The WNBA should have seen this coming.
Eighteen months ago, forward Angel Reese and the LSU Tigers beat guard Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA championship. Reese celebrated by walking around the court pointing at her ring finger and mimicking Clark’s “you can’t see me” celebration. From that moment on, a rivalry between the two phenoms was born. And as much as Clark and Reese have had a compelling on-the-court rivalry in the WNBA, mostly about the once-heated Rookie of the Year race, the real battle is off the court, and rarely involves anything the two stars are actually doing.
They’ve become the new sociopolitical and racial battlefield, spilling over into nastiness that has done a disservice to them and the WNBA. The noise has overshadowed their brilliant statistical seasons.
Clark entered the WNBA as one of the most popular athletes in the country, and with good reason. She was one of the greatest college basketball players we’d ever seen and entered the league equipped with a dynamic game and a deep 3-pointer that reminds fans of Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry. That enough would be the formula to make her one of the biggest new stars the league has seen in a long time. But when you add in the fact that she is a straight white woman, she would become much more: a central figure for segments of the country who have disdain for Black queer women to rally behind. So anything that Clark did – a triple-double, a 30-point game, setting a record – wasn’t just a great basketball performance. Her achievements were used to cast aspersions on the women who make up most of the WNBA’s players.
Many of Clark’s fans also had Reese, a Black female villain who everyone could pit her against. To a certain segment of fans, any accolade she accumulated — and, to be clear, there have been multitudes — was not just about Clark. It was about embarrassing Reese — who was also having a record-breaking season, setting a WNBA record for consecutive double-doubles and nearly setting a league record for rebounds — and women like her.
The Reese-Clark rivalry stopped being about basketball. It was about everything else. Blackness. Queerness. An impending election. A divided country. Racism. White supremacy. Allyship. Ratings. And not nearly enough people actually showed compassion to the women themselves.
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