Should Caitlin Clark be like Mike?
Whether Caitlin Clark is or isn’t a WNBA superstar, she’s already under that kind of pressure — might she respond in the manner of the apolitical G.O.A.T.?
Jerry West passed away yesterday. For some, it was an opportunity to reflect on the man.
Others used the attention around West’s death to spotlight themselves.
Whatever your thinking or feelings regarding West, his passing probably didn’t affect them any. If anything was striking about it, it was how many people made such a stink out of how others responded. Woj wrote a detailed, Tweet-length ode while Shams’ no-frills “Jerry West has passed away at 86 years old” struck some as cold. That meant something, to some people. Imagine being such a big deal that the way people Tweet about your death is a big deal to people who never knew you.
Of course it’s not just about West the person, though let it be said that even for someone recently deceased – a group we tend to elevate before the body’s cold – the stories shared regarding West’s life and how he treated others are all glowing. It’s about what he represents, increasingly to people who never saw him play. West the gentleman. The executive. The legend. The Logo.
One story that fades more and more into the past is West, Elgin Baylor and other 1960s stars risking losing their jobs as NBA players for threatening to boycott the 1964 All-Star Game, the first ever to be televised, unless the league recognized the players’ union and agreed to serious negotiations regarding player pensions. That’s no exaggeration; Laker owner Bob Short told Baylor and West their careers were finished. West was undeterred. That kind of thinking, of being – putting others before self – is something we idealize far more than we actualize.
If Jerry West wasn’t the Logo, maybe Michael Jordan would be. Hard to think of anyone more deserving; his Jumpman logo may be even more iconic than the West silhouette the NBA doofishly pretends wasn’t obviously him, or else poor parasitic billionaires might lose some sliver of the excess they neither need nor deserve. The similarities end there – there’s more of a chance of Jerry Krause coming back from the dead to eulogize Jordan than of anybody sharing a heartwarming workers’ rights MJ story.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. What does Michael Jordan care what anyone thinks of him when he’s dead? Or alive? He doesn’t just have “f*** you” money; he has “f*** reality” money. The world he lives in can be whatever he wants it to be. To “be like Mike” wasn’t just about liking what Mike sold us – the shoes, the underwear, the electrolytes – but ignoring the stuff Mike didn’t truck with: anything political, anything pointing to the problems and solutions confronted by people who weren’t 6-foot-6 with hops from here to the moon.
West fought for the rights of future players. Jordan pushed for the right to be the kind of superstar he became: one with as loud a platform and as big a bandwagon as any human being the last 15 years of the 20th century, who used both to tell the world: “Republicans buy sneakers too.” When Mike dies, they’ll tell stories about his passion for dressing athletes in his merchandise.
Caitlin Clark’s start to her WNBA career has been something else — exactly what is very much in the eye of the beholder. She leads Indiana in minutes, points, assists, 3-pointers, free throws and steals, ranks third in rebounds and is just two blocks behind team leader Aliyah Boston despite being five inches shorter. And while these feats would be the lede in most articles about most rookies, they are only the 10th- or 14th-biggest storylines around Clark a third of the way into her rookie season.
Like West, Clark is enough of a big deal that her brand has its own gravity. Her existence, the way she makes her way through the world, seems to invite reactions that most athletes, much less most people, don’t. Before she played a minute for the Fever she was sexually harrassed at a press conference. When Clark told a room full of media she talks to them more than her family, she was greeted mostly with laughter. And you may have heard one or two stories about stuff having nothing to do with her Xs and Os.
It’s the out-sized importance to everything Clark says or does or doesn’t say or doesn’t do where she’s already resembling the magnitude of West and Jordan. In the midst of everyone everywhere having a take on Clark/racism/misogyny/basketball, there was even a call by some for Clark to use her platform and the attention always swirling around her to call for greater attention to be paid to Black WNBA players and the work they’ve done building the WNBA into what it is and where it’s headed. If Clark is going to keep inspiring conversations from basketball aficianados to bad-faith actors and everyone else in-between, the least she could do is recognize the privilege of her centrality and shine some of that light on others, right?
Or how about this is where Clark can pull a move from the Michael Jordan School of Social Responsibility and kindly tell the rest of the world to go touch grass?
Why does Clark have to say anything about anything to anybody? Why? Help me, I can’t recall – was it Woj or Shams who broke the story on what Victor Wembanyama makes of France giving Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets to Ukraine to help their war against Russian aggression? What does Jayson Tatum think of the Trump verdict? Who was the last #1 pick in the WNBA or the NBA asked to comment on anything social or political? The only time LeBron James ever piped up with a remotely risky statement on anything was when he said Daryl Morey “wasn’t educated” after Morey tweeted in support of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. Republicans by shoes, but China buys a lotta shoes.
There is perhaps no greater reflection of Clark’s unique position than juxtaposing her with her own teammate, Boston, the #1 pick a year earlier. A couple of weeks ago Boston was praised – rightfully – for publicizing how she’d logged off from her social media; there was so much ugliness and negativity there, escaping was an act of mental health self-care. Now consider Clark would not only be lambasted for doing the same – she’d be shirking her apparent responsibilities after other prominent white women have spoken truth to power, like Paige Bueckers at the 2022 ESPYs.
What Bueckers said shows an awareness of a world beyond her borders and experiences, more similar to West’s fight-for-the-future organizing than Jordan’s I-can-be-rich-if-we-all-shut-up-about-injustice self-interest. It’s about all you could ask for from someone in her position. It reflects well on her.
It also probably doesn’t mean anything. Whatever your feelings regarding women’s sports, racism, misogyny and basketball, Buecker’s words probably have no affect on them.
It’s like when a news network interviews a group of “undecided voters” near election day – if you haven’t made up your mind by that point, nothing new you hear is gonna clear things up. Who are Bueckers’ words supposed to impact, anyway? She mentioned that 80% of the WNBA award winners the prior year were Black, yet those athletes only received half as much media attention as their white peers. Was she speaking to ESPN? If she wasn’t, she was wasting her time, since they handle most of the televising/publicizing of WNBA players. If she was, ESPN never would have presented her as doing so; instead we get this watered-down praise for Bueckers saying what “needs” to be said even if the people who “need” to hear it clearly aren’t. It’s extremely unlikely any current player would make a point of calling out the WNBA’s media partner – particularly a player who’s yet to turn pro. Remember: Republicans have daughters who have daughters, and while they may not need reproductive rights they do buy shoes.
Bueckers’ words were meaningful but utterly non-threatening, thus in keeping with what corporate sports and its media hype men pass off as progressive: end zones that mouth “End racism” or absurd bubble jersey backs like “Group economics.” Bueckers tells the world how things should be, and a network with the power to create change will make sure that call’s lighting and audio are fabulous while pushing against it all the while, because that’s not what the shareholders want. The live audience that night included too many athletes who’d rather be like Mike than sage like Paige.
Clark’s career is still wide-open in front of her. The world wants her to be all things to all people, even when those things and people are contradictory. Maybe she ends up taking the Jordan route, and turns away from her platform right when she has the chance to amplify voices that need to speak to people who need to hear them. We can say we hope not, but if nobody cared when Wemby and Zion Williamson and Karl-Anthony Towns and Aliyah Boston and Jackie Young and Breanna Stewart were silent, why pretend we care now?
