The numbers don’t lie: The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) is, at long last, having its moment in the sun.
After more than twenty-five years of accruing an incrementally expanding fan base, attendance and television ratings have skyrocketed. Players like Angel Reese and Kelsey Plum have become social media stars. And the league is even driving the chatter in the hyper-macho world of sports talk radio.
Much of this remarkable reversal of fortune has been driven by twenty-two-year-old Caitlin Clark, the All-Star rookie who plays for the Indiana Fever. Clark is more than a player; she’s a cultural phenomenon. Again, the numbers don’t lie: Fever games have accounted for a staggering 33.5 percent of WNBA attendance this season, and teams regularly have to move to larger arenas to accommodate ticket demand. The average attendance for Fever games is more than 15,500, a 105 percent increase from a league average of roughly 7,500.
Clark’s record-setting collegiate years at the University of Iowa, her steady flow of national television commercials, and particularly her thirty-foot three-pointers off the dribble have generated a passionate following of new WNBA fans.
Granted, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Clark. She also leads the WNBA in turnovers. Her gesticulating complaints on the court—sometimes aimed at referees, other times at her own teammates—have offended some old guard fans and players.
But this story, shamefully, does not end at the sidelines. Clark has also become a shibboleth of the political far right—people who have never shown an ounce of interest in the WNBA until now. Their line is that Clark, who is white and straight, is being “targeted” by women who one rightwing radio hack contemptuously dismissed as “a league filled with Black lesbians.”
Additionally, former high-profile sports writer Jason Whitlock, who has rebranded himself as a rightwing scold following a series of humiliating firings, expounded by saying, “The WNBA for twenty-five to twenty-six years has basically been a traveling lesbian sex cult.”
The Chicago Tribune published an editorial “defending” Clark from hard fouls, describing one in particular as “an assault.” Even a back-bench Republican U.S. Representative from Indiana named Jim Banks spoke out against the “targeting” of Clark.
This is all absurd, of course, as it’s the reactionary old saw from decades past that white, straight women must be protected, particularly from Black antagonists, at all costs. Hard fouls are “assaults,” and Clark, that damsel in distress, must be protected from the hordes.
The Whitlocks of the world are just reviving and replaying an old lynchers’ classic. This rightwing onslaught does more than just pollute our political air; it does a profound disservice to the athletes of the WNBA, who are playing the best brand of women’s basketball we have ever seen.
As Washington Post sports writer Candace Buckner told the BBC, “I’m just taken aback that the new fans are so shocked. It’s a contact sport. It’s almost as if you were a new opera fan and you were surprised there was music.”
Pressure has risen for Clark to denounce these revanchists riding on her back. For several weeks, Clark seemed to pretend it wasn’t happening, but eventually, silence began to look like complicity. This began to frustrate other players. Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington took to social media to say, “Dawg. How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts. We all see the sh*t. We all have a platform. We all have a voice & they all hold weight. Silence is a luxury.”
Clark had to say something. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect, so people should not be using my name to push those agendas.”
It’s not exactly a call to arms, but it was a sign that she had been listening to critiques of her silence in the face of the gutter commentary aimed at her league. She is also twenty-two and clearly getting an education that few could understand.
Clark is a transcendent figure already. But she is learning that with great power comes great responsibility. She finds herself in the middle of a toxic political period, seeing her whiteness be weaponized. Going forward, she will surely have to once again reclaim her personhood in the face of people who claim to adore her but would laugh with satisfaction if the league—and women’s basketball—disappeared without a trace.