‘It can be taxing’ – Sportsnet.ca

INDIANAPOLIS — In the centre of the storm, Caitlin Clark is trying to remain calm.

It’s not easy.

The world keeps dragging her into the swirl. In the space of her few years in the public eye, Clark has seen her story evolve from a fun tale about a record-breaking college basketball scoring sensation bringing new eyes to women’s basketball, to a talking point about race, sexuality, fame, money and opportunity, before circling back to her concerning turnover totals in the early going of her first WNBA season.

It can be a lot.

“I think it’s definitely difficult. I feel like I’ve had to grow up pretty fast,” the Indiana Fever star said on Sunday when asked about sudden, inescapable fame, and mental health. “Like I’m only 22 years old. I feel younger than that at times and I’m trying to navigate moving to a new city by myself. I’m trying to navigate, you know, playing in a new league on top of everything else that has come with it. And, you know, obviously I’ve been given a lot of amazing things in my life and [with] that comes great responsibility … [but] I think when you’re in the spotlight, and people are seeing your every move, it can be taxing.”

The latest installment of Clark’s whirlwind turn at the cross-section of celebrity and basketball came Sunday in front of another sellout at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis. Meeting her there was Angel Reese, the Chicago Sky rookie who is no stranger to high-profile showdowns with Clark and her teams.

They had a heated battle in the 2023 NCAA national championship game where Reese’s LSU Tigers downed Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes – punctuated famously with Reese pointing at her ring finger and mocking Clark’s own ‘you-can’t-see-me’ hand motion. Clark and Iowa got revenge of sorts when they knocked out Reese and LSU in this year’s Elite Eight back in April.

Whether it’s the level of basketball – Reese is averaging a double-double for the Sky and, in the view of some, is the front-runner for rookie-of-the-year honours, ahead of Clark – or the level of drama, people can’t stop paying attention. Attendance is up, merchandise sales are spiking – up 756 per cent – and even without waiting for the official numbers, everyone assumes the latest Clark-Reese game will set viewership records.

“We’ve done a great job bringing on a lot of fans to the league from college,” says Reese. “I think we’ve done that for both our respective schools and doing our championship runs and going into the Final Four. So I think we did a great job being able to bring the fans from college to the league and I think they still want to see us and continue to have to it grow.”

Says Clark: “I think it’s just the emotion and the passion that we play with. And I think that’s maybe not something that was always appreciated about women’s sports, and it should be, and I think that’s what makes it fun. We’re competitors and that’s the way the game should be. It’s going to get a little feisty, get physical, but at the end of the day, both teams are just trying to win.”

In their second meeting as professionals, the Fever earned a 91-83 win that might have been Clark’s best all-around outing of her 15-game professional career. She scored 23 points on 11 shots while adding nine rebounds, eight assists and two blocked shots.

Coverage will likely also include plenty of footage of Reese – who finished with 11 points, 13 rebounds and five assists — hitting Clark across the head and sending her to the floor as she attempted to block Clark’s lay-up attempt in the third quarter, which earned Reese a flagrant foul.

Clark’s reaction?

“What’s going through my mind is I need to make these two free throws,”
she said. “That’s all I’m thinking about. It’s just part of basketball. It is what it is, she’s trying to make a play on the ball and get the block. It happens.”

Things bubbled over the last time the Sky and Fever met back on June 1 when Clark was body-checked by Chicago’s Chennedy Carter away from the ball in the final moments of what ended up being a one-point win for the Fever, with Reese jumping off the Sky bench to celebrate the play, which eventually was called a flagrant foul.

That set off what felt like two solid weeks of debate on every imaginable platform about race, sexual identity and societal issues in general. This is all with the subtext of Clark – by virtue of her unprecedented $28-million shoe deal with Nike – already being the richest women’s player of all time before even taking the floor in the WNBA, which set the table for potential resentment.

“I think it’s a huge thing. I think a lot of people may say it’s not about Black and white, but to me, it is,” Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson, twice the WNBA MVP and widely acknowledged as the best player in women’s basketball, said earlier this season when asked the potential impact of race on Clark’s popularity and before she recently signed her own shoe deal with Nike. “It really is because you can be top notch at what you are as a Black woman, but yet maybe that’s something that people don’t want to see.

“They don’t see it as marketable, so it doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug. That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race, because it is.”

Clark has done her best to avoid any societal debate, claiming that she studiously avoids social media or wading into the frothy waters in a world where racially and politically tinged debate is the oxygen for so many media formats in sports and beyond.

By nature and perhaps by policy, Clark never fans the flames.

Sometimes that doesn’t work either, though. Just this week, she was criticized when she brushed off a question about the way her name is used by some corners to justify certain political or cultural positions:

“No,” Clark told a group of reporters. “I don’t see it. I don’t see it. That’s not where my focus is. My focus is here and on basketball. That’s where it needs to be, that’s where it has been, and I’m just trying to get better on a daily basis.”

That got awkward when Connecticut Sun forward DiJonai Carrington said on X “Dawg, how one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts. We all see the [expletive]. We all have a platform. We all have a voice & they all hold weight. Silence is a luxury.”

That prompted Clark to clarify her position: “Everybody in our world deserves the same amount of respect. The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect,” Clark said in a question about Carrington’s comment on X. “People should not be using my name to push those agendas.”

And have we talked about the on-going controversy around Clark being left off the U.S. Olympic team heading to France next month, which set off another week of debate.

Clark hasn’t, other than to say that yes, being an Olympian is a goal and acknowledging that making the powerhouse U.S. team – gunning for an eighth consecutive gold medal – is one of the most difficult things to do in team sports. She hopes to be there in 2028 in Los Angeles, and in the meantime, she’ll make good use of a much-needed, one-month break in the WNBA schedule to rest, recover and recharge after playing almost continuously since last November. 

But it seems like everyone else has an opinion, with some of the view that Clark should be on the team to bring more eyeballs to the women’s game and others saying that a largely unproven rookie even being considered is more proof that she’s the beneficiary of a double standard.

The swirl never stops.

Her teammates, meanwhile, are getting used to going to work with Clark every day. They get up shots, jostle, sweat and have post-practice, half-court shooting competitions, as is the case with every other professional basketball team, and then leave the gym to find all hell is breaking loose.

“It’s hilarious, I kid you not. You come across these things, it’s like, who comes up with this stuff?” said Fever veteran Kelsey Mitchell. “But it’s here for a reason, we have to be doing something right for them to be talking about us … it takes some adjusting, but I will be honest, it’s hilarious.”

But all that’s off the floor. On the hardwood, Clark still likes it noisy; still likes to make the crowd roar.

At that, she’s undeniably excellent. She had the fans buzzing Sunday in the opening moments of the game when she blew past the Sky’s Lindsay Allen for a lay-up and the first score of the game. A few minutes later, she came off a crushing screen set by Aliyah Boston to drill one of her trademark deep threes. She did it one more time late in the fourth quarter when she took a kick-out pass from one of Boston’s six offensive rebounds and rifled a pass behind the heads of the defence to get NaLyssa Smith a lay-up that finally put the game out of reach.

It was all in front of another sellout crowd of 17,274 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in the capital city of a state in basketball’s discerning heartland. Through seven home games, the Fever are averaging 16,683 fans per home game. The NBA’s Indiana Pacers averaged 16,468 at Gainbridge last season. Put another way, through seven home games the Fever have already drawn more fans (116,782) than they did (113,300) in 38 home dates combined in 2022 and 2023. 

“Yeah, it’s been night-and-day different than it’s always been,” said Fever head coach Christie Sides, who is in her third season with the team.

Sellouts on the road are routine, which can make for some tough nights, more media requests, less privacy and more scrutiny.

“I blame Caitlin,” jokes Mitchell.

Imagine when Clark really starts to get rolling.

The Fever (5-10) have won for the fourth time in six games after starting the season 1-8, a stretch that corresponded with them playing 11 games in 20 nights to start the season, several in marquee matchups as the WNBA tried to leverage Clark’s popularity to kick off the campaign.

Clark has been very good, but not without blemish as a rookie in a league featuring the world’s best 144 players. The WNBA also is known for its physicality, aided by the fact that players have an NBA-style six fouls to use even if the games are only 40 minutes long — and happily use them.

Clark came into Sunday’s game averaging 15.6 points a game along with 4.9 rebounds and six assists, but also a league-worst 5.5 turnovers while shooting just 36.7 per cent from the floor and 32.2 per cent from three. She’s had some highs, including a pair of 30-point games, but also some lows that are likely all new to her: four single-point scoring games, including three points on 1-of-10 shooting against the New York Liberty, WNBA finalists from a year ago. Not any easy experience or a familiar one for the NCAA’s all-time leading scoring leader, woman or man.

“It’s not a difficulty thing. I think it’s navigating professional life. I think it’s something that’s new for myself,” Clark said. “I think it’s an adjustment for me to be able to wipe one game and move on to the next, whether it’s a great game or whether it’s a game where you have 10 turnovers.

“I think I’m such a perfectionist and you want to be perfect in every area. But when you’re playing at the highest level … you don’t have time to sit there and sulk about what just happened to you or, you know, whatever is happening. You got to be able to let it go and learn from it and be able to move on.”

Easier said than done.

“For somebody like me like that can be really hard at times, because you know you want it to be perfect and you feel like you’re just inches away from maybe making a couple more shots or taking care of the ball that better or playing great defence,” Clark said. “So I think that’s kind of been you know, one of the biggest things for me, it’s just my ability to move on and that’s something I’ll learn as I you know, progressed through my career.”

In the meantime, people will watch and talk, watch some more, and likely continue to do more of all of it for years to come. It bodes well whether you’re a fan of the WNBA, of women’s sports, or if you’ve just spent a reported $50 million to bring an WNBA franchise to Toronto for 2026, as Larry Tanenbaum did last month.

“It’s really cool,” said Clark, who slowly made her way through a gauntlet of pony-tailed autograph seekers post-game. “I was someone who grew up loving women’s sports, whether it was basketball, whether it was soccer, I always had it on. I always wanted to support it and it just shows that when given the opportunity women’s sports are certainly an amazing thing and fun to watch and are only on the rise … and once people watch one time they can’t get enough of it and they continue to come back and to be a small part of that is super fun.”