Break out your best China and dust off your finest threads, Baltimore. We’ve got company coming Wednesday and we’ll need to be on our best behavior.
Caitlin Clark is coming to Charm City and you’d better be ready. It’s not often royalty is in our midst.
Clark, for the uninitiated, is a second-year guard with the Indiana Fever of the WNBA. She’s been credited with breathing life into if not flat out saving, the 29-year-old women’s basketball league, as well as curing cancer and eliminating the national debt.
OK, that’s a bit much, but you get the idea. To hear her fans and media sycophants tell it, Caitlin Clark is the savior of women’s sports and the most compelling figure on the American athletic scene.
That’s a lot for any one person, much less someone like Clark, just a year removed from being college basketball’s all time leading scorer and likely still trying to find her place in the world.
Yet, that’s the status that has been assigned to her, along with that of an unwitting figure in the ongoing culture wars.
You see, because Clark, last year’s Rookie of the Year, is a straight white woman thriving in a league that is dotted with Black women, many of whom are lesbian, her status and success are thought by many to be a positive affirmation of all that is right about the good old US of A.
The fact that Clark and her Fever teammates are coming to play the Washington Mystics at the arena formerly known as the Civic Center in the hometown of Angel Reese, her supposed archrival, probably will be seen as some triumph of good over evil, even though Reese plays in Chicago and won’t even be here.
Reese and Clark have orbited each other for years going back to when both were on travel teams before high school. Reese, who graduated from St. Frances’ Academy was the nation’s No.2 rated high school recruit and Clark was rated third.
Clark went onto Iowa, while Reese began at Maryland before transferring to LSU after her sophomore year. They met in the Final Four as juniors in a heavily promoted championship game showdown.
Reese was not only the victor, but was named the Most Outstanding Player. She waved her hand in front of her face and pointed to her ring finger, mocking Clark who had taunted her opponents with a similar gesture.
That was three years ago and the two of them are still pawns, witting or otherwise, in a silly battle for control of the American civilization, waged supposedly by a pair of young women who frankly each have some growing up to do before they can lead anything.
Oddly enough, Reese will not get a chance to play in Baltimore this year, as her Sky team will play the Mystics in Northern Virginia. That’s probably just as well. One cultural icon at a time is more than enough for us Charm City denizens.
And that’s how I see it for this week. You can reach us via email with your questions and comments at Sports at Large at gmail.com. And follow me on BlueSky, Threads and X at Sports at Large.
Until next week, for all of us here and for producer Lisa Morgan, I’m Milton Kent. Thanks for listening and enjoy the games.
