The problem with Caitlin Clark’s walk-out with Morgan Wallen
The web unleashed its fury on Indiana Fever shooting guard Caitlin Clark over the weekend after she walked on stage Saturday night time with country music star Morgan Wallen as he acquired a packed sand in Clark’s yard: Indiana.
At concern for Clark are Wallen’s personal history and his selections. In 2020, Wallen ran afoul of Covid lockdown restrictions. The identical 12 months, I got kicked out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse in Nashville and was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. In 2024, he was arrested once more — this time for throwing a chair off the balcony of one other Nashville honky-tonk, a six-story bar. The piece of furnishings crashed to the road beneath, narrowly lacking two law enforcement officials. He entered a “conditional plea” and was sentenced to seven days at a DUI education center.
The largest purpose why Clark ought to have stayed residence Saturday night time is a 2021 video through which Wallen could be heard shouting the N-word.
This conduct alone in all probability ought to have been sufficient to make Clark — the WNBA’s most marketable star — suppose twice about showing with Wallen. But the largest purpose Clark ought to have stayed residence Saturday night time is a 2021 video posted by TMZ through which Wallen could be heard shouting the N-word and different obscenities. As journalist Sarah Spain wrote on social media over the weekend about Clark, “If Morgan Wallen using the N word wasn’t enough for you to stop supporting him — (forget all the other terrible s*** he’s done!) — I don’t know what to tell ya.”
Per week after TMZ revealed his video, and after his document label suspended him indefinitely, Wallen known as his use of that racial epithet “unacceptable and inappropriate.” He blamed it on his consuming — “a bender” — and promised to do higher.
Since the weekend, Clark’s followers have identified that different celebrities and distinguished athletes —including Drake, Peyton Manning, Myles Garrett, Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift’s fiance Travis Kelce — have walked on stage with Wallen in latest months with out controversy. If Hall of Famer Manning can stand subsequent to Wallen in his throwback University of Tennessee soccer uniform, and NFL champions Mahomes and Kelce can bro it out with Wallen and be cheered, then why cannot Clark do the identical? Isn’t {that a} double normal?
Absolutely, it’s. But Clark’s followers are lacking an necessary level right here: None of the above stars have been dubbed a great white hopea mantle that Clark has been shouldering since 2024. That’s the 12 months she turned the all-time main scorer in girls’s school basketball, the Indiana Fever’s No. 1 draft decide, the face of the WNBA, the participant most followers wished to see and Time journal’s athlete of the 12 months, spawning what one WNBA official known as the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”
That stage of fame, sophisticated by racial politics, comes at a price. It implies that all the things Clark does will get scrutinized to find out what he may say about her, about us and about race in America. Clark ought to know that the majority of all. She’s been dwelling within the unforgiving glare of the highlight since earlier than she performed a minute within the WNBA. Even the NCAA match runs throughout its final two school seasons were seen by some as racial dramasas she and her principally white Iowa Hawkeyes teammates tipped off towards mostly Black teams together with South Carolina and LSU.
It’s a sports activities narrative that we have now seen no less than as soon as earlier than. In the late Seventies, Larry Bird, a back-to-back All-American at Indiana State, was labeled a fantastic white hope, too. In 1979, Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” informed up a narrative on CBS’ “Evening News” not about Bird’s greatness, however about his whiteness. In that CBS report, white followers complained there weren’t sufficient white gamers to root for in skilled basketball. “I don’t enjoy going to the basketball,” one white man informed CBS, “and seeing all Black players.” The CBS function argued that Bird was about to alter that after he joined the league that June. Many others agreed — together with, most significantly, league officers — and Bird did his finest to reply questions on this delicate matter, similar to Clark in the present day.
Keith O’Brien
Keith O’Brien is a journalist and a PEN America award-winning biographer. He’s the writer of “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball.” His latest e-book is “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird.”