Will Con Media Turning on Caitlin Clark Impact WNBA Popularity?
Megyn Kelly, Maria Taylor and the battle for what's mainstream
A Comment from Subscriber Drewski:
HoS muse of 2022: Adrian Wojnarowski (my edit)
HoS muse of 2023: Brock Purdy
HoS muse of 2024: Caitlin Clark
Any predictions for 2025 ?
It won’t be Clark again in 2025. Clark’s 2024 run in this category is absolutely dominant, but there’s a beauty to how HoS Muse must change by the year. It’ll be tough to wholly leave Clarkville though. She’s even proven to be a bountiful content generator over the weekend, in the offseason, as football games are happening.
I wrote about the TIME Caitlin Clark feature last week, figured that story would soon die down, but no. Washington Mystics co-owner Sheila Johnson decided to do an interview on CNN, reacting to TIME's decision to name Caitlin Clark "Athlete of the Year” with bizarre resentment and amazing quotes.
Caitlin Clark was named Athlete of the year. Why couldn’t they have put the whole WNBA on that cover & said ‘The WNBA is the league of the year’?
We have so much talent out there that has been unrecognized, and I don’t think we can pin it on just one player.
When you single out one player, it creates hard feelings, so now you're starting to hear stories of racism within the WNBA, and I don't want to hear that.
It's the way media plays out race. I feel really bad, because I've seen so many players of color that are equally as talented, and they never got the recognition they should have.
Moments like this, I really value the non insane leagues. I sometimes take it for granted that nobody in the NFL is angry that Christian McCaffrey got a lot of attention as the rare White superstar running back. Marshawn Lynch hilariously called CMC “Snow Bunny Pearl” and effusively complimented him. Nobody was mad that McCaffrey won Offensive Player of the Year and did a great Uber Eats ad with Matthew McConaughey.
Nearly everyone reading this believes the WNBA’s culture to be absolutely nuts on the Clark situation. I maintain that the league is a strange Earth 2 redoubt, an artifact from a parallel universe where all the 2020 cultural fashions continued unabated. The question is whether that culture somehow upends the tremendous enthusiasm they’ve reaped with the Caitlin Clark windfall. The connected question is whether Clark herself is now a participant in undermining the golden goose (herself).