Povich Panel: The Caitlin Clark Effect and the Future of Women's Sports (March 26, 2024) 

Caitlin Clark has made historic strides like no other! Her boundless energy, remarkable abilities, fearless attitude, and relentless drive to succeed have significantly shaped the landscape of women's basketball. Her contributions should be celebrated for their merit, rather than focusing on her skin color. Let's express appreciation for her accomplishments, which have garnered well-deserved recognition for women's basketball. Her achievements serve as an inspiration to women and girls worldwide, motivating them to emulate her success and, perhaps one day, even surpass it, thereby elevating women's sports as a whole. However, it is my sincere hope that the current trend of excessive focus on race, propagated by certain misguided individuals or groups, will not interfere. Such emphasis on skin color is both irrelevant and inappropriate.

The Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom once noted that a great tragedy in American life is that whenever you see books by blacks (or in this case a panel) you instinctively know you will be hearing the same single narrative and conclusions, over and over again-in perpetuity. In essence, there are rarely interesting surprises because we can predict with near accuracy everything they are going to say, like the former soccer player who spoke on stage. Meanwhile, millions of white Americans exalted with god like fervor Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Oprah --some of the biggest and celebrated names ever, yet all we hear is that same boringly predictable woe-is-us narrative. Every time.

In the discussion of race, I found it interesting that there was no mention of the USA article stating that the face of women's basketball should be black. Let's dismiss Caitlin as the face because of her skin color. Where is the fairness of that.

The panel said that the Caitlin Clark Effect would not have happened if she were black. Why did it not happen with Kelsy Plum, Sue Bird, Diana Turasui, Paige Bueckers, etc, etc, etc?

With all the talk of Caitlin Clark it got me intrigued about her. I have never followed or been interested in baseball at any level, outside of having to spend some gym time high school haven't dribbled a ball. I find it slightly more interesting that than the CFL or NFL where hardly ever touch the ball.I now can say I watched one full game and most of a second. I have heard her called a generational player. Can she have the impact like a Greztky who it is said helped hockey expand into the sunbelt. Would there be a player grow up in Arizona like Austin Matthews without the Great One. If Clark is the one that helps women's sports, yes even for a non fan, basketball, it is a good thing.I also understand what the concern about perhaps the may be a racial bias in the coverage.

It’s not the game as a whole silly. It’s one person who plays the way she does. She of course has been inclusive of others trying to carry everyone with her. MJ got the attention like no other. He is black. He got it because of the way he played. Caitlin Clark gets the attention because of her style of play on court, no off court antics and in a country that’s still pretty strait laced about all things sex she’s a regular girl next door..

I don’t totally agree that if Caitlin was black she wouldn’t get the same attention, some of my reasons are Stevie won 4 Nats in a row and she didn’t get attention like CC, Serena & Venus GOD knows have gotten their attention. And best reasons are MJ and Tiger Woods, both black and are considered the Best in the world. So I don’t agree if she was black she wouldn’t get the same treatment. Just my opinion

I disagree that the Caitlin Clark story would be so different if she were black. First off, Hope Solo got so much attention because she’s drop-dead gorgeous, not because she’s white, and attention on the WNT had been sustained when she arrived as well. Caitlin gets so much attention and praise because she’s flashy with her logo threes and crazy passes, which no other player has done in the women’s game like she does on such a regular basis. And it’s also because she’s so great off the court, stayed at home in Iowa instead of going to one of the perennial powerhouses, loves the attention and uses it to sign autographs forever after the game while also consciously serving as a good role model. If you put all of that into a black girl, I think you’d get close to exactly the same result. Juju and Bueckers (one black, one white) get praise but less attention than Caitlin because while they are both more efficient than Caitlin, they don’t have the flash she does. For instance, Steph Curry is black, and he was an instant superstar when everybody got to see him with Davidson in the NCAA tourney.

Of course the level of interest in Caitlin Clark would have been different if she had a different skin color. It might be 95% to 20% of the present situation. Different people support sports stars for different reasons. If there was a Chinese American girl playing like that, the interest from China would be through the roof. There would have been basketball tours from China to see her games, home and away. Same thing for a Korean or Japanese girl, but not for an Indian girl. People from India would not have come to see her.