All of this has been years within the making. Viewership for school girls’s basketball has been growing steadily over the previous a number of years. Because the Nineteen Nineties, there have been famous person gamers, dynastic girls’s groups and million-dollar coaches. I bear in mind as a younger participant wanting as much as Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Diana Taurasi, Sue Hen and watching the College of Tennessee Vols coached by the pioneer Pat Summitt.
All of this historical past is there to be taught. And the current can also be crammed with spectacular younger gamers reminiscent of Reese and fellow rookie Cameron Brink, in addition to a bunch of fantastic veterans reminiscent of Taurasi. However to take heed to Clark’s excessive followers, she alone is the divine spirit elevating the game. Having fun with the 22-year-old newcomer from the College of Iowa will not be sufficient; her acolytes demand that every one followers and the league itself should bow down and specific gratitude for the curiosity in Clark, particularly the curiosity from White and male audiences. Implicit is a menace that if Clark doesn’t get what they consider she — (cough) that viewers — deserves, their curiosity could possibly be taken away at any time.
Provided that the WNBA is greater than 60 p.c Black, it’s exhausting to not really feel like the brand new followers are utilizing Clark as a proxy for their very own points and attitudes about race, sexuality and gender.
Take the current determination to depart Clark off the Workforce USA roster for the Paris Olympics this summer time. The introduced staff is stacked with veteran expertise, a feminine dream staff, together with Taurasi and her Phoenix Mercury teammate Brittney Griner. Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart have been additionally named. No rookies have been named to the staff. No gamers beneath the age of 26 have been chosen.
However for 2 weeks, commentators have been squawking about how girls’s basketball is lacking the “best alternative ever” to develop the game. Writing for USA Right this moment, columnist Christine Brennan described the Olympic determination as a snub, and charged that USA Basketball “dumped” Clark. Barstool Sports activities got here out with a T-shirt with 5 photos of Clark, every holding one of many 5 Olympic rings. “The Solely Participant That Issues,” the shirt declares.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver lately stated of the selection: “I wouldn’t say I’m disenchanted, however it will have been good to see her on the ground.” He added that the basketball governing physique “has a really particular mandate about fielding the very best staff, from a aggressive standpoint, and I settle for that all of them did their jobs the way in which they have been instructed to.”
In different phrases, the job of Workforce USA is to win. To her credit score, Clark acknowledged gracefully that she has room to develop earlier than she is totally the equal of one of the best veterans within the recreation. “Actually, no disappointment,” she stated after the roster was introduced. “It simply offers me one thing to work for; it’s a dream. Hopefully, in the future I will be there. I believe it’s just a bit extra motivation. You do not forget that. Hopefully, when 4 years comes again round, I will be there.”
After all, grace is briefly provide on sports activities radio and social media. Proper-wingers have used Clark not solely to race-bait however to stir homophobia. Skilled blowhard Jason Whitlock known as the WNBA a “touring lesbian intercourse cult.” Whitlock continued: “It’s being very hostile in direction of Caitlin Clark as a result of they’d like to interrupt her, smash her and destroy her in order that they’ll set up a lesbian or a Black girl, ideally a Black lesbian girl, because the face of this league. … Have you ever ever heard considered one of them speak about what males have finished for them?”
When requested about her title being weaponized to push racism and misogyny, Clark stated, “I believe all people in our world deserves the identical quantity of respect. The ladies in our league deserve the identical quantity of respect. Individuals shouldn’t be utilizing my title to push these agendas. It’s disappointing. It’s not acceptable.”
It’s a great factor, and the character of sports activities, to see superb younger expertise rising to problem, and finally exchange, the very stars they grew up idolizing. Clark is rising into the nice and rising custom of ladies’s basketball, and doing so with grace and maturity. However she simply arrived within the WNBA. Her followers have to comply with her instance and respect what the ladies earlier than her have constructed.
However that is the crux of our cultural and political second, proper? The rise of the WNBA coincides with a broader wave of conservative male forces claiming to “save” America from varied “threats:” vital race concept, DEI, migrants of coloration and LGBTQ+ individuals. Clark isn’t asking to be saved from something. Her extremist followers ought to pipe down.
