No, Caitlin Clark still doesn’t need you to rescue her from the WNBA
On the out-of-control narrative from crazed fans and obsessive media members who have lost touch with sports reality
“Some of the biggest challenges are I have all this emotion… how do I channel this? At times they were definitely like, ‘Why is this girl a psycho?’”
– Caitlin Clark to ESPN’s Wright Thompson
Meant as the highest of compliments, Caitlin Clark is a competitive lunatic.
Not every player born with that trait is going to succeed. Gyms across the country are filled with competitive lunatics bricking shot after shot. But every great player, especially the ones whose greatness sees them transcend the game, almost always is. Some will be able to mask their stone-cold killer mentality behind an ice-cold persona – think Joe Montana pointing out John Candy in the crowd before a game-winning Super Bowl drive – others simply won’t or can’t – think Tom Brady yelling on the sideline, think of literally any Michael Jordan moment ever. Caitlin Clark fit in with the latter two until she learned how to be the former.
But inside her is that level of competitiveness that we mere mortals can’t come to comprehend. We read profiles to try and figure it out, but we end up more confused. How could anybody live like that? How did they not run to therapy to get that fixed? But that thing inside the 23-year-old from Des Moines, Iowa, has led to everything else: the court-vision, the great passes, long three-pointers that have captivated the sporting public. Sure, there’s talent at the heart of this, but the hard work, determination, and skill to harness the temper and tenacity were all powered by that competitive fire.
That is the ball of energy circulating at the core of Caitlin Clark.
Judging an athlete’s popularity can be tough. When you are in a sports bubble as I am, it can be hard to gauge what breaks through to the masses. Caitlin Clark is the most popular and famous women’s athlete since… ever? It is hard to overstate the enormity of it all.
Clark’s rise began her penultimate year at Iowa and hit overdrive with a run to the Final Four and a crushing loss on the Sunday before Easter to a juggernaut of an LSU team didn’t dampen the enthusiasm. It just set up the next season when it hit another level of attention that again didn’t dampen with another loss in the title game, this time to a sledgehammer in South Carolina.
Christine Brennan, the USA TODAY Sports columnist, had been waiting for this moment. Waiting for an athlete to reach this level of superstardom and catapult the women’s game to the level that it had long deserved to reach. In February of Clark’s final season at Iowa, she called her, “the greatest show in sports. This is Title IX personified. We’ve never seen anything quite like this. Basically, even going back all the way to the ’99 Women’s World Cup.”
The Indiana Fever took Clark No. 1 overall in the WNBA Draft that April, and the conversation shifted a great deal. In part because the league is physical, and rookies often need some time to adjust. “I think just playing with better pace and that’s kind of a learning thing. It’s not something I always had to do at Iowa,” Clark said after her third game as a pro. “But in the league, everybody’s all over me, they’re hounding me 94 feet, I’m getting trapped on every ball screen, getting blocked on every stagger screen. So I think it’s just a learning process. And I’m gonna continue to learn from game to game.”
The conversation in the media and online turned unsavory as the narrative took form: Clark was being unfairly targeted by her opponents, roughed up physically in a way that was outside of the game because of jealousy and hatred.
Brennan, who was covering Clark and working on an “unauthorized” biography, “On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports,” became one of the most prominent media voices lambasting the league for failing to promote and potect its new star, and pressing other players about their actions on the court. It ruffled many feathers.
It is clear that while Brennan began, like the rest of us, slack-jawed in awe of Clark’s amazing ability on the court, she has been overtaken by the hype of her own story and constantly psychoanalyzing, looking for opponents’ and detractors’ ulterior motives. Her words now carry a level of incredulousness, as if to say, ‘How could the other players not demonstrate fealty, prostrate themselves before tip-off, and genuflect each time Clark drives the lane?’
There is a duality to all of this: Clark, the inevitable hero and savior, is here to deliver the league and women’s sports with the huge amount of attention and money she draws, is also a damsel in distress in constant need of defending and rescue against a world out to undermine her.
He’s everything. The faucet, the goose...
What goose?
The one that lays them golden eggs.
While much of sports history – especially that of women’s participation –is defined by instances when factors other than merit impacted decisions, the games and their results have continued to be decided solely by that bottom line. A truth turned into a taunt: scoreboard.
So why is it that the conversation on Caitlin Clark – a two-time college player of the year, a three-time unanimous first-team All-American, a three-time Big Ten Player of the Year, and the all-time leading scorer (man or woman) in college basketball history – descends into screeds on economic impact, inspiration, popularity, ticket sales, and television ratings? Did sports stop being sports? Did we suddenly graduate beyond RINGZ culture? Of Kobe Bryant mocking a fan by counting to five?
“Women’s sports is always about more than sports,” Brennan wrote in a Feb. 2024 column. “Someday that won’t be the case, but we’re not there yet. It’s why so many great female sports stars sign every autograph and pose for every selfie and talk about the number of girls in the stands and answer every question about Title IX and the growth of their sport. They are athletes and they are advocates, they are players and they are pioneers, and that’s just the way it is.”
Brennan, who is a pioneer herself for her coverage and for being the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media in the late 1980s, is not wrong about any of that. But it also raises the question: When does it ever become just about sports? When will we know that the switch has been flipped?
The answer, as is the case with everything in America, comes down to money. Every women’s sports story always carries the subtext that this is a fight for survival. A fight to be seen as worthy of attention, a fight for legitimacy, or just a fight for you to read the story in the first place. Brennan has been in that fight and under siege from editors, fans, everybody for so long that she has become hardened by it.
The WNBA has been in that fight, too. And, even before Clark’s arrival, it was beginning to show what had become clear with soccer: women’s sports were an undervalued asset that just needed investment to achieve the growth that doubters said was impossible. Brennan, a historic advocate of this, was right all along. The results: the NBA, the capital behind the women’s league, has seen team valuations and ratings on the rise for a few years now.1
Unlike during the rise of the men’s leagues, the WNBA has come about in an online sports media landscape that has rapidly democratized, with more people having access to big megaphones to defeat the din of the digital cacophony. All chasing a financial reward. And that money is at the heart of an economic parasocial relationship that certain sports commentators enter so they can draft alongside superstardom and, on the back of their takes, ride that into notoriety.
Brennan is not in the same category as the many grifters who have arrived at fame and are after fortune by being the best at garnering attention, negative or otherwise, in a media ecosystem that rewards extremes over everything else. Her track record buys her the courtesy to not be classified with the likes of those professional bad opinion-havers acting in bad faith, either out of greed or sheer honest to goodness stupidity or plain old simple misogyny and bigotry. But they are her landsman, just a different sect of the same faith.
And in that faith, Caitlin Clark is the center of the universe. All actions exist because that center exists, and all actions are viewed through the prism of how they impact the center. Brennan, in her pursuit of her book, has left behind the domain of her profession. No cheering in the pressbox? The columnist has taken to proselytizing.
“One of her superpowers is taking things personally. The fact that you’re on a basketball court with her, that’s a challenge. ‘You should leave this court knowing you have no right to be on it. You need to go home and go work if you want to share the court with me and my team.’”
– Caitlin Clark’s brother, Blake, told Thompson
Two weeks ago, Caitlin Clark got poked in the eye as Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon swiped at the ball. A foul was called immediately. Clark and Sheldon bumped before a fracas ensued that saw Clark get dumped to the ground. By game’s end, the tally read five technical fouls, two flagrant fouls, three ejections, and a Fever 88-71 win.
Brennan quote-tweeted a video of an incident: “This happened last night to the most important audience magnet and TV and corporate draw in the history of a business (WNBA) that is desperately trying to advance and succeed in a very crowded, male-dominated sports marketplace,” she wrote June 18.
“Unfortunately, the WNBA is mirroring last year,” Brennan told the Toledo Blade later. “...it’s unconscionable for a league — given the gift they’ve been given with Caitlin Clark and the eyeballs she brings — to not be prepared last year and to still be looking like they’re trying to figure it out this year.”
This is a constant theme for Brennan: The league, which exists in Clark’s orbit, is letting its asset get trampled. There is no other story that merits coverage.
“When you cover a sport, you write about the big story,” she told The Washington Post last year, defending her focus. “Over the years covering golf, I wrote probably over 100 columns on Tiger Woods and ignored almost all the other golfers.”
She likes the Woods comparison and often mentions the impact the Black golfer had on the white sport in captivating its fanbase and bringing new fans and greater attention to the game. But long before Woods putted against Bob Hope on TV at age three, golf’s popularity, with brand-name national figures, made it so her focus on the young phenom fit into the context of a sport with a known history. With the WNBA having much less pedigree than golf, zeroing in on the new sensation and “ignoring almost all the other” players is seen as a dismissal of all other figures, even those who had national name recognition, and the league itself.
Her comparison to Woods rings hollow when you recall his domination led to “Tiger-proofing” courses. Brennan has called for the opposite when she agreed that it would be feasible for Clark to start her own league.
Starting a direct competitor to the WNBA, which will celebrate its 30th season next year, expanded to 13 teams this year, will add two more in 2026, and reach 18 teams by 2030, would greatly harm the women’s game. But Brennan, at this point, seems less interested in that and the other players who only exist as people who “will benefit greatly” from the “magical Caitlin Clark.”
When Clark returned from a stint on the sidelines in the middle of last month, Brennan called it the “best possible news for her, the Fever & the WNBA” as now the “massive spotlight on her also shines on all the players who have deserved attention for years but not gotten it until now.”
But Brennan rarely directs her spotlight to anybody else.
Angel Reese, who beat Clark in the first national title game and became a target of hate since then, has only been mentioned on Brennan’s social media account as a player who committed a flagrant foul on Clark.
She has never tweeted about Sabrina Ionescu or Jonquel Jones, and her one post about Breanna Stewart came a decade ago. Those three players were at the center of the New York Liberty’s title-winning team last year, known as Clark’s rookie season. (The five-game WNBA Finals got one column from Brennan, which focused on Minnesota’s head coach.) Her lone tweet about A’ja Wilson, fresh off her third MVP last season, was posted four years ago. She’s never tweeted about Napheesa Collier, who could win MVP this year. This week, Paige Bueckers became the sixth No. 1 overall pick to be an All-Star in their rookie year hasn’t been mentioned either. Aliyah Boston, Clark’s Fever teammate, made the All-Star team this year, too, but no dice.
She did post her column about a tree falling at The Masters in 2023. Twice.2
Well, surely after the Fever won the Commissioner’s Cup, the WNBA’s in-season tournament in an upset over the Minnesota Lynx on Monday, something, right? Well, with Clark sidelined, the spotlight was off, so the game was hard to see.3
Brennan has fought hard for women to get the recognition they deserve throughout her career is now singularly focused on heaping as more attention as she can, placing the survival of an entire league built upon empowering women, onto the one player who, as Brennan’s accounting has made abundantly clear, needs no help garnering attention.
When Clark first got injured, she spoke of it as if it were an existential crisis for the league: “It’s also terrible news for the WNBA, which relies on Clark for so much — attendance, viewership, social media, merchandise — in a way no sports league ever has before. I’ve asked the WNBA for comment.”
And when ratings did fall (nationally televised league games dipped 55 percent), she wrote, “This was utterly predictable.”
Brennan, of course, is a part of creating this phenomenon. Breathless, singular focus at the expense of the league, making sure others stay 20 feet from stardom. A self-fulfilling cycle that, instead of making it more likely for Clark to succeed, makes it more likely she won’t. That her success will be the high-water mark rather than the first of a long line.
If Clark doesn’t continue to transcend, doesn’t reach the lofty goals, and the women’s game doesn’t take off, she will blame the WNBA for failing to capitalize or failing to make the league more friendly for the superstar.
One person who won’t buy into that crap: Caitlin Clark.
Well, can’t he just beam up?
This is reality, Greg.
I had a fever dream when I was around 12 or 13 that stuck with me because it was vivid and ended with a panic-inducing moment as I woke up hot with sweat. That final punctuation arrived when I figured out I had traveled back in time to when I was eight, the year the Baltimore Ravens won their first Super Bowl. And that is when my father turned around to face me and said through gritted teeth, “Ben, they lost.”
Everyone wanted this to be just like the movies. The minor characters stay in the background, and the foes present challenges, but ones that our hero can vanquish in a way that shows off their gallantry, humility, and otherworldly gifts. And we get a happy ending.
Christine Brennan wanted it to be that way, too. That her book about Caitlin Clark, her rise to national prominence, and singularity – “America has never seen an athlete quite like Caitlin Clark” – won’t have to be about back-to-back loses in the national title game for Iowa, a U.S. Olympic team “snub,” and the “WNBA’s lack of preparation for heightened national scrutiny, and troubling outbreaks of jealousy and resentment as a white player became the top story in a predominantly Black league.”
Brennan, in pursuit of this story, has hammered Clark into a two-dimensional character and flattened the narrative arc so that there is little room for talk about her play, good games and bad ones, winning and losing, tons of assists but too many turnovers, and, shockingly, a slump in outside shooting. There is only enough room for how her opponents in the WNBA must be reigned in, as if the competitive lunatic would even consider, let alone accept, that the game should be made easier for her.
Brennan so wishes for Clark to be more than just a basketball player, that she discarded the part that makes the story truly compelling: That she is just a basketball player trying to prove on the court that she is the best basketball player.
Everything else is secondary, especially for Caitlin Clark.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.
And it is a good reminder that the modern behemoth of the NBA would be unrecognizable from what it was 40 years ago, when it was just happy to be at the table with MLB and the NFL, still trying to find big-time popularity and a decent television deal.
Brittney Griner does have several posts, but there was a 10-year gap between coverage of her at Baylor and Brennan’s renewed interest after Griner’s arrest in Russia.
Of course, Twitter posts aren’t the only way for this to be tracked, but Brennan posts links to her USA TODAY columns there, and searching the social media site also would have turned up her columns on these subjects. A rundown of her archive yielded similar results.