Just walk away, Caitlin (while you can still walk) (2024)

So Caitlin (I’m going to assume there might be a few people reading this post who haven’t been following the story) has been playing on a Women’s National Basketball Association team after a spectacular college career with the Iowa Hawkeyes, all of a couple of months, and the strikingly hard hits—physical and and aimed at her spirit—are coming in with regularity.

In the photo above, the 22-year-old six footer, now with the Indiana Fever, is sprawled on the linoleum after a player from the opposing team, one Chennedy (pronounced Kennedy…so why is it spelled Chennedy?…oh never mind) Carter of the Chicago Sky slammed into the rookie guard’s shoulder.

The “hit heard around the world,” as it is now called, was delivered after the ball had stopped moving, while players were just standing around waiting for play to resume, when Carter simply strolled over and shoved Clark, inspiring another member of Carter’s team to leap from the bench applauding. So unsportsmanlike!

It’s not like these things don’t happen occasionally in the men’s game, but the NBA also does a good job of at least making a show of honoring the Good Sportsman’s Code. Your teammate might deliver a pretty good smack but you maintain your poker face. You might congratulate him in the locker room—but not in front of the TV cameras.

At the end of every NBA game, in a ritual that always makes me tear up, the two competing teams form a kind of receiving line and file past each other shaking hands. Many then mill around on the court and embrace each other—hard and long…without losing an ounce of their masculinity, by the way.

Of course, they would. They are mercenaries traveling the world, going from team to team, playing with somebody one day and facing him across the court the next day. It’s beautiful.

Back to the Hit Heard ‘Round the World: Often hard hits in basketball are masked by scrums of players, or occur in the middle of fast play and take many slow-motion videotape reviews to unpack No slow motion replay was needed to parse this one however.

Chennedy v. Clark was the most blatant, targeted foul this basketball fan has ever seen—then the indignity was compounded when the refs labeled it a garden variety common foul, the kind that occurs several times an hour in ordinary play.

I find it hard to believe that this could have happened in an NBA game, in the men’s game. If the refs somehow miss a flagrant foul, the fouled player’s coach fights the call to the bitter end. NBA games also often have the benefit of a self-appointed secondary layer of judges: the hyper-educated, hyper-involved Super Fans who see everything and will holler and thump their feet until justice is done.

In the days that followed, the call trended on Twitter and generally became a subject du jour. But perhaps it finally took Sir Charles Barkley declaring that “Chennedy Carter should have been ejected. It wasn’t a hard foul, was not even a basketball play” to make the league change the call.

In any case, a day later, the hit was reclassified as a Flagrant 1, which will at least stay on Carter’s record for the season and could count toward a possible ejection at some point. Still if you miscall a foul while a game is in progress you can change the outcome of a game, and this miscall smelled of the willful blindness and double standards that have infected so many other spheres of life these days.

And the below-the-radar hits haven’t stopped. Christie Sides, Clark’s Indiana Fever coach will now admit that her new point guard is “getting hammered” and that the refs seem curiously blind:

"We're just going to keep sending these possessions to the league, and these plays, and hopefully they'll start, you know, taking a better look at some of the things that we see happening, or we think is happening," Sides said.

"It's tough to keep getting hammered the way she does and to not get rewarded with free throws or foul calls. She's continued to fight through that.”

About a week after the Chennedy Carter incident, Clark was informed that she had been left off the US Women’s Olympic team. Seeing that this was a decision formed by a committee of some sort, with, one would assume, lots of input, this is especially crazy.

But by now it’s clear there’s something happening here which isn’t about basketball.

For years WNBA reps have been complaining that their abysmal daily game attendance numbers (around 400 ticket sales per game, according to sports columnists who are forced to sit in the near-empty bleachers) are the result of insufficient spending on marketing.

Well, the NBA actually spends a lot considering the women’s league generates about $60 million in revenue and costs about $10 million to run, compared to the billions earned by the NBA.

The mechanics of basic capitalism seem to confound the WNBA players who go on TV to bitch about the profound injustice, the discrimination, of being paid less than their male counterparts who draw TV audiences in the millions. (The number of households tuning in to WNBA games in past years, until recently, has averaged way below one million.)

Their salaries (a WNBA starting salary is $76 thousand) might go up if the NBA could finance broadcasts with advertising revenue but it’s kind of hard to do that with the abysmal viewing numbers. And Clark has brought the numbers: According to StubHub figures WNBA ticket sales increased 93 percent over last year, probably due to “college basketball star Caitlin Clark and her team the Indiana Fever.”

Dave Portnoy the entrepreneur behind BarStool Sports, summed up the situation perfectly in an epic Tik-Tok rant after hearing that Clark had been left off the Women’s Olympic Basketball team:

The business part of my brain is just ready to explode. Who made this decision? I never want to hear you complain about flying commercial or low salaries again. Here you have the most popular player in the world, the woman who’s put up more points as a rookie in history, the woman who puts the most asses in the seats and she can’t make the women’s Olympic basketball team?

What mostly pays for the Olympics — oh wait — revenue generated from broadcasting partners. As in TV.

As in Caitlin is TV GOLD. Opportunity wasted….

Portnoy said now that Clark is off the team, he’d rather watch “grass grow…paint dry…dirt moved around.”

And he’s right. WNBA players like to claim that they’re marginalized because of their demographics. “We’ve faced marketing challenges in the past because the league is 70 percent African-American and 30 percent gay,” explained a player this week.

Actually play attendance might have something more to do with the league’s spectacularly average skills. (The NBA is at least 70 percent black and that doesn’t seem to bother anybody.)

The fact is, these girls make a decent effort to run and pass, but they sure can’t jump. Their play looks nothing like the sublime athletics that transformed someone like me, a balletomane, into a hard-core basketball fan.

J.R. Smith, for instance, in his Knicks day was heart-stopping when he ran the court and performed all sorts of acrobatics in the air before finally deigning to come down and put the ball in the basket. (Then of course there were his sideline shenanigans which I found totally charming.)

It seems to me that dunking the ball should be defined by getting your head and shoulders—at least—above the rim so you can smash the ball in the net from above. From above seems sort of key. I assume the term “dunking,” as applied to basketball, must have migrated over from other kinds of dunking—like dunking donuts. Well, you don’t slither a donut up the side of the coffee cup and kind of squeeze a corner of it into the coffee. The act has swagger; it’s insouciant, imperialist, it’s an act of control.

But slithering up the side and squeezing the ball into the basket with the eyes below the basket, with a lot of groping around with the hand and wrist, is the way “dunks” are executed in the WNBA. Check it out!

There is a video on YouTube titled “Every NBA Dunk in History.” I thought at first it might be some sort of parody reel, making fun of the ladies’ inability to get above the rim, but then one notices the announcers in the background doing their best to approximate the way announcers at NBA games get hysterical over big plays.

The fact is everybody—game announcers, sports press, general press—have been working their butts off to manufacture excitement, to sell this league to the public, but the public just ain’t buying it, probably because the play is so lumpy-dumpy and the players are so sour and injustice-collecting.

The thoroughly uncharming Brittney Griner (the gal who was imprisoned in Russia for marijuana possession) is one of the WNBA’s manufactured stars and I was tickled to see this ESPN headline captioning a video clip:

“Highlights from Brittney Griner's team-leading 18 PTS in WNBA.”

Oh dear, if Jalen Brunson totaled eighteen points for one game the press would ask if he’d injured himself.

Enter the Caitlin Effect

And then, last winter, a strange thing happened: the first glimmerings of what is now called “the Caitlin effect.” In the middle of a dismal Iowa winter, the nights (at home on TV and in Iowa’s stadiums) were illuminated by the appearance of a very peppy, slim (!), personable, college basketball player on the hometown women’s team who shot 3-pointers like Steph Curry.

The Hawkeye’s Number 22 developed an insane following in Iowa (testimonials from ten-year-old girls, sold out jersey sales and other merch, crammed venues) and the rest of the country began to take notice. When the basketball gods (Lebron, Steph, Shaq, Kevin Durant) and celebrities like Ice Cube and Dave Portnoy weighed in, and when Clark (by now just “Caitlin”) began turning up all over, pitching products like Nike and State Farm Insurance (generally a gig only the most famous basketball players get), the rest of the country tuned in to see what the fuss was about.

That’s how it happened. The beginning was organic, then the rest of the country tuned in out of curiosity, then the MSM assisted by declaring Clark part of a righteous feminist narrative of beating the boys and invalidating sex differences.

(In the future everybody will do the same things. Women will love STEM and ice hockey at exactly the same rate as men and then we will all be happy…and the same, which is the most important thing, of course, as differences lead to differential treatment and differential treatment has to be a product of bad faith.)

I have no idea if the Caitlin fan base will hold.

She’s cute. I’ve gotten sucked into the drama. But Caitlin at her best is no Jalen Brunson or Kristap Porzingas or Jeremy Lin. She’s a woman. I love to watch female gymnasts and ice skaters but this is basketball.

We seem to be confronting irrefutable sex differences here. Women have long been identified as lacking anything close to male upper body strength but a certain cohort (you know who they are) doggedly insists that women make up the difference in lower body strength. US military physiologists, for instance, forever searching for a way to put lipstick on the pig of womens’ integration into combat jobs, have liked to point to stats that supposedly show “females” (to use the US military’s favored term) dominating in the sit up category.

Yeah? The numbers are actually kind of underwhelming. If our bodies were identical (and thank God they’re not. Wouldn’t life be boring if they were? Vive la difference!) we wouldn’t have to have, say, separate women’s track and field teams or marathon records and so on.

The ballet world knew about irrefutable physical sex differences. It used to be standard practice in a ballet class to have the boys do the “big jump” portion of the class separately from the girls so the pianist could slow down the music giving the boys longer hang time. Jumping was my thing. I would sneak into the boy’s group in the back and try to jump with the boys because I found their big jump energy exhilarating.

WNBA management and players have scrambled to justify Clark’s exclusion from the Olympic team and ended up parroting a line about her “rookie status”—as if a spot on the Olympic team should be handed as a reward for good attendance.

But let’s get that out of the way: The exclusion should have nothing to do the Iowan’s rookie status. As Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most politically correct sports writers out there and one who’d we’d expect to parrot the WNBA line, points out:

Previously, four WNBA rookies - Rebecca Lobo in 1996, Diana Taurasi in 2004, Candace Parker in 2008 and Breanna Stewart in 2016 – have been selected for Team USA’s Olympic rosters, while Christian Laettner made the 1992 ‘Dream Team’ roster as an NBA rookie…

Even Gay had to raise the politically unpalatable issue of…money…and profits…and revenue:

…If Olympic basketball is also a business…then passing over a player who’s become a stadium-filling sensation is a strange and stubborn choice. Here was a low-risk opportunity to add a talented, already-on-the-roster-bubble rookie who would introduce a massive wave of new fans to the Olympic theater. These fans might not have followed prior U.S. teams, but so what? Clark’s inclusion would have lifted attention around the U.S. team in an extremely crowded Olympic calendar.

Think about it. Even if she seldom played a minute, Clark’s presence in Paris would have increased attention, coverage, eyeballs, merchandise, sponsorship opportunities…please stop when you think any of this is bad. By not including her, Team USA is fumbling an opportunity to ride a genuine grassroots phenomenon and raise the profile of its entire program. It’s daffy.

The key word in Gay’s analysis is “stubborn.” Why is seemingly everybody in the WNBA higher echelons so stubbornly grouchy about the “Caitlin effect,” to the point of perversely, self-destructively shooting Clark down?

Because the WNBA seems to have gotten comfortable in their dank little victim’s corner. Victimhood is the most cherished prize of life in the 21st century and the WNBA has been working that side of the street virtually since they were created in 1996. In fact, if one looks at Adam Silver’s statements when the league was created, one could argue the league was never expected to succeed, that its main purpose was to be a tax write off, a virtue signal, a tithe to feminism to make up for the crime of displaying glorious male bodies and untrammeled male athleticism.

So the WNBA is known for—in fact celebrates—the fact that its players are 70 percent black (that in itself is no big deal in basketball) combined with the secret sauce of 30 percent LBGTQ. (Thirty percent is the number of players who are out; the actual number may actually be much higher.)

That the league has become a sort of Peaceful Valley retirement sanctuary for lesbian athletes seems to be fast becoming the league’s biggest bragging point. As an article on Yahoo News chortled:

Yes, we queer folks love us some WNBA but just how LGBTQ+ is it? The answer: Very.

According to Interbasket, as of 2022, nearly 30% of the league identified as queer, which was down from the 38% back in 2019. The numbers have also dwindled just a tad coming into 2024, with some players like Riquna Williams and Amanda Zahui B. not returning this year…But still, those numbers are pretty great, and who knows how they will look after the draft.

The upcoming summer Olympics provided an orgy of LBGTQ pride testimonials.

A website called OutSports came out with this bizarre and perhaps all-too-revealing headline: “Half of USA Olympic women’s basketball team is LGBTQ. Caitlin Clark is off the roster.”

Given their miserable their attendance figures, given the snarky sotto voce jokes, WNBA players seem to have circled the wagons ever tighter behind a defensive fence of identity politics. Maybe they derive comfort from a “We few, we happy few; we band of brothers” esprit. After all, the great psychologist Erik Erikson once said, “any deprivation is endurable if it is given meaning.”

Anyway, this tightly-knit coven was invaded by a young, fresh girl from Iowa, a graduate of a Catholic high school, a daddy’s girl, following her dad, a football coach into a sporting career. She is has no tatts that we know of, no dreadlocks. She’s thoroughly rural in every way, engaged to be married to…that would be to a man, and at twenty-two already earning millions from endorsem*nts from companies like State Farm and Nike, which plans to do what it did for Michael Jordan, name a shoe after her. She’d hosted a show on Saturday Night Live, and was earning the love of the gods of basketball, men like Lebron, Steph, Kevin Durant and Shaq, who called her “the best female collegiate player ever."

One has to acknowledge that the hype monster had something to do with the charming personality and awesome play but that, ironically, it was given extra rocket fuel by feminism, by the mainstream culture’s endless crusade to find female equivalents to men, so as to pretend sex differences have no hard-wired basis in the body and that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all one happy, bland world, dressing the same, looking the same, and doing virtually the same things all the time.

See, Caitlin initially benefited from identity politics, until her female-in-a-man’s-sport card was trumped in the intersectional victim hierarchy by females-in-a-man’s-sport who are also 1) black and 2) LGBTQ+ WNBA players.

In effect, the WNBA said, “Yeah, so you’re a woman? We’ll see that card and raise you two. We’re also women, but you’re a woman who’s been helped along the way by white, hetero and pretty privilege.”

(“Pretty privilege” was added by one of the ladies on The View. I have to disagree about the pretty part. One of the things I found refreshing about Caitlin’s elevation is that she is not conventionally pretty. In fact, with her large beaky nose and long narrow face she looks like a female Ichabod Crane. Not having to look like Lindsey Vonn is progress!)

So new dynamics have kicked in—aided once again by the Greek Chorus, endlessly suggestible media: Caitlin is no longer a trailblazer for little girls who dream at night of becoming basketball stars (of which there are like, four, in the entire country.) The script has flipped and now she’s an arrogant invader, propelled by white, heterosexual, red state privilege. According to of The View, she’s been manufactured in the NBA marketing lab to make the black, gay, tatted-up WNBA more palatable to “straight white men.”

So the league that’s been crying out for more marketing is now eyeing this new blast of profile-raising like horses wrinkling their noses at spoiled feed.

The problem down the line for Clark is that historically a victim identity becomes an excuse for violence. The bigger the (often manufactured) injustice, the greater the permission to exact revenge on the purported victimizer. History is full of examples of the alchemy of purported victims morphing into the greatest victimizers.

Given this all-too-common human dynamic I don’t think it’s far-fetched to predict that the women of the WNBA will continue to resent Clark, to see her as a sort of invader, and to look the other way at “accidents” that might occur on the court.

In fact, some of the players seemed to be setting the stage for lots more bumping and jostling in interviews last week with a new line about the “more physical play” in the pros. It was best Clark didn’t go to the Olympics said one player smugly, because at the Olympics “physicality is taken to an entirely new level.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with physicality. It makes games exciting, but that’s why we have red lines called flagrant fouls, and the whole system breaks down if, out of their own white guilt and fear of looking racist, coaches look the other way.

That is the scenario under which Caitlin could become a sort of sacrifice to the great gods of woke.

Athletes bodies are fragile and their careers are brief. Having had an aspiring dance career cut short by knee injuries (for which I later had surgery) caused by insufficient hip joint flexibility (for which I later had more surgery), when I’m at my most morbid I look at an athlete and see only an assemblage of joints running around on the basketball court.

And what is a joint? It is a space between major bones filled with the soft stretchy fabric-like material—cartilage and tendons. It’s heartbreaking to think that our future functioning rests on these delicate constructions—the ankle, the knee, the hip sockets, the lumbar and cervical spine.

Caitlin is a lanky ectomorph surrounded much of the time by much bulkier mesomorphic bodies. Their joints, unlike hers, are surrounded with a lot more impact-cushioning muscle. If she is going to stay in the WNBA she should probably bulk up. On the other hand, would she become more muscle-bound and lose that lovely nimbleness? That’s for a sports trainer to answer.

In any case, rich men like Ice Cube and Dave Portnoy have offered Caitlin millions for a relatively easy schedule of demonstration games.

Now that sounds fun! So just walk away, Caitlin. Tell your agent to get you out of your contract. That would violate all the laws of Iowa Nice stoicism, but you’re a pro basketball player now. You can act a little imperious. Leave the airless little coven alone to nurse their precious victim status.

And get out while you’re healthy.