Caitlin Clark and The Discourse

No, not an awful new band, just an awful new media cycle about women's sports.

Chennedy Carter should have been assessed a flagrant foul (during the game, not retroactively) for her body-check on Caitlin Clark in the Chicago Sky vs. Indiana Fever game on Saturday. There, glad we cleared that up at the top. The unfortunate part about singular events on a basketball court, however, is that they don’t occur in a vacuum. That’s where things get tricky.

Before Carter bowled Clark over on an inbounds pass, Clark was a bit loose with her limbs while dribbling (with Carter as her defender) and playing defense (against Carter) and she, as she has many times before in her basketball career, barked at an opponent after her team scored. Talking shit on a basketball court is a time-honored tradition and Clark, seemingly, is quite good at it. But…if you talk a lot of shit it is highly likely that opponents are going to be seeking you out to let you know when THEY make a good play.

That’s what happened on Saturday when, directly after making a jumper, Carter drilled Clark in the side before the ball was even in play. This has happened at every level of basketball countless times every year. It’s the “reaping/sowing” tweet come to life. It’s the “fuck around and find out graph” on a basketball court. It’s “talk shit, get hit,” a theorem that every athlete is well aware of from an early age. The WNBA is a physical league! And that’s ok!

Now, it’s important to remember that a corollary of the Talk Shit, Get Hit Theorem is You’re Probably Going To Get Called For A Foul If You Are The One Doing The Hitting and, lo and behold, Carter did receive a foul and then the Fever made a free throw…in a game that they ended up winning by one point. In trying to prove a point, Carter showed how tenuous the difference between winning and losing can be in the WNBA.

It would be great if the conversation around this play ended there but, alas, Clark is a lightning rod for the worst kind of people online. I, a long-time Caitlin Clark Hater, know this better than anyone but, I’d like to think, I keep my Hating to Clark’s on-court exploits like: she’s not a winning basketball player or she’s a chucker to the detriment of her team or she’s basically Russell Westbrook or she plays defense that would embarrass a traffic cone or, well, you get the point.

Many of the new WNBA “fans” are online culture warriors who see a chance to score some points due to, uh, a litany of factors which include:

• Reverse Racism! The WNBA has a majority of black players and Clark, already the most well-known player in the league in her rookie season, is white

• Weird White Savior Stuff! The other players should be thankful that Clark deigns to grace the same court as them or else the WNBA (which was already rapidly growing) would basically cease to exist

• Weird Paternalistic (and Also Racist) Stuff! The WNBA needs to protect poor widdle baby Caitlin Clark from the big, mean (mostly black) players in the league who are jealous and lashing out at her

• The Male Gaze! Clark, a conventionally attractive cishet woman, is already the face of the league due solely to new, male fans who wouldn’t be watching if the face of the league was gay, or had short hair, or didn’t fit into their “what a woman should look like” box

• Plan Ol’ Misogyny! Women shouldn’t be playing sports at all, let alone in a rough, aggressive fashion like this!

That is a LOT to unpack, and I haven’t mentioned Clark’s brother and boyfriend liking weird, racist posts on Twitter about other players in the WNBA or her lack of saying ANYTHING about the abuse her supposed “fans” have give to other black players in the league and on her own team! Luckily, this is just a short post about basketball so we don’t need to get into all of that here.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t push back some on the “they’re all jealous of Clark and this is only ever happening to her” narrative that has taken hold.

The WNBA has ALWAYS been a physical league because…basketball is a physical sport and sometimes athletes at the top of their game who are competing night in and night out against the other best players in the world lose their cool. That doesn’t make it right, and Carter should reevaluate how she reacts to things on the basketball court, but it does make it a recurring theme in all of sports and not just a one-off, THEY’RE TARGETING THIS ONE PLAYER thing. Players, even great ones, get caught up in the moment all the time!

When you are, or are predicted to be, an all-time great, people on the other team are going to want to stop you. It happened to Michael Jordan. It happened to Bill Russell. It happened to Candace Parker. They had to change the whole damn rulebook because teams wouldn’t stop going after Shaq so he had to shoot free throws. Hell, it even happened last year to Clark’s current teammate, Aliyah Boston! The top players in basketball always have a target on their backs, especially when they’re younger and haven’t done anything in the pros to justify their considerable hype.

Carter shouldn’t have committed a foul on Clark that would’ve been a penalty in hockey, but all of the hand-wringing about What It Means should be left to the people who want to talk about ball and, at minimum, don’t have a bad faith and cynical reason for bringing it up.