Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese's rivalry reveals the ugly side of the WNBA's rise

In their 2025 WNBA season opening, highly anticipated contest against each other, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese squared off in a game heavily promoted by ESPN. Clark’s Indiana Fever hosted Reese’s Chicago Sky on May 18 as the league looked to further capitalize on the new swell of visibility that these two young stars have helped usher in. It was the continuation of a two-year rivalry that has crossed over into mainstream pop and political culture discourse, starting with Reese’s LSU 2023 national championship game win over Clark’s Iowa. The Hawkeyes got a bit of revenge in last spring’s college tournament, followed by Clark’s Fever winning three of the four games against Reese’s Chicago squad in their 2024 WNBA rookie season.

Maybe this would be a time where the biggest storylines from their latest contest would just focus on their game. But with Indiana up 56-42 in the second quarter, Clark prevented Reese from scoring an easy layup by grabbing her by the stomach and lightly shoving her to the floor. Reese, a passionate, prideful forward, immediately got up to yell at her shorter rival. Indiana’s center Aliyah Boston got in between the two to prevent a direct altercation and Clark was given a flagrant foul penalty. That competitive tension is something very normal in not just women’s basketball, but in men’s basketball and all sports in general. It’s part of the WNBA’s appeal and growing popularity. Yet instead of quickly moving on from that entertaining exchange, a new cesspool of anti-Black bile was spewed at Reese online following the Sky’s blowout 93-58 defeat to the Fever. It was alleged that Reese faced racist taunts during the game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

The hatred towards Reese has been undeniable for anyone viewing the Clark-Reese story with good faith objectivity. One of the more outspoken critics of Reese is former NFL quarterback turned sports commentator Robert Griffin III. Immediately after Clark's flagrant foul on Reese, and Reese’s furious reaction towards it, Griffin tweeted out, "Angel Reese HATES Caitlin Clark." There was no criticism or negative viewpoint, however, from the 2011 Heisman Trophy winner for Clark despite her committing the bush league act on Reese.

Griffin is part of a class of men who have only started watching the WNBA for Clark, instead of collectively appreciating the many amazing players in the best women’s basketball league ever. And they use cheering for her as a subtle cover to also criticize, mis-analyze or belittle the rest of the players in the majority Black women’s league. So much for supporting women in sports. Griffin’s enthusiasm for the popular Clark masks his subtle disdain for Reese. And he subjected the Baltimore native to more brutal online hate in shamefully casting her with the same tired “angry Black woman” characterizations, while positioning Clark as the defenseless, innocent one.

Thankfully there was another former NFL player, and ironically another Clark, in Griffin’s former studio colleague Ryan Clark who held him accountable for his problematic perspective on Reese. The thoughtful commentator slammed Griffin’s irresponsible words and added how bizarre it was for Griffin to deliver his ridiculous drivel about Reese while his white Estonian wife, Grete, sat behind him.

"The one thing we know about RGIII is he is not having conversation at home about what Black women have to endure in this country," Ryan Clark said of Griffin’s rant against Reece. "When is the last time within your household you've had a conversation about what she's dealing with? You haven't been able to do that because in both of your marriages, you've been married to white women. You haven't had opportunities to have those conversations to educate you on what they're feeling, what Black women deal, what they're seeing when they think of a young Angel Reese and the whole time he's mimicking Angel Reese and bobbling his head and moving his neck while he's doing this whole piece, his wife is in the back "amen'ing" and clapping."

That blunt honesty from Clark to his former ESPN Monday Night Football desk mate has led to their own public, personal feud forming being its own side story, further encapsulating how the Reese-Clark situation has become so incendiary at this point.

Following Griffin’s inflammatory words about Reese inevitably came the right-wing ridiculous takes on her.

“Caitlin Clark BULLIES THE BULLY That Is Angel Reese,” Fox-backed sports gaslighting online outlet Outkick celebrated.

“Reece hates the player who has made her rich and famous,” the universally hated misogynist and regular producer of misogynoir, Jason Whitlock, spewed.

The short tempered founder of Barstool, Dave Portonoy, who called Reese a “classless piece of s–t” after her taunt back at Clark (for her own cocky behavior) during that 2023 national title game, urged his fellow Clark fans to never like Reese.

The latest online swell of anti-Reese takes led to the WNBA having to issue a statement monitoring the online hate and investigate the alleged in-person arena hate towards the 23-year-old forward. “They understand that this is a priority,” Reese said of the WNBA last week. “I believe that every player in this league deserves to be treated with respect and wants to come to work and just have fun and have a great environment to work at.”

In encouraging news, the league announced on Tuesday that they were not able to "substantiate” any racist fan behavior at that game towards Reese. Sadly though, social media and the rest of the internet isn’t lacking in that.

Two days after the game, Clark, like she did several times last year, gave her usual surface-level repudiation of any hatred around her, the Fever and the WNBA. Her Fever coach, Stephanie White, simply urged fans the message “don’t be a jerk” towards their league. Although those bare minimum words are welcomed, both Clark and White could take a page from Los Angeles Sparks rookie coach Lynne Roberts on how to deliver the best solidarity message from white WNBA figures to Reese and all their other Black counterparts.

“It’s a league of predominantly African-American women, and we need to be a space that’s safe and that empowers everybody,” Roberts said, when asked about the league’s anti-hate campaign. “And I think, you know, there’s a lot of eyes on our league right now, and we need to make sure that we’re carrying that banner with seriousness and sincerity.”

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The popularity of Reese’s unapologetic persona has ascended at such a swift rate daily amongst Black women in the last two years, as she has become her own crossover pop culture star, garnering commercial deals with the likes of McDonald’s and her own popular podcast. It has also elicited endless amounts of anti-Black women hate towards her and anyone else who isn’t buddy-buddy professionally or personally with Clark. Meanwhile, the ratings for the Sky-Fever season opener recorded the highest ratings ever for any WNBA game, with 3.1 million people watching.

But the only way a healthy resolution to this unprecedented growth of women’s basketball can be achieved is if all parties, fans, media, WNBA staff and players, fully acknowledge and consistently work to eradicate the blatant and subtle anti-Black narratives placed on Reese and other Black players.

June 7 in Chicago was supposed to be the next time Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark’s teams faced each other again, but Clark has been ruled out for at least the next two weeks with a quadricep strain. It will be a temporary reprieve, at least, from this recent matchup producing the same annoying toxicity around it, a toxicity that should not be tolerated around and in the WNBA, no matter how many more eyeballs are on it.