Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark reacts during a first-round WNBA basketball playoff game against the Connecticut Sun, on Sept. 25.Jessica Hill/The Associated Press
In terms of rookie campaigns, there have been only a few transformative ones. The sport was in one spot when they started, and a more advanced spot when it ended. Those sorts of debuts tend to predict career greatness – Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Dan Marino.
Caitlin Clark just had one of those seasons. In terms of where the WNBA was before she was drafted and where it is now, you could argue no modern player has pushed the line further forward.
Sport isn’t the important thing here. You don’t change the game by winning. You do it by altering the terms of engagement.
Clark went into the WNBA freighted with a reputation as the greatest collegiate basketball player in history. She was a shy, if not retiring, middle-class kid from the American Midwest – Madison Avenue’s dream athlete. They could turn her into whatever they wanted.
Clark was never going to fail. Too much money had been invested in her. But it could easily have fizzled. Clark could have been bad or, worse, she could have been too good. The former would make her look ridiculous; the latter would do the same to the league. Either would have bored the public.
Instead, Clark spent a year figuring a new way to perform athletic superstardom – as a chilled-out martyr.
Clark isn’t much of a talker so, in the way of things, people started talking for her. Few of them got it right.
There was the reporter who asked her in her first news conference if she would flash him a heart sign in the audience. There were the other players who rubbished her before they’d played against her. There were the talking heads who wrote her off as a charlatan when her team lost eight of its first nine games. So far, so good.
Clark’s role was not to play better or win more. It was to refuse to react. The cavalry would arrive soon.
Clark did have bigger problems at this point, such as surviving. For the first few weeks of her pro career, resentful opponents treated her like a piñata. Clark’s own teammates seemed to share some of this resentment. They didn’t do much to help her.
Eventually, the pro-Clark forces were mustered. Many of them were former NBA players who now work in media.
At the beginning of the season, they’d done what the media has always done when it comes to women’s basketball – mostly ignored it. But watching Clark get knocked around without the benefit of reprisal drove them to high dudgeon.
You’d open up ESPN or the New York Post in the morning and someone else would have said something outraged about how the WNBA and Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, were or were not protecting her. Then someone else would react to that reaction and it would be news as well.
Eventually, Clark’s detractors inside the league realized they could get good coverage by saying something nice about her. This virtuous circle of self-interest turned Clark and the WNBA into a mainstream concern discussed by regular people. It’s the first women’s league to get there.
Clark’s role in this was to remain shtum. She’s a boring interview, which is a good strategy. That way, she never alienates anyone. Like Michael Jordan back in the day, she’s whoever you think she is.
Good bad things kept happening to Clark. In June, she was passed over by the U.S. women’s Olympic team.
“I think it just gives you something to work for,” Clark said brightly of the snub. She should have sent flowers to the selection committee. The decision brought thousands of neutrals over to her side.
Meanwhile, both Clark and the Fever were getting better. It was now impossible to suggest she was a bust. By August, a new consensus was formed – Clark was already one of the best players in league history.
Eventually, as was inevitable, the backlash to the backlash rolled around. WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert volunteered to step on the banana peel.
Asked to comment on the racial aspects of Clark’s contrived rivalry with former collegiate nemesis Angel Reese, Engelbert gushed about Bird-Johnson and what that did for the NBA. You could hear dollar signs in her voice.
People were enraged. Engelbert humbled herself. There was a lot of intoning in the press and by the relevant player support groups. And from Clark? Crickets.
Some were angry that she didn’t speak out on the issue, but Clark had seen this general problem coming a long way off. She doesn’t speak out on anything.
She didn’t pop off back when plenty of basketball types were taking personal shots at her. Now the same people were demanding her commentary on something someone else said about an argument she never involved herself in? It wasn’t a supportable position, and collapsed as a talking point.
Clark’s learned a lot of things during her time as a public figure, and one of them is the Kate Moss rule – never complain, never explain. More people should try it.
On Wednesday night, Clark completed the arc on the most successful rookie season in memory – she lost.
Well, she didn’t. She played all 40 minutes and was the game’s high scorer, with 25 points, as the Connecticut Sun swept the Fever out of the playoffs with an 87-81 win in Game 2 of the best-of-three series. Everyone else on her team lost. The Fever were eliminated in the first round of the postseason. It’s the first playoffs they’ve made in nine years.
This is also a bad good thing. You don’t want to win too much as a rookie. It creates an unmeetable expectation. More important, it catches people by surprise. What you want to do is build interest gradually. Give late adopters plenty of opportunity to catch on.
By the time Clark is in it with a chance to win titles, the WNBA could be on the same viewership footing as its male counterparts. If so, it won’t be the work of one person, but one person will have done more work than anyone else.