By Candace Buckner
The splashiest NCAA tournament in the history of women’s basketball offered everything we could have wanted. Especially when we forgot about the whole basketball thing and branched into battle lines for an impromptu town hall on sportsmanship, modesty and racial double standards.
“The Moment” – and, let’s face it, we care only to talk about that moment now – was the final ingredient needed for LSU v Iowa to morph into the cultural crossover hit that it became.
This moment between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark has gone viral.Credit:Getty Images
Discussion on how Iowa centre Monika Czinano’s screening action frees Caitlin Clark for her sheesh-and-swish three-pointers would be too technical. How LSU forward Angel Reese – who bats her long eyelashes, whips her wavy hair and then bodies any sucker gullible enough to fall for her “Bayou Barbie” persona – works for positioning that lets her grab all those offensive rebounds is too inside basketball. And LSU coach Kim Mulkey becoming the first woman to win the national title at two different scho … OK, let’s stop right there since I’ve already lost half of the bandwagoners who never bothered to read a word about girls doing sports and such until this March.
Instead, let’s all reach for the low-hanging fruit bursting with social media pulp: how it makes us feel when a 6-foot-3 Black girl taunts a ponytailed white girl on national television.
Clark, the transcendent star, was already doing more than enough to attract new fans to the tournament. Iowa’s Final Four match-up with South Carolina drew an average of 5.5 million viewers on ESPN, the most ever for a women’s semi-final, and Clark made even the most casual of watchers drop his or her jaw. However, the climax of the tournament left us invested in the ick factor.
Now, because Reese talked trash, we had something juicy to discuss – no matter how revolting the conversation might be or how shallow it makes us look. We just can’t seem to keep the pastime of cultural polarisation from seeping into yet another sporting event.
With her team’s title in grasp, Reese stared directly at Clark and waved her hand in front of her face – the “you can’t see me” celebration popularised by wrestler John Cena. Then, as the seconds ticked away to the celebration, Reese turned full heel. She briefly tracked her foe around the court and pointed at her ring finger – because hers, and not Clark’s, will soon be adorned with a championship bauble.
Before Reese and her teammates could hoist the trophy, a torrent of takes, formulated for the sole purpose of scoring clout, gushed in from those offended by her incessant taunting. Has she no class? Among the hog waste of Twitter, the word “classless” showed up often. A pair of white men – the founder of Barstool Sports, a website not exactly known as a bastion of gender equality, and Keith Olbermann, an adult who should know better – marched forward as the moral police but showed no class in directing vulgar comments at a 20-year-old.
Reese followed Clark to deliver a second taunt.Credit:Getty Images
Then another group – mostly men and women of colour – arrived to the conversation appalled by the double standard: that Reese would be criticised for an insult that Clark was cheered for doing in a previous game. This is what selective outrage looks like! But context has little space to breathe in that viral, split-screen photo of Reese and Clark making the same gesture. When the two players are at the free throw line, and Reese does the iconic insult, that single image is propped up as Exhibit A for her defence. However, the other video of Reese, who went out of her way to follow Clark and push the limits of acceptable trash talk and taunting, is not as defensible.
That moment concluded what should have been the most fun, most special women’s March Madness of our time, an entry drug to hook new addicts among the millions of viewers who enjoyed the high-level shot-making and competition. But rather than the beauty of the basketball, which had been elevated by the personality and physical strength of a new generation, fans latched on to the spiciest and, at the same time, the least savory element: two all-Americans and the Black-and-white backdrop of America.
Sports have always been best served with a side of controversy. A football league so taut in tradition needed the contrast between a Roger Staubach, who probably drank milk and read his Psalms before bedtime, and a Joe Namath, who wore mink coats and bragged about his sexual conquests before the biggest games of his career. And sometimes, the clash of personalities goes to a deeper place, where the roots of our divisions have existed since the formation of this country.
The NBA in the 1980s bankrolled its popularity in part because it understood America. The best player in the eastern conference was white. The best in the west was Black. And with Bird and Magic, fans picked sides, and rivalries bloomed from the impassioned loyalties.
This is not to say that the NCAA will walk into the negotiating room for its next television rights deal with mock-ups of Reese wearing a dashiki and Clark in Patagonia. However, who wouldn’t want LSU and Iowa to meet in the 2023-24 regular season, or again in the tournament with so much on the line?
If Reese and Clark face off next year, imagine that game leading sports-talk shows and receiving record-shattering ratings. To the longtime champions of women’s basketball, that will be a win; for years, they’ve wanted to see the game grow beyond its niche and loyal fan base to reach the masses.
Throughout this tournament, Reese and Clark shouldered the responsibility of being ambassadors for their game – “We’ve grown women’s basketball just being who we are, and I embrace that,” Reese said after LSU’s semi-final win over Virginia Tech – but there’s no number of double-doubles Reese can post, no 30-foot dagger Clark can hit that will do more for the women’s game than The Moment. And what might be good for the game doesn’t feel very good at all.
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