MAYHEM ARRIVES FOR CLARK AND THE WNBA — WACKOS NOT BEHAVING ADMIRABLY
If the league has a commissioner — maybe Cathy Engelbert, whose boss is Adam Silver — terrible officials will whistle ugliness to protect Clark and Angel Reese while restoring order to hellish games
Does the commissioner of the WNBA — Wackos Not Behaving Admirably — even care that Caitlin Clark was jabbed harshly in the eye by Connecticut’s Jacy Sheldon and then rammed in the back to the floor by Marina Mabrey. Or that Clark’s teammate, Sophie Cunningham, responded by tackling Sheldon around the neck on a fastbreak and heaving her to the hardwood, which started a Tuesday night brawl that led to three ejections.
Or that Bria Hartley, from the same Connecticut Sun, yanked on Angel Reese’s hair and almost started another skirmish last weekend. “You pulled my hair,” Reese said. Or that Clark, resting with an injury in the United Center, was ridiculing the Chicago Sky — and Reese — during a nationally televised blowout.
The most important female athlete in the history of the modern world, by ratings and various metrics, is Clark. The second-most important athlete might be Reese. Neither is protected by a league that wouldn’t exist without them. Defenders don’t know how to stop Clark and often turn to dirty tactics, just as they can’t prevent Reese’s “mebounds” without getting in her braids. There is an alarming lack of credible officiating in an association trying to make inroads. Every game is liable to erupt into a fracas.
If boss Cathy Engelbert doesn’t gather the National Guard — I am not kidding — we will see repeated violence at WNBA games. We watch women’s basketball to get away from the meaner world. It just brings us an even meaner world, thanks to what Clark’s coach with the Indiana Fever, Stephanie White, calls “bad officiating.”
“I think it was pretty obvious that stuff was brewing, right? When the officials don't get control of the ball game, when they allow that stuff to happen — and it has been happening all season long — you've got competitive women who are the best in the world at what they do, and when you allow them to play physical, this is what happens,” White said. “Everybody is getting better, except the officials. We need to remedy that. I mean, we've heard every coach talk about it. I don't know what the answer is. The officials have to be better.”
Also pointing a finger at the league office was the Connecticut center, Olivia Nelson-Ododa. “Obviously, there was a physical game. I think when things aren't managed well to begin with that it tends to get out of hand," she said. “I feel like a lot of stuff was escalating throughout the game, and that's what happens when you don't make the proper calls or officiate the game and manage it the right way.”
Why Cunningham was hunting for heads is beyond me. Recently, she was denying she had a sexual relationship with her former boss in Phoenix. “When you are winning a game by 17 points, and you do this … for me, it’s a stupid foul,” Sun coach Rachid Meziane.
When Clark missed five games with a left quadriceps injury, TV ratings for the Fever and the league dropped significantly — in half. Should that be a red-alert for Engelbert and the officials to make obvious calls? Clark continued to fend off commentary about ugliness, saying after the 88-71 victory, “You guys came for basketball. Let's talk about basketball.” But after she was poked in the face by Sheldon, she said on the court, “I can do whatever the f— I want to do.” Her frustrations arrive nightly, which should command the instant attention of the basketball world — including NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who is Engelbert’s superior.
We do not want Clark to be overly safeguarded on the court. Just call the cheap shots, please, especially when the Fever are advancing to the Commissioner’s Cup final against the Minnesota Lynx. “Players are faster, they're better, they're bigger, they're stronger,” White said. “They're as good as they've ever been there, as athletic as they've ever been. The game is fast. Now, things are happening quickly. So we’ve got to find a way to remedy it.”
It reached the point where tennis’ Chris Evert, once the most important female athlete in America, posted a warning for the WNBA: “When will these ladies realize, accept, and appreciate @CaitlinClark22 is the best thing that ever happened to women's basketball. This is a bad look for the sport and what's happened to sportsmanship?”
Wackos Not Behaving Admirably. Some league, Adam Silver.
Fix it before Clark or Reese end up in an emergency ward.
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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.