Let Them Talk Shit
Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark don't have to be friends — and it's better for sports if they're not.
Dear readers,
The big personal news on the Southpaw front this week is that the two of us attended our first ballgame of the season yesterday, a matchup between the New York Mets and the Miami Marlins — and the Mets won! We’re enjoying the feeling while it lasts.
In other news, one week out, the sporting news cycle is still being dominated by the fallout from the women’s college basketball championship between LSU and Iowa. We have our own thoughts about all of it below — hope you enjoy.
-Ian and Calder
Let Them Talk Shit
Last Sunday, Louisiana State University and Iowa University faced off in the women’s college basketball championship. The game was dominated by two stars — Angel Reese of LSU and Caitlin Clark of Iowa — although it also featured the unfortunate sideshow of LSU’s coach, Kim Mulkey, flailing around on the sidelines. (Mulkey, who coached Brittney Griner at Baylor, didn’t so much as lift a finger when Griner was detailed by Russia last year, apparently because she objected to the fact that Griner has come out as gay.)
Clark dominated the tournament, averaging 31.8 points per game and knocking off perennial powerhouse South Carolina in the Final Four to put the Tigers into the championship. She put up a heroic effort in that final game as well, but LSU managed to pull off the upset, prevailing 102-85. The game was watched by 9.9 million people, a massive record for women’s college basketball and a huge step up from the previous record of 5.7 million for a title game.
The real fun started after the game, though. In the closing seconds, when LSU had all but secured the victory, Reese hit Clark with a “you can’t see me” gesture, which she followed up by pointing to her ring finger to indicate that she’d just won a championship ring. The gesture mimicked a move that Clark had made after knocking Louisville out of the tournament a few games earlier.
Predictably, the worst people got angry about Reese’s celebration. On Twitter, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy called Reese “a classless piece of shit,” while Keith Olbermann chimed in with “What a fucking idiot.” Even First Lady Jill Biden didn’t want to fully admit Iowa’s defeat — she attended the game and afterward said she wanted to invite both teams to the White House to celebrate. (Reese replied by saying she’d go see the Obamas instead.)
When people pointed out to Olbermann that Clark had made the same gesture mere days earlier, he responded that “both were wrong.”
There are obvious racial dynamics at play here. Clark is a white woman from Iowa, and Reese is a Black woman from the D.C. area. When Clark was dominating the tournament, people were talking only about her greatness and how she’s drawn more eyes to the sport. When Reese sent her home, people like Olbermann couldn’t help but whine.
Olbermann’s weak walk-back of his comments, though, was bothersome in a different way. Olbermann is ostensibly a liberal, and he’s clearly afraid of being hit with any accusation of racism. To avoid such accusations, he spent days several days insisting on Twitter and on his show that both Reese and Clark were classless for rubbing victories in other players’ faces.
But Olbermann’s bluster invites the question: why do our athletes have to be “classy”? And what does being “classy” really mean in this context?
We would posit that it means showing absolutely no personality at all. To fans of Olbermann’s demographic, being “classy” means turning yourself into a human stat-line, a blank and boring slate onto which fans can project their own emotions. In other words, it means something that Olbermann would otherwise be loath to connect himself with: “Shut up and dribble.”
It’s also a criticism that’s levied much more frequently at female athletes than male ones. Olbermann takes every chance he gets to complain about baseball players pimping home runs or mens’ basketball players flexing, but as far as we’re aware he’s never called them “mindless [and] classless,” as he called Reese. That’s an extra level of vitriol.
In addition to deepening sports’ racial and gender divides, the “shut up and dribble” crowd also make sports less fun. When athletes hate each other and show it, when they’re proud to rub a victory in someone else’s faces, when there’s a player who the home team loves and the visiting team loves to hate — that’s the engine that drives sports’ success. Asking players to turn themselves into robots not only turns them into commodities but also devalues their work. Even if you’re thinking about sports in stark financial terms, it’s stupid to suck the joy out of the product.
When debates like this one arise, you inevitably hear a bunch of handwringing about how athletes should be “sportsmanlike” and consider their responsibilities as “role models” to the next generation of athletes. But as the sporting world continues to diversify, it’s worth asking who gets to set the standard for what is “sportsmanlike.” As the academics Tomika Ferguson and Robin Hughes pointed out in a column this week, Reese was “reared and socialized in a majority Black, urban environment where trash-talking and communication with your opponents during the game is accepted and expected.” The knee-jerk reaction to write her gesture off as “unsportsmanlike” engages a whole set of normative and cultural values that more and more players and fans don’t share.
Don’t believe us? Just listen to Clark herself, who in the midst of the controversy this week said the following on ESPN: “[Reese] should never be criticized for what she did. I’m just one that competes, and [Reese] competed.” She added, “I’m a big fan of hers.”
It was a statement designed to show that she just wants to play basketball. And she probably believes the first half of what she said. It’s a bummer, though, that she had to say the second half to ward off some of the dumbest criticism in the world. Rivals don’t have to be fans of each other. They can hate each other, and it’s more fun when they do.
Reese and Clark are both returning to college next year. It’s entirely possible that they could meet again in the NCAA tournament, where we hope they keep up the fireworks.
Let them talk shit.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the Biden administration’s new rules about transgender athletes? “Title IX and the New Rule on Transgender Athletes Explained,” by Remy Tumin in The New York Times (April 7, 2023).
. . . golfers speaking out against LIV Golf? “‘It’s about the damn money’”, by Kent Babb in The Washington Post (April 5, 2023).
. . . changing norms about women’s running uniforms? “The Runners Changing Course on Uniform Expectations,” by Nell Gallogly in The New York Times (April 8, 2023).