AS THE WORLD WONDERS ABOUT RACE AND MONEY, CAITLIN CLARK NEEDS A VICTORY
She arrives in Los Angeles at 0-5, battered by Black players, and at some point, Clark will catch an inbound pass for a late win instead of mishandling it and turning her new life into a negative daze
Whether they’re moguls or pretenders, however they are contrived now, Hollywood’s movie executives will show up. They want to see Caitlin Clark in Los Angeles but not for the jubilant reasons they thought. She is 0-5 with the Indiana Fever. This week, she had a chance to win a game but botched the inbound pass. She was badgered in the face by Breanna Stewart. Her left ankle is sore. She is shooting only 32.6 percent beyond the three-point line, which made her fame, and averages six turnovers a game.
And after the fifth WNBA defeat, the same number she lost in her last season at Iowa, she chomped on her nails and gripped her fists at the podium. Her best teammate, Aliyah Boston, deleted Twitter from her phone. Her head coach, Christie Sides, might lose her job. All while Clark has agreed to a $28 million contract with Nike and a large deal with Wilson, which created a signature collection of basketballs with only one other player — Michael Jordan — and joined State Farm, Gatorade and other companies supporting her.
There are loud people in America, Black and White, who think Clark is immensely overrated and profited from a flurry of logo shots and exquisite feeds that brought 24 million viewers to her national championship loss. One is Jemele Hill, who refuses to remember why I happen to enjoy Clark while also counting Jordan and Stephen Curry among my favorite players to cover. Her ample trail of long-range bombs, every game, lured me to watch telecasts. If she was Black, I’d have had the same eagerness. Hill seems to be contacted these days, as she was by the Los Angeles Times, only when it’s time to describe Whites such as me as racists.
“We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity,” said Hill, a podcaster run off by ESPN because she dismissed Donald Trump as a “white supremacist” while broadcasting “SportsCenter.”
So, her comments have allowed Black players to make the same claim in the WNBA. “A lot of people may say it’s not about Black and white, but to me, it is,” said Aja Wilson, a two-time league MVP and two-time champion based in Las Vegas. “You can be top-notch at what you are as a Black woman, but maybe that’s something that people don’t want to see. They don’t see it as marketable, so it doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug. That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.”
She weighs 152 pounds and is 6 feet tall. Clark not only is a moving target — every second, every game, every week, for the rest of her pro career — but symbolizes what remains explosive about racism in America. All she wants to do is hoop. She respects Wilson when asked about her remarks, saying, “There's opportunities for every single player in women's basketball. The more opportunities we can give across the board, that's what's going to elevate women's basketball.” It certainly isn’t Clark’s fault that she is called for major endorsements, when Nike gives her a massive jackpot in a league where she’ll otherwise make $338,000 in four years. It isn’t her fault that her presence magnifies the WNBA in a nation of previously bored fans.
But she represents the White female, described as someone’s “mom” by a marketing professor, who takes advantage of financial breaks when Black women’s players haven’t done so. I don’t have to think much to grasp Serena Williams, regarded as the finest of all recent female athletes, Black or White. Turns out Caitlin Clark, who does look like a mom, perfected 35-footers. We watched. Then she went to the big leagues.
Now it’s hell. Until she prevails once — much less scores 35 a game to her current 17.8 — she’ll hear the social view of her slump to winlessness. The movie people were thinking about a full-blast treatment of her life. They just want her to make a shot and not turn the ball over. The last two losses have been close. They’re still zeroes.
“These two definitely hurt the most. We're, what, six points away from being 2-3 instead of 0-5? It's that close,” Clark said Wednesday night. “There's so many instances of going back and watching the film of little things that you can easily fix and clean up that would go a really long way, and possibly it wouldn't even come down to one possession. I think you have to find confidence in that, especially at this point, being 0-5. If you just get upset by it, I don't think that's going to be too beneficial for us.”
How does the collegiate winner deal with immediate, constant failure? “You're never happy to lose,” Clark said. “It's not fun, but at the same time, there's just a lot of things to build on. I'm just trying to be as positive as possible, continue to learn and continue to stack days. I know that first win will be right around the corner. It's a process of getting there to be able to do that the whole game and trying to navigate that with my teammates. It's still a process of learning when to be assertive. Sometimes it's hard when you start off cold. For sure, I think that's when I'm at my best, is being a little bit more aggressive and creating my shot. I was able to create a couple of threes there that kind of got me going. I was able to find (teammates) running the floor a few times. I think the more I can play with more pace, that's when I'm definitely more successful.”
The more she misses, and the more she bungles, the less we’ll watch. That’s how big-time sports tend to work. Nike will sell her shoes, because plenty of kids want them, but the league race will involve Wilson and whether the Aces repeat. At some point, Clark and the Fever will fade out until further notice. The first win could have happened if she’d handled Kristy Wallace’s throw-in, which was slightly behind her but catchable. Eleven seconds remained. Host Seattle recovered and won, 85-83. “Probably the longest minute of a basketball game I've been a part of in a long time," Clark said of a long final-minute stretch. "We definitely gave ourselves a chance, but at the same time, there were little things that we shot ourselves in the foot.”
She has been defended by the biggest critics, including Charles Barkley, who scolded the likes of Aja Wilson. LeBron James weighed in to help. "You women out there, y'all petty, man," Barkley said. “LeBron, you're 100 percent right on these girls hating on Caitlin Clark. Y'all petty, girls. I expect men to be petty because we're the most insecure group in the world. Y'all should be thanking that girl for getting y'all a-- private charters, all the money and visibility she's bringing to the WNBA. Don’t be petty like dudes.”
Said James: “For her individually, I don’t think she should get involved in (anything) that’s being said. Just go have fun, enjoy. I’m rooting for Caitlin because I’ve been in that seat before. I’ve walked that road before. I hope she kills it. The one thing that I love that she’s bringing to her sport: More people want to watch. More people want to tune in. Don’t get it twisted. Don’t get it f—ked up. Caitlin Clark is the reason why a lot of great things are going to happen for the WNBA.”
It would be fun if her first victory came in Crypto.com Arena, where James plays and the once-great Lakers have won 17 championships. But when she enters the building, fans will view Caitlin Clark with measures of sadness. Someone will say race played a role in her popularity. If so, she should hit a magical three from near midcourt.
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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.