What If Angel Reese Were White?

I have gone from a non-observer of women’s basketball to a minimal observer of women’s basketball (which is still an infinite increase) because of one player: Caitlin Clark.  I discovered Caitlin Clark (yes, me) during a Sports Center episode on ESPN after the 2023 women’s elite 8.  I saw a woman playing basketball in a way that I, in my limited experience, had never seen. It was like a white woman had been possessed by the spirit of Steph Curry.  In the span of ten seconds before I could change the channel I asked, “who is that?!” So I tuned in part of the final four game, where Clark torched the favored South Carolina team. And then I made a point to watch a decent part of the finals, where Iowa and Clark lost to LSU and Angel Reese.

Now that finals became best known for the reciprocated trash talk from Angel Reece at the end of the game when LSU won.  She served the same taunts at the conclusion of the game that Clark had been dishing out throughout the tournament.  I have attempted to make my position clear in my reaction to it. I thought it was unpsports-personlike to taunt at the conclusion of a championship game.  For every person that accused me of having everything from a double standard to a the soul of a Klansman, they could not offer me one other example of this kind of taunting in a championship game. Because we would remember the fist fight that would have ensued after it.

However, I found myself, unfortunately, in the company of some very crude folks on the Internet who unleashed verbal bombs on Reese (and seem to have not stopped).  But I did not concede the point because no matter how bigoted or crude someone else is, I don’t have to disavow my thoughts based on how others came to a somewhat related opinion.

Fast forward a year and a half later and Clark and Reese are in the WNBA.  The target has been on Clark since the college tournament earlier this year when WNBA legend Diana Taurasi was already staking the “she’s in for a wake up call” territory (probably knowing the Clark is coming for any and all records she holds) and Clark has responded by putting together what is certainly going to be the greatest rookie season in WNBA history.  Reese has also made history in terms of double doubles, but those double doubles have had, at times the aesthetic appeal of a middle schooler who has matured faster than everyone else and is playing catch with themselves off the backboard, and the shooting percentage of a person who is in their first few months of learning the game.  Reese is shooting a lower percentage as an interior player than Clark is as the league’s prominent long-distance shooter, if not its best, yet.  Reese has proven to be an elite rebounder, but Clark is 9th in the league in scoring, first in 3 pointers made, 1st in assists and her team has improved from last in the league to middle of the pack, whereas Reese’s team appears on track to have a worse record.

Now as Clark’s rise began many people justifiably brought up the sudden prominence of a great white hope.  I think that played into it a little, but the WNBA has been littered with superstar white players.  I think it was the style of play that Clark showed that made her the star that she is.  No matter how skilled, bigs in women’s basketball will never compare to the explosiveness and strength of NBA players (Britney Griner at her peak seemed closest that I can recall and she was not close).  But Clark seemed to me to be the first (this is wrong – I will get to that) woman to play a style that really resembled a man, namely Steph Curry.  This made her much more compelling because her game did not feel like it had to be judged on the relative scale of “women’s basketball” but instead, could provide a direct comparison to men’s basketball, and the greatest shooter of all time as a bonus.

When the racial rivalry hit its apex I saw and heard several on-line narratives suggesting that it was Angel Reese who made Caitlin Clark famous, but in my case I tuned in to a game before the LSU final in 2023 solely because the clips of Clark were crazy.  I only saw Angel Reese go toe to toe with Clark because of Clark and I think that might be true for the vast majority watching with new interest.

The last thing I want to do is make common cause with a-holes like outlets like Outkick, but it is clear that Caitlin Clark, despite her skill set, her star power and her record breaking career, has been getting sold short by jealous legends and Twitter warriors for a lot of this season.  I am not referring to her omission from the Olympics, by the way.  But the fact that we are still being handed an “Angel Reese vs Caitlin Clark for rookie of the year” narrative is pretty insulting at this point in the season.  I saw a clip on Tik Tok from Joe Budden (once you like one funny WNBA commentary video you get 400 WNBA opinion tik toks) where he said “No one ever looked at Dennis Rodman or Ben Wallace and put them in the same conversation as Michael Jordan.”  I thought that sort of succinctly summarized the point.  In the reasonable-at-first, but now purely hater-motivated desire to check Clark’s rise, there seems to be this desire by some to deny the obvious.

Now, as I admitted earlier, I was wrong about Clark in one respect. There have been players who have played an exceptionally exciting style of play and one in particular is Mya Moore (who happens to be Clark’s favorite player). Moore accomplished all there is to accomplish as an individual and as a member of a team and then walked away in her prime to free a man from prison (who she later married).  Her career is basically like if Colin Kaepernick had won the Heisman in college, won 2 Super Bowls and an MVP and then left the NFL for social justice. Or if Patrick Mahomes quit the NFL tomorrow to work for the Innocence Project. Truly one of the most amazing athletes and people in all of sports in the last 50 years.  But for the purposes of this blog, I only saw clips of her playing recently and thought, this is the case people could be making for Clark’s perceived preferential treatment. Mya Moore’s game was electrifying and enjoyable.  The fact that society, or the WNBA, or both could not find a way to make Mya Moore a Clark-level celebrity is a much more damning case than trying to manufacture a competition between Reese and Clark (in a savvy, but cynical attempt to cultivate a Magic-Bird type rivalry, but Clark-Reese is closer to a Magic-Robert Parrish rivalry).  Moore shows what Clark might have been if she were Black: talented, exciting and not nearly as well known to the wider/whiter public.

From what I have seen and read, anything less than a unanimous ROY for Clark is insulting.  And while Mya Moore provides a good example of how perhaps similar Black talent did not receive the same social explosion as Clark, imagine if a player with a plodding game, poor shooting percentages and a team that intentionally lets her pad stats at the end of losing games were white and getting hailed as a neck and neck rival with a Black woman setting the world on fire and breaking rookie records (insert Matthew McConnaughey gif from the end of A Time To Kill). It would be outrageous and in this case, force-feeding a narrative that is so obviously false on its face should be trashed. The thing the WNBA should be focused on is highlighting Clark and doing the same thing when the next Mya Moore shows up (or realizing, which perhaps they have, that A’ja Wilson has not received the star treatment and spotlight level she has deserved). Like Reese, the WNBA will have an opportunity to rebound their past misses, but shouldn’t do so at the expense of Clark.