YES, CAITLIN CLARK WAS ROBBED AND DISSED — WOMEN’S BASKETBALL STILL WON BIG

This was a landmark moment in sports, a Final Four weekend when buzz about Clark — and a dubious technical foul, then a taunt — was larger than a men’s event that had an epic finish but lacks sizzle

     America is convulsing again, divided in fervent protest — though not only for the reason you think. People are in mad mode about Caitlin Clark and whether she should have been whistled for a technical foul after a mere peccadillo, the flip of a ball behind her back and out of bounds, while irked by a foul call against a teammate as the national championship was slipping away.

     The referee, some say, should be urine-tested and probed by the gambling cops. Others, predictably, are citing race — the official is Black, Clark is white. At the least, the ref was wrong, over-officious and oblivious to the gravity of the moment inside a Dallas arena. Unlike the final minutes of Super Bowl LVII, where a cornerback grabbed a receiver’s jersey and committed an obvious holding penalty, Clark was not egregiously impacting the game. It was a ticky-tack judgment call, and with 1:03 remaining in the third quarter — and with more viewers watching a women’s basketball game than ever before on this planet, many to witness Clark and her mesmerizing sampling of Stephen Curry, Pete Maravich and the sport’s wondrous entertainers — the decision robbed 9.9 million of what they came to see on a Sunday afternoon.

     “I mean … you have GOT to be kidding me,” protested Ryan Ruocco, abnormally expressing strong opinions as a play-by-play man on a telecast.

     “She said nothing,” noted analyst Rebecca Lobo, one of the sport’s all-time greats. “No player in this game should get a technical foul for that.”

     Before you knew it, after the technical had saddled Clark with her fourth foul and limited her final-quarter comeback powers, the swaggering LSU players were pointing at their ring fingers while a weeping Kim Mulkey — the coach’s tiger-striped, two-tone-sequined pant suit deserves a Met Gala invite, if not a “Dancing With the Stars” berth — was bopping with her grandchildren on stage. Did Clark’s flimsy technical cost Iowa the title? Probably not, as the Tigers were in control through much of a 102-85 victory in the highest-scoring women’s title game ever.

     But it would have been fun watching her try, instead of summoning referee Lisa Jones for an explanation. Because Iowa had received an earlier delay warning “for batting the ball away after a made basket,” Jones said, Clark had to be called — Rule 10, Section 12, Article 3K —  after she “picked up the ball and failed to immediately pass the ball to the nearest official after the whistle was blown.” The offense, if considered one, could have been overlooked. It wasn’t an attempt to gain an advantage as much as an insignificant show of frustration. Both teams were in on-court huddles. There was an entire quarter to play. Instead, the officials doused the drama with two Iowa whistles in the same sequence — a personal foul on Monika Czinano, then Clark’s technical — and by the time LSU made two free throws, the Iowa deficit had grown to 11 points. The two teammates were forced to sit. The game was over, never mind that Mulkey had spent much of the game screaming at officials a few steps on the court.

     “I thought all I could do is respond and come back out and keep fighting and keep trying to help this team crawl back into the game,” Clark said.

     Her coach and teammates weren’t as diplomatic. “It’s very frustrating because I feel like I can’t talk to them,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said of the officials. “They won’t even listen. When your two seniors have to sit on the bench … those two women didn’t deserve it. And then Caitlin getting a ‘T.’ I don’t know. It’s too bad.”

     “I don’t really think that’s a great question for me to answer honestly,” Czinano said. “We can’t live in the past. All we can do is live in the moment. That game happened. Those calls were called. Going forward, we’ll see what people decide what to do about it.”

     In the future, women’s college basketball will realize it’s more about sizzle than the recesses of the rulebook. And players in the sport will stop hating on the moneymaker, with race as an impetus. Earlier in the tournament, Clark turned to Louisville rival Hailey Van Lith and shot her the “you can’t see me” hand gesture popularized by WWE wrestler John Cena. LSU’s Angel Reese, named outstanding player of the Final Four, stared down Clark with the same taunt Sunday. As she romped demonstratively around the floor, the dissing display smacked of a grudge that skewed beyond basketball.

     “All year I was critiqued about who I was," Reese said. “I don't fit the narrative. I don't fit in a box that y'all want me to be in. I'm too hood. I'm too ghetto. Y'all told me that all year. But when other people do it, y'all say nothing. 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. That's what I did it for tonight. It was bigger than me tonight. It was bigger than me.”

     All of which only fed an uncomfortable narrative: Clark was hunted for reasons beyond her basketball abilities. Afterward, on the podium, her tears suggested the experience was overwhelming. “I want my legacy to be the impact that I can have on young kids and the people in the state of Iowa,” she said, trying to embrace innocence and hope. “I was just that young girl, so all you have to do is dream and what you can be in moments like this.” Her emotions underscored an unprecedented truth. The fact an American sports populace is focusing on Clark — the call and the backlash she faces — feeds a seismic cultural change: There has been more national buzz about the women’s Final Four than the men’s Final Four. The women’s game was bigger. Ever think that day would come?

     And I say that after a spectacular finish Saturday. Lamont Butler hit an 18-foot jumper at the final horn, the first time a Final Four buzzer-beater flipped a loser to a winner — and put San Diego State in the Monday night championship game. But let’s be real. Other than family, friends and frenemies, the nation generally isn’t into a men’s tournament that oozes of parity thanks to the transfer portal, NIL collectives and no Zion Williamson types, no dominant one-and-done players headed to NBA stardom after solo college seasons. The new way of doing business enabled SDSU, which gave us a human moment, Butler eliminating Florida Atlantic in the memory of his sister, Asasha Hall, who was murdered last year at age 30.

     “I miss her,” he said, “but I’m doing everything I can to make her happy.”

     Delivering a shot for the ages is one way. “Forever," teammate Darrion Trammell said. “I think that's going to be one of the shots that we're going to see forever. They're going to play for previews for March Madness next year and the year after that. I think that was just legendary."

     What the women’s game did was give us something new, something thought-provoking, a sensation who plays like Curry and hits three-pointers from the logo and finds teammates with selfless purpose. Clark brought her sport from the shadows to the forefront, an ABC time slot. Two games earlier, the Iowa-Louisville game drew a larger audience — 2.49 million, on ESPN — than any NBA game this regular season. Iowa’s semifinal upset of South Carolina attracted an average of 5.5 million viewers and peaked at 6.6 million. Sunday’s viewership was expected to push far beyond that number, and suddenly, a men’s championship game projected as a blowout — San Diego State vs. powerhouse Connecticut, the sixth team in the current era to win every tournament game by 10-plus points — looks like an afterthought compared to Clark, Mulkey, Reese and the women’s show.

     Let’s not fiddle with the narrative. Caitlin Clark brought us to our TVs like no other women’s basketball player before her, like few women’s athletes in our lifetimes. Consider it was far more difficult navigating into the women’s final, inside American Airlines Center, than it was to see the men’s Final Four in a Houston football stadium. Consider it was less expensive to see Taylor Swift on Sunday night at AT&T Stadium in nearby Arlington — a $308 get-in price — than it was to see Clark, whose theatrics commanded a $428 entry investment. “Hey! I’m going to her in June! She should stay for the game tomorrow!" Clark said.

     Had Swift attended, she would have advised Caitlin to shake it off when the calls were going against the Hawkeyes. But this is just the beginning for Clark and her sport. Now that people are watching marquee games in the millions, not by the previous smatterings, the women can break away from the NCAA’s rights bundling and sell media rights separately — with the tournament worth between $85 million and $110 million a year. In that business paradigm, it didn’t matter if Clark won or lost Sunday. She’ll be back for another season in Iowa City, rewarded with significant local and national NIL riches, and we’ll see if her game progresses to the point the NBA will give her a training-camp shot.

     Even racial overtones from South Carolina coach Dawn Staley didn’t mar a weekend to remember. “We're not bar fighters. We're not thugs. We're not monkeys. We're not street fighters,” she said after the UConn lapse. "I do think that's sometimes brought into the game, and it hurts.” Monkeys? Not sure where that came from — and I searched — but her reaction was unfortunate. Bluder, responding to a question about South Carolina’s physicality, had trended in that direction, comparing a rebounding battle to “going to a bar fight.” But injecting racism, just as fans injected racism in the decision to call Clark for a technical, won’t help the sport grow. Basketball is a heated game. Deal with the fallout.

     “Some of the people in the media, when you're gathering in public, you're saying things about our team, and you're being heard, and it's being brought back to me,” Staley said. “And these are the people that write nationally for our sport. So you can not like our team and you can not like me. But when you say things that you probably should be saying in your home on the phone or texting out in public and you're being heard, and you are a national writer for our sport – it just confirms what we already know. So watch what you say when you're in public and you're talking about my team in particular.”

     She should be happy those people are talking about women’s basketball in general. In that context, I hope the breakout stars are ready for the backlash — unvarnished commentary about race, fashion and looks. A sport has crossed over into the big time. It can be an ugly place.

     But it also can be pretty darned exhilarating, if they’d just leave Caitlin Clark alone.

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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.