Caitlin Clark’s rookie season is finished, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from providing their hot takes on her first campaign in the WNBA.
Clark’s season included never-before-seen levels of social and cultural drama in the WNBA, and as a result, there’s been no stop to the number of people commenting on the state of women’s sports. One person who is overqualified to speak on the situation is WNBA legend Sue Bird, who did just that on an episode of her podcast, A Touch More, with her wife Megan Rapinoe.
“Can we just call a spade a spade? Racism has been impacting the WNBA well before this year. This is not a new thing. In that way I do think Caitlin is being used as a pawn. Caitlin didn’t bring racism into the WNBA. This has been happening. And that I think is what has been such a shock for all of us. That other people are surprised by this. We’ve been trying to tell you,” Bird said, per Awful Announcing.
“And once again, for so long, as a player I would almost joke, I’d be like ‘I would have loved to have shut up and dribble.’ In so many ways I would have loved to been valued as a basketball player. I would have loved to have been spoken about just for my play.
I think everybody in the league would say that. But nobody ever let us do that. So what happened? We started to build a backbone, a little bit of an identity. We understood that in order to push our league forward we were going to have to combat these things.”
“That has to go. Because it’s not the Fever fans. It’s not Caitlin fans. That is a large group of people… we’re talking about the faction of that group that is pushing racist agendas and is pushing hate and creating divisiveness online acting as fans, acting as Fever fans, acting as Caitlin fans.
Now whether or not they like basketball, I don’t know. But that’s the group of people we’re talking about. Not all Fever fans, not all new fans, just the ones that are out there pushing this —-. That is what we’re talking about.”
It’s hard to blame Bird for having such strong opinions of people infiltrating her sport with racist agendas. Hopefully, the WNBA is better prepared to deal with these people next season.
