoFi Stadium and certainly not South Pearl Street in Albany, N.Y., is a showdown between a gay-baiting coach and the most prominent women’s athlete of an American era. Kim Mulkey vs. Caitlin Clark. If it isn’t the biggest sports event in this land beyond the Super Bowl, what am I missing?
The rise of the female game in 2024? Why it’s larger than anything happening on the men’s side of life? Why we’re counting more TV commercials for Clark and looking to see what Mulkey is wearing in colors and feathers — not much on the chest, some might say — than anything else this spring?
It makes no sense why LSU and Iowa are playing in the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament. But so be it, as Mulkey and LSU advanced Saturday after a no-lawyers-necessary piece about her in the Washington Post, while Clark pushed Iowa into the quarterfinal with her typical 29 points and 15 assists. They have nothing in common beyond a psychotic thrill for basketball, thrusting both into a slaughter mode where anything but a championship fails. They might as well duel now.
Because both are winning, so far, and can’t move on without beating the other. We waited to see if the Post piece would shed light on Mulkey’s contentious career and did not, when it was posted a few hours before her game against UCLA. The story, by the Mulkey-deviled Kent Babb, only portrayed what we already knew: She has treated her gay players with insufficient vibes, though they weren’t treated “more harshly or differently” than straight players, her attorneys told the Post. These were old stories, as ESPN pointed out in saying she’s “known to hold grudges and clash with players, including about their appearances and displays of their sexuality.” Her problems with Britney Griner, who is gay and was imprisoned in Russia for 294 days, are well-known. Her issues with Kelli Griffin are well-known, such as a suspension from Mulkey that was gay-related and led to the end of her career. We knew Emily Neimann made remarks to a gay site, OutSports, that she did not leave Baylor in 2003 “because Coach Mulkey is homophobic.”
Is it immoral that Mulkey prefers her players to be straight? Very much so. But her behavior was apparent for years and never became a major angle until the women became a cultural story. Should LSU dismiss her now because the Post rehashed matters from years back? When she won a national title last season and might win another? Something new and chilling had to come from Babb’s piece. The school won’t be firing her when it didn’t before. Unless Babb speaks, we’ll never know if the Post eliminated excerpts after Mulkey’s threat to sue the paper with defamation lawyers. Does anyone think Post owner Jeff Bezos wants to deal with Team Mulkey in a court of law? In a real world, she might be canned, like Bob Knight at Indiana in 2000.
She won’t be. The world isn’t ready to fire a top women’s coach for wrongdoing. We are supposed to watch.
Besides, she keeps winning. First she went off on the Post, saying “You're telling me something I didn't know. So you're the bearer of good news or bad news or however you want to look at it. Are you really surprised? Are you really surprised by the timing of it? But I can tell you I haven't read it, don't know that I will read it. I'll leave that up to my attorneys.” Then she chose another source, the Los Angeles Times, whose writer, Ben Bolch, wrote a pregame commentary referring to her team as “dirty debutantes” and UCLA as “milk and cookies” in a matchup he described as “good versus evil. Right versus wrong. Inclusive versus divisive.”
“Sexist,” Mulkey said.
“Awful,” she said.
“Wrong,” she said.
Off she went again. “You can criticize coaches all you want. That's our business. You can come at us and say you're the worst coach in America. I hate you, I hate everything about you. We expect that. It comes with the territory,” she said. “But the one thing I'm not going to let you do, I'm not going to let you attack young people, and there were some things in this commentary that you should be offended by as women. It was so sexist. It was good versus evil in that game today. Evil? Called us dirty debutantes? Are you kidding me? I'm not going to let you talk about 18- to 21-year-old kids in that tone.
“I’m not going to let sexism continue. And if you don't think that's sexism, then you're in denial. How dare people attack kids like that. You don't have to like the way we play. You don't have to like the way we trash talk. You don't have to like any of that. We're good with that. But I can't sit up here as a mother and a grandmother and a leader of young people and allow somebody to say that. Because guys, that's wrong. I know sexism when I see it and I read it.”
So now, Mulkey has succeeded in rallying her players against the world. It’s not just a matter of her against the media. They are villains, too. Angel Reese will have the world zoomed on her rematch with Clark, after they traded “you can’t see me” hand gestures during LSU’s victory in last year’s championship game. Right now, after a season when Mulkey temporarily chased her off the team, she’s buying in. She also acknowledged what we’re all realizing.
The women are the essence of March — and April.
“We're the good villains,” Reese said. “Everybody wants to beat LSU. Everybody wants to play against LSU. You’ve got to realize like we’re not any regular basketball team. Coach talks about it all the time, she calls us the Beatles. People run after our bus. People are coming to our games. You’re seeing sellouts, you’re seeing people buying jerseys, you’re seeing more sellouts than the men. We’re impacting the game so much and all of us are super competitive and want to win and do whatever it takes to win. We’re just changing the game. You've got to realize like we're not any regular basketball team. We're just changing the game. We're doing the unknown.”
Her teammate, Flau’jae Johnson, even raps. “People are going to discredit me because I rap and I hoop, so I know I got to go extra hard,” she said.
Amid the craze, Clark shows up, shoots more kid-affectionate jumpers and leads an 89-68 win. Contrary to LSU mania, she smiled and said, “This is so good for women’s basketball. I’ve watched a lot of LSU games. It’s been fun. I know it’s gonna be a great game. It couldn’t be better for our sport.”
And the rage that Ice Cube is offering her $5 million to play in his Big3 league? Please. She’ll be headed to the WNBA in a Nike-infused extravaganza. “I honestly don't talk about those things with really anybody. I have other people that deal with it, and they haven't said a word to me about it,” Clark said. “My main focus is on this team.”
I’m not sure how they are wedged into humanity. One is from Des Moines and the other, as Babb wrote in his dateline, is from Tickfaw, La.
Albany? Are you ready? I’m not sure we are.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.