Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese Are Exposing Morons in Sports Media, Like ESPN's Ryan Clark | Clay Travis

In the opening game of the WNBA season, one of the least remarkable plays in basketball happened. One player fouled another player to prevent an easy layup. The same exact play, or subtle variations of it, likely took place thousands of times on thousands of basketball courts all over America on that same day. 

If you haven't yet seen this particular play that unleashed a thousand sports media takes, here it is:

As you can see, a player pushes another player in the back with two hands to get a rebound, a clear foul that should have been called. A second player points at the foul that's missed and has a split second decision to make: she can either let the wide-open layup be made, or she can foul and force the other player to make two free throws. 

She fouls. 

And in fouling, she fouls in a way to ensure that the open lay up isn't also attempted and made, which would result in a potential three-point play. (If you have played or coached basketball, you have likely said or been told a thousand times or more about this exact same situation, "if you are going to foul, make sure you actually foul, don't let them make the shot and foul them too.") 

Legit, there is nothing remarkable about this play at all. As I said above, it's something that happened that same day thousands of times on thousands of basketball courts.

Basic Sports Play Turns Into Big Cultural Problem 

Yet somehow this play, in a women's basketball game, no less, turned into a week-long battle on social media over race, gender, and who is allowed to critique the play of an athlete on the court. In so doing, I believe it reflected larger cultural battles that continue, even if they are often moronic and counterproductive. 

And it all happened because Angel Reese, in reacting to the foul, flopped and behaved like a complete and total moron in chasing down Caitlin Clark and having to be held back from attacking her. Here is the full play and the reaction: 

Former Heisman trophy-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III opined that Reese's reaction was based on hating Caitlin Clark. 

Given the normalcy of the play and the excessive nature of the reaction, that's a reasonable take. It's one I also shared without seeing RGIII's take. I didn't even see it as a remotely controversial take. What else, but hate, could explain Reese's reaction?

Prior to the reaction on this play, I'd even thought that Clark and Reese might be in secret cahoots, playing up the hate to make them both more money.  After all, athletes play up hate all the time in boxing and the UFC because it makes them more money. But true hate, actual hate of a competitor, is rare. This foul didn't warrant that reaction so, clearly, something else is at play here. 

I expected nothing much else would come from it because RGIII's take wasn't even that provocative, it's probably a take that 90 percent or more of sports fans would have agreed with.  

Ryan Clark of ESPN. (Photo by Ric Tapia/Getty Images)

The next day, ESPN's Ryan Clark reacted to RGIII's take by saying that RGIII's take was illegitimate because RGIII had a white wife. 

WHAT?!

Holy shit. 

Can't Fix Stupid

Clark's take was so profoundly dumb and so outside the bounds of realistic sports takes -- even the mafia doesn't target wives and kids -- I didn't think it could be real. That is, I didn't even think Ryan Clark, for whom explaining the Cover Two defense is an intellectual challenge he sometimes loses, could have let loose with a take this monumentally stupid. 

But he did, He really argued it. 

RGIII fired back with an eloquent defense. 

And I was going to let that be the end of it, but then this afternoon, Ryan Clark posted a photo of his mixed-race child to prove that he truly is the dumbest person working in sports media today. 

Legit Ryan Clark is so dumb, he doesn't realize that if he had married the woman he had his first baby with, by his own logic, he wouldn't be able to have an opinion on Angel Reese because his wife, like RGIII's, would also have been white. 

The result is that Clark's argument is so stupid, I legit think ESPN should fire him for it. Not because of his opinion, mind you, we all have opinions, but because some opinions are truly so dumb and indefensible that by making them you demonstrate you aren't intelligent enough to work at a media company doing live television. I've disagreed with a lot of opinions before, but I think this is the first time someone has said something so dumb I don't think ESPN can employ them anymore.

But Clark's stupidity is so profound, I actually think it needs to be utterly and completely destroyed.  

So buckle up. 

Let's break this down in detail. 

Make This Identity Madness Make Sense

1. Clark is arguing that if your wife isn't the same race as a player on the court or field, you can't analyze their decisions on the field or court in an intelligent way. 

Since his wife isn't white, this would mean he can't analyze what Caitlin Clark does on the court. 

This would also mean that Mina Kimes, his co-worker at ESPN, who is married to a white man, can't analyze any black player's actions on the football field. (If we applied his logic even more aggressively, this would mean Kimes, who is Korean, could only talk about Korean football players on the field. Meaning she can only talk about Atlanta Falcons kicker Younghoe Koo. If Saturday Night Live was actually funny, this would actually be a really funny skit. Kimes would be asked questions about other football players, but she would have to answer all of the questions only by discussing Koo's makes and misses on field goals. And to be even more ethnically consistent, she wouldn't even be able to analyze the kicking makes or misses from a football context, but based on her own interpretation of how society has treated Korean men since time immemorial. "Koo was angry about missing that kick, Ryan, because of the Japanese invasion of Korea during World War II.")

Getty Images

This is the antithesis, of course, of how ESPN built its entire business. 

Which is the idea that sports connects us all IN SPITE OF OUR DIFFERENCES not divides all of us because of our differences.

Sports is the ultimate meritocracy. It's why I love it, it's why you likely love it too. The best man or woman wins. The best team of men or women wins too. In an era when so much of media is gaslighting us every day -- "Joe Biden is the best he's ever been!" -- sports is an escape from the bullshit, the purest form of reality TV there is.  

And that's why I find Clark's moronic take so indefensible and insulting. Because his insistence on racial identity when it comes to analysis divides all of us and leaves us only able to talk about the least interesting parts of ourselves -- our race and gender -- the only two things none of us had any say in at all.

If anyone ever begins an argument with, "As a (insert race, gender or sexuality here)" erase the opening. They're attempting to win an argument based on identity, not facts. It's the modern-day equivalent of the divine right of kings. A king in olden days argued he was correct because of his birthright, 250 years after we won a revolution to prevent this argument from winning the day, modern-day left-wingers have brought it back. 

Left-Wingers Are Taking Us Backwards

2. One of my favorite analogies is the blindfold on Lady Justice. 

Why is that blindfold there on Lady Justice as she attempts to weigh guilt or innocence in a court of law?

Because the goal of a justice system is to treat everyone, regardless of their race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or religion the exact same and not to be impacted by what someone looks like. 

A detail photo of a statue of the blindfolded Lady Justice. (Photo By Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

It's an aspirational goal. 

Have we ever attained it completely in this country? 

No. 

But have we done a better job of striving for that goal in America than any other country in the history of the world? I think so. 

Every time I give you any opinion in sports, politics, or culture, I do so in the quest of treating everyone the exact same. Am I perfect at it? Of course not. No one is perfect. But if you study the millions of words I've spoken and written in the 20 years I've been doing this, I've been pretty consistent at always attempting to apply this standard.

I try to give no favor or disfavor to identity. 

And I try to apply the facts evenly no matter what.  

What Clark is arguing for, and what modern-day left-wing identity politics demands, is that we take the blindfold off of Lady Justice and consider the actions of an individual based on the racial, gender, or sexual history of how someone that looks like him or her might have been treated before any of us reading this was alive. 

What Ryan Clark is really arguing here is, "Since racism and sexism happened, Angel Reese shouldn't be held to the modern-day standards of a normal basketball player. She's angry because she's a black woman and black women have been treated unfairly in the past. So she's not really angry at Caitlin Clark, she's angry at how white women -- and white society in general -- have devalued black female bodies. And since RGIII doesn't have a black wife, he can't understand this."

Angel Reese of the Chicago Sky takes a hard foul from Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever on May 17, 2025 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

I mean, written out, it's one of the dumbest arguments ever made in the modern history of sports media. 

But this is essentially what he argued. 

Not only does it lead to a logical result that only allows people to judge others who look like them -- a direct attack on the entire basis of the justice system -- it actually excuses poor behavior on the basis of historical injustice. It replaces individual responsibility and washes it away with collective historic guilt as a cleansing agent. 

The end result?

The soft bigotry of low expectations. 

And do you know what low expectations eventually create? Weaker results than high expectations. 

In trying to protect Angel Reese from criticism, Clark is treating her as a soft, weak black woman, not as a strong, fearless black woman. Clark argues that Reese isn't able to control her emotions because history has been unkind to black women. 

He's actually infantilizing her because this is how we treat young children who misbehave, as if they couldn't possibly know any better.

It's toxic empathy.  

Why Is The WNBA Giving This Oxygen?

3. Sadly, the WNBA itself is making Clark's argument too. 

How so?

Because it is investigating what appears to be completely made-up allegations of fan racism as if it could destroy Reese. 

A question for you guys: When is the last time an investigation of alleged fan racism at a sporting event actually uncovered smoking gun evidence of fan racism at a sporting event? I'm not saying there are no racists in America, mind you -- after all, Ryan Clark and Angel Reese exist -- but I am going to say that even a white racist would realize that the consequences of screaming a racial slur IN A CROWDED ARENA WHERE EVERYONE HAS CAMERA PHONES would essentially end that fan's life. That person would lose his or her job, become a social pariah. That person would have media camped in his or her front yard. That person would never be able to live as a normal person again for the rest of his or her life. 

All for yelling a racial slur at a sporting event. 

In fact, if you told the average white person who attends a WNBA game, "You can either be caught on video screaming a racial slur or be arrested after the game for driving drunk," 100 percent of white people would pick the DUI arrest. 

That's how much of a social penalty we have heaped on racial slurs for white people --  it's better to be an actual felon than to yell a racial slur. 

Plus, who actually attends your average WNBA game? Lesbians and dads and moms taking their little girls to watch basketball. 

If I had to rank places where racists are likely to go, WNBA basketball games aren't even in the top 1000 social events. Hell, a ton of left-wing white people lie awake at night dreaming about catching a racist on video. This would be the greatest moment of many of these people's lives. Yet none of them managed to record a racist screaming loudly enough to be heard in a crowded arena by basketball players on the floor?

The odds of this happening are roughly the same as Joe Biden winning the 100-meter dash at the 2028 Olympics. 

That is, zero. 

Yet the WNBA treated it as a serious story. 

Why?

Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Because, like Clark, the WNBA also thinks Angel Reese and her black teammates are fragile, subject to collapse if someone says something mean to them. 

I'm sorry, am I the only person who thinks this is ridiculous?

We have to teach all of our kids to be tougher, especially in a social media age. 

And I say that as a dad of three young boys. Every now and then, I pull up awful things people say about me online and let the boys read them. Or I read them out loud for laughs. Why? Because I want my boys to be mentally tough. Especially since at some point they are likely to run into people who don't like them because they happen to be my kids. If words can harm them, how can I expect them to be tough enough to handle actual, true adversity, which is inevitably going to arise, in their lives?

My advice to them is simple, "Some people are going to say shitty things about you, either ignore it or use it as fuel to work harder."

So my hope would be that sports leagues would say something simple like this: "Sometimes fans will say shitty things, we wish they didn't. But when we catch people doing it, we'll kick them out of games. But our players are tough and will be fine."

Why do sports leagues send the message that players aren't mentally tough when their jobs require that they be both mentally and physically tough? Most players would feel like wusses if they didn't play with a jammed finger. Is a fan yelling something mean to you really anything worse than a jammed finger? Heck, I'd much rather have people yell mean things at me than jam my finger.

That shit hurts. 

But the WNBA doesn't even apply this same soft standard to all players, only to the black ones. 

Because yesterday Angel Reese was sharing clips on social media saying she wanted to fight the "white girl" Caitlin Clark. What would happen if Caitlin Clark shared videos saying she wanted to fight the "black girl" Angel Reese? She'd get suspended, maybe for months. 

What happens to Reese?

Nothing!

So the WNBA is sending a message -- the white girl has to have thicker skin and be tougher than the black girl!

Where does that lead?

My guess would be to Caitlin Clark being the mentally stronger competitor. 

Which is exactly what we saw when Reese charged Clark after the foul. 

Clark didn't even blink when Reese came after her, a buzzing fly would have gotten more attention.

The WNBA's message is we expect white players to be tough, but we have to protect our black ones. 

It's actually insulting. 

And counterproductive.     

And it's the same message ESPN has for Ryan Clark. Because if a white guy had said Clark had the opinion he did on Angel Reese because he's married to a black woman, ESPN would have fired the white guy. And he'd probably never work in sports media again. In fact, Clark himself, because he's not smart enough to understand basic logic and coherency in arguments, would have made the argument himself. 

ESPN Has Been Imploding For Years

4. ESPN has created and emboldened a culture of identity politics, which has destroyed its brand. 

In 2022, ESPN aired this protest live during a women's basketball game. 

That is, ESPN chose to have a far left-wing protest during an actual basketball game. 

How does that happen?

By creating a culture of identity politics, one that allows black and gay employees to marinate in grievance and victimhood, often overshadowing the games themselves.

This culture of left-wing identity politics has consequences. It led, I firmly believe, to ESPN missing a moment of silence for the terror victims in New Orleans. You make time for the things you care about, ESPN doesn't care about uniting sports fans anymore. The network has lost its way. ESPN is just MSNBC with basketballs now.  

The great thing about sports is all that matters is the pursuit of excellence. I don't believe in identity politics excellence. Michael Jordan wasn't emblematic of black excellence, just like Tom Brady wasn't reflective of white excellence. Both men represented excellence. 

The goal of American life isn't to be the best of your race or gender at something, it's to be the best, period. 

We rejected the idea of racial excellence long ago. That's why sports were integrated, to allow the best man or woman to be the best in the entirety of the sport. 

Here's the truth, in America today there are black, white, Asian and Hispanic racists. 

Every race has racists. 

It's no longer 1954, when all the racists were white. It's more complicated today. 

And the racists of every race are always wrong. Because racism, at its core, is about judging people based on their skin color, not their individual merit. 

Ryan Clark of ESPN. Barry Reeger-Imagn Images

What Ryan Clark's argument does is drag us back into the days of segregation, where we are all judged by our race, not the content of our character. Inevitably, eventually, it leads to a world where athletes can only be critiqued by people who look like them, where opinions aren't based on what athletes actually do, but on what our country did before any of us were ever born.

Ryan Clark thinks he's enlightened, but he's actually just making the same arguments white racists in the 1950's made when Jackie Robinson wanted to integrate baseball. 

In that way, history's still telling us a story. Clark's just the racist villain, who thinks he's the hero. 

And unfortunately for him, Clark's not a modern-day Rosa Parks, pointing out an historic injustice. He's the white sheriff who put Rosa Parks in jail for behaving in a way she shouldn't have. How dare she take the seat that belonged to another person's identity? Didn't she know better than to be among people who didn't look like her?

Congrats, Ryan, you played yourself.

And in the process, you demonstrated why ESPN keeps losing. ESPN has forgotten that sports unite us all, not tear us all apart.