The summer of 2024 was supposed to be the year the WNBA came into its own.
The stars had aligned. Not only did the league have a great draft class, the rest of the sports world has been pretty blah. The NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals are showing some excitement as the Edmonton Oilers and superstar Connor McDavid try to charge back from a 3-0 deficit against the Florida Panthers, but that’s about it.
The NBA playoffs, meanwhile, were about as boring as watching paint that’s already dried, aside from a decent Western Conference Finals series.
Major League Baseball’s regular season is basically just a 162-game march to a likely Dodgers-Yankees World Series in another four months. The most exciting moment in the NASCAR calendar thus far has been a fight after a race that didn’t affect the championship standings. Major League Soccer still hasn’t moved beyond cult status.
There’s also the Olympics — but the biggest interest surrounding the Games, at least in the U.S., has been about the WNBA and star Caitlin Clark being snubbed for Team USA.
Meanwhile, several prime rookies entered the WNBA via this year’s draft, most notably Clark out of the University of Iowa and Angel Reese out of LSU. They were the main reasons this year’s women’s NCAA tournament outdrew the men’s, and for good reason: It was more exciting. The momentum was there. The rivalry was set.
For her part, Clark has played admirably for the Indiana Fever, a moribund team that needs a few more pieces before they’re competitive. Reese’s Chicago Sky, meanwhile, have the opportunity to compete. They also have the opportunity to self-sabotage, something they’ve been especially adept at doing of late.
After a loss to Clark’s Indiana Fever on June 1 in a game where the biggest news was a hard off-ball foul on Clark by the Sky’s Chennedy Carter — and Reese appearing to celebrate from the sidelines. Things have gone very much south in the interim, with the Sky losing six of their last seven to fall to 4-9.
Despite this, and despite the fact that Reese’s celebration of the foul (and subsequent reaction to it, which was anything but apologetic), establishment media outlets have fallen all over themselves to make her out to be the victim. It’s become a sociopolitical issue: Clark is white and straight, whereas the stereotype of the WNBA is that the players are black and lesbian.
Do you like Angel Reese?
(For what it’s worth, Reese was dating male Florida State basketball’s Cam’Ron Fletcher before breaking up in March, before the NCAA tournament, People magazine reported. Since then, she’s been single, according to the website Athlon Sports.)
Naturally, any good guy/bad guy narrative, must somehow come down to privilege these days. And yet, despite the fawning media attention, Reese still isn’t happy with the way she’s being covered.
Nowhere was that more evident than in an interview attempt after the Sky’s practice on Tuesday, when even a simpatico columnist had to admit the word “catastrophe” could best sum it up.
“An occasionally friendly columnist went to Sky practice Tuesday eager to make rookie Angel Reese’s acquaintance, pull her aside from the cameras and microphones and speak with her about being 22 and taking a huge bite out of life — new job, new city, happiness, homesickness, fears, dreams,” wrote Steve Greenberg of the Chicago Sun-Times.
“A few questions in, it was clear that one- or two-word answers were the order of the day. And that something was wrong, even though Reese had essentially ignored a couple of questions by saying, dismissively, ‘I’m good.’”
“But she wasn’t good, was she?” Greenberg continued. “She was asked if she knew why the conversation, such as it was, was off to such an inauspicious start.”
“I know how y’all like to twist my words, so I’m just keeping it short and sweet,” she responded.
No, no, the reporters said — they were there to try and get her side of the story! No word-twisting involved. Nothing like that.
Uh-uh. Reese was having none of it.
“I can’t trust any of y’all,” she said, according to Greenberg. “So I’m just letting you know — short and sweet.”
And mind you, Greenberg basically spent half the article apologizing for Reese’s problems — on and off the court — since entering the league.
“As a WNBA rookie, she said ‘not just one person’ — meaning not Clark alone — was lifting women’s basketball to new heights, and the blowback was intense,” he noted.
(He neglected to mention the context — it was after she was caught celebrating the meaningless foul on Clark from the sideline, which she refused to apologize for — or the rest of the quote, in which she said she would “take the ‘bad guy’ role, and I’ll continue to take that on and be that for my teammates. And I know I’ll go down in history.”)
Angel Reese believes the physical play that Caitlin Clark has experienced isn’t new to the WNBA
Just more 👀
“The reason why we’re watching women’s basketball is not just because of 1 person. It’s because of me, too. I want y’all to realize that”
More: https://t.co/3fNUxipTTD pic.twitter.com/1YbGG4mWuL
— GNSportsTV (@GNSportsTV) June 3, 2024
He then papered over a foul Reese committed against Clark on Sunday by focusing on the reaction, rather than the behavior itself.
“After Reese committed a flagrant foul against Clark in the Sky’s last game, a 91-83 loss to the Fever that was the most-watched WNBA telecast in 23 years, a few influential imbeciles in the media world clapped back at Reese with a level of outrage generally reserved for someone who drop-kicks a puppy or punches the clown at a children’s birthday party,” he continued. “And that was before Reese apparently made it worse for herself by knocking the refs and saying ‘some people [get] a special whistle.’”
Sorry — “apparently” made it worse? The flagrant in question involved Reese literally smacking Clark upside the head as Clark went up for a layup, without even trying to go for the ball. The foul wasn’t just cheap and nasty, it was wholly unnecessary: Reese’s teammate managed to block the ill-conceived layup from Clark rather easily without, you know, trying to take Clark’s head off:
Angel Reese takes total swing at Caitlin Clark’s head, gets flagrant foul. They hate Clark because she’s white. Fever have to get an enforcer or Clark’s going to be knocked out for the year on one of these plays: pic.twitter.com/865KEUpLUv
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 16, 2024
But, yes — blaming the refs “apparently” made it worse for Reese. The same way a 2002 rant by the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers then-star Allen Iverson about “listen, we’re talking about practice” made people “apparently” question his work ethic.
And yes, of course, Greenberg brought out the doozy: It’s not Reese’s fault she has a bad rep, it’s all the online haters.
“The comments directed at Reese on social media — which she uses avidly, and where she has cultivated a giant following — have, unfailingly, scraped the bottom of the barrel at every turn,” he said. “We could argue the size of her role in rubbing people the wrong way, but the racist slurs and tropes used against her are uncalled-for and awful and would put anyone on guard.”
Oh please. First, let me let Greenberg in on something that he should probably know: Social media brings out the worst in people — but they’re generally random trolls in their parents’ basement.
Angel Reese is a candidate for WNBA Rookie of the Year and she’s behaving like this. Caitlin Clark is getting the same blowback — if perhaps not as strongly because she doesn’t say stupid things every third second — and do we hear about this? No, of course not. We get “The View” calling her privileged for taking a hard, unnecessary foul.
Greenberg, moreover, tries to humanize Reese by including a quote from Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon in which she urged us all to please, think of poor, sensitive Angel Reese and how she’s coping.
“I think sometimes we fail to realize what the athlete might think,” Weatherspoon said.
“What is she thinking? How does she feel? I think sometimes we just fail to realize that because it’s almost like every time she speaks, there’s something wrong with what she says. There’s something wrong with what she does. That’s what it seems like. But what we do here as a team, that’s really all that matters.”
Believe it or not, I’m rooting for Angel Reese. I’m sure if I were important enough, Mr. Greenberg would include me among those “influential imbeciles in the media world clapped back at Reese with a level of outrage generally reserved for someone who drop-kicks a puppy or punches the clown at a children’s birthday party” because I’ve dared to criticize her behavior. However, villains are good for sport — provided, of course, they keep that villainy in check.
The NBA had Isaiah Thomas. The NFL had Bill Belichick and Al Davis. NASCAR had Dale Earnhardt. The UFC has Conor McGregor. You may hate them, but they make sports fun.
However, the thing is that they all behaved within normal parameters of human behavior, at least most of the time. We don’t have a huge sample size for Angel Reese, but it doesn’t look good so far. Yet, the establishment media is willing to cover for her. And what’s her thank-you gesture?
“I can’t trust any of y’all.” Six words that say it all. So much for the summer of Clark v. Reese. Now it’s looking more like Reese v. a fawning media. I can’t say that’s the rivalry I expected, but it’s definitely the rivalry we’ve gotten.
