Shut Up and Dribble

Caitlin Clark plays basketball. She baskets or she balls. She’s a basketer or a baller. One of the two. She’s tall and she’s a ‘rookie’, which means she’s just starting out in her professional career and she’s basketing, which makes her sound like a weaver or something. But she isn’t a weaver. She’s a jumper who jumps and baskets.

And that is the extent of what I know about what Caitlin Clark does, because I’m British and basketball is an impenetrable pastime to most British people.

In basketball, one team runs to one end of a squash court, jumps, puts the ball into a basket, congratulates itself, and then the other team does the same. This continues, each team taking a turn to put the ball in the basket, until someone decides that the game is over.

Nominally, there is a huge clock that counts down to when the game is over, although this is entirely pointless because the clock, and inherently the very nature of the universe itself, can be stopped to allow the teams to talk to each other about an exciting strategy of running up to the other end of the squash court and putting the ball in the basket, or to sell insurance and Oreos to people who are watching via television.

The game lasts somewhere in the region of nine hours and points are scored at alarming rates, meaning that a spectator unwise enough to momentarily glance away with the scores at an exciting 88 each, will look back again to find the scores are now 965 to 964 and that Caitlin Clark is leading extra-double on the rebound average with a 7.36 and has completed 5 bustdowns in the end quarterzone with a completion index of 4.336.

Or something.

I freely admit that, because I am British, I have no idea about basketball.


Ironically, of course, Britain is famous for having its own, even more impenetrable sports.

Cricket is a sport in which men dressed in white throw a tiny, rock-hard ball around a field all day. And when I say, ‘all day’, it literally means all day. They have to stop for lunch and then again in the afternoon for a perfectly reasonable spot of tea.

In cricket, when you go out, you are in and when you are in, you can get out and then next person comes out to go in.

There is genteel applause when one of the players who is in gets out or when one of the players who is going in comes out and if he doesn’t come out quick enough, he has to go back in again, at which point everyone applauds again.

The crowd applauds when the player who is in does something and applauds when they do nothing at all, which is sometimes better than doing something.

When the player gets 75 quids for a wickety-wick, everyone gives them a standing ovation and then falls asleep for another few hours until it’s time to get drunk again.

Amazingly, this goes on for five days. And it only stops after five days because once in the 1950s, during a game between South Africa and England in South Africa, the game had to finish early after about a month because the boat taking England home had to leave.

Even now, after five whole days of drinking, wickety-wicks, tea and toasted buns, the game can end in a stalemate which might, just might, be the most exciting game ever and everyone will applaud and go home in raptures.

So, I don’t understand basketball. I hope that’s abundantly clear.

I do, however, understand that the right wing of politics has a pearl-clutching hatred of what it calls ‘culture wars’ and I also understand that unless the right wing of politics has something to clutch pearls over, they don’t have much else to offer. Which is why they create culture wars out of thin air in order to have something to be outraged about.

Outrage is the oxygen of the political right.

In Caitlin Clark they have found someone that they can mass their outrage fully behind because as well as being a basketball player, and apparently a good one, Caitlin Clark is, according to them, a white girl in a black lesbian’s world. And she’s getting bullied.

When Clark was splattered in a foul against Chicago Sky, the furious frothing reached fever pitch. There’s nothing new, and there never has been, in a rookie, especially one who has received so much media attention and financial compensation, finding themselves on the end of a wily old pro’s elbow.

“Welcome to the big time, kid” has long been the standard greeting for talented media darlings among the gnarled ranks of professional sportspeople who are less vaunted among fawning media onlookers.

When twinkle-toed English football star Paul Gascoigne met the lumpen carthorse of former player and now Hollywood hardman actor Vinny Jones, Jones famously gave him a jaunty welcome by grabbing him tightly by the testicles and snarling at him. Jones so reveled in this hooligan role that once, in the pre-game warm-up when 6 and 7 year old kids were on the field, running around and trying to fulfill their dreams by scoring a goal at the away end, thereby creating a memory that would live with them for life, Jones took exception to the antics of one youngster and decided to treat him, too, to a ‘welcome to the big time’. Although he resisted the urge to grab the testicles of a 7-year-old child, he did slide tackle him, at full pace, from behind, wiping him into the front row of the stand, where he told him not to be such a cocky little fucker.

But Jones and Gascoigne were both men and white and so everyone could laugh about it and roll their eyes. Boys being boys.

When Clark received an elbow to the head, for which her opponent Angel Reese was punished, Clark’s response was to accept it as part of the territory and get on with it. Reese dealt with the media interest in exactly the way a professional who knows what the score is would:


“I'm always going for the ball. Y'all are going to play that clip 20 times before Monday."

And she was right. They were going to play it 20 times before Monday.

Because Reese is black.

The two athletes involved dealt with it and moved on. The media, in particular the right-wing media, didn’t.

Even as someone who is only dimly aware of the sport of basketball, and the women’s game even less so, it came as something of a surprise to learn that Clark hadn’t made the USA Olympic team. After all, she is clearly a superb athlete, and her stock is soaring high. She can also take a lot of the credit for the sudden surge in popularity of the women's game at the moment. Whilst those things may be self-evident, things in sport are never quite so straightforward and whilst her inclusion in the Olympic team might have done wonders for her own game, and for the sport’s image in general, it would also have necessitated moving other, far more experienced athletes into different roles or leaving them out altogether.

Clark is also a rookie and one whose game needs improving in several areas and international sport is not the arena where rough edges should be knocked off any sportsperson’s game.

So, while a certain level of surprise at her exclusion should be expected, the reaction to it on the right was far from levelheaded.

The official X account of the House Judiciary GOP, chairman Jim Jordan, got in on the act, saying that Clark should be on the team. Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley had a go on X, too, asking pointedly:


“I think the Olympic selection committee should be asked do we want the best team to represent our country or not?”

Implying that the reason for Clark’s absence wasn’t down to form at all. Haley didn’t say it out loud, but the inference here is that Clark’s non-inclusion was down to other factors, such as one of the Right’s current bugbears, ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’.

On ESPN, Pat McAfee went for it full throttle when countering some claims that Clark’s whiteness makes her more marketable than other, equally talented, black rookies:


“Nah... just call it for what it is.... There’s one white bitch for the Indiana team who’s a superstar”.

He later apologized for using that term, admitting that he should never have used it, ‘no matter the context’.

But Clark is a superstar, and her whiteness does make her more marketable. Being white in what is supposedly a black person’s world has always had its advantages. Big Mama Thornton's version of Hound Dog sold 500,000 copies. Elvis’ version, three years later, sold 5 million.

The problem comes when every hurdle she has to jump on her road to a long and successful career in the WNBA, the same hurdles that every single one of her peers also has to jump, is greeted by the right-wing as a racist attempt by Woke America to further drive the diversity nail into the coffin of Apple Pie Conservative USA.

Clark is not even, by a long way, the only white face in the sport. When her mostly white Iowa team faced the mostly black LSU team in the 2024 Women’s NCAA basketball tournament, the reaction hit the sweet spot of sexism and racism.

One LA Times journalist described the game as “America’s Sweethearts v Basketball Villains”, and you don’t need me to tell you which team was being portrayed as which.

The article originally contained the jaw-dropping line:

“Do you prefer America’s sweethearts or it’s dirty debutantes? Milk and cookies or Louisiana hot sauce?”

Perhaps sensing that this might be a tad fucking racist, they amended it to:

“Do you prefer the team that wants to grow women’s basketball or the one seemingly hellbent on dividing it?”

Which, on the face of it, doesn’t seem a particularly well-balanced question and not much less racist than their first attempt.

As Hailey Van Lith, who is white, of LSU pointed out, her team did have a lot of black women on their team who had ‘attitude’ and liked to trash talk. But then sport has always had those sorts of athletes. When Vinny Jones sent the 7-year-old kid flying and called him a ‘cheeky little cunt’, he was unrepentant. He still tells the story to this day, reveling in his villainous role.

But as Van Lith pointed out:

"A lot of the people that are making those comments are being racist towards my teammates," Van Lith said. "And, you know, I'm in a unique situation where I see with myself, you know, I'll talk trash, and I'll get a different reaction than if Angel [Reese] talks trash,"

Van Lith went on to say that using the term ‘dirty debutantes’ had nothing to do with sport at all:

"Some of the words that were used in that article were very sad and upsetting, and, you know, I didn't really—I actually didn't want us to—read the article before the game because hearing stuff like that, it's not right.”

At the center of this storm sits Caitlin Clark who has, it must be remembered, done absolutely nothing to provoke it. She has neither said anything political, nor does she seem to be the sort of person for whom expressing their political ideology comes naturally.

She is the epitome of what the Right wants athletes to be. Sportspeople pure and simple. The famous mantra of ‘shut up and dribble’ applies perfectly to Clark and this is what the Right expects of athletes or, perhaps more accurately, it expects of athletes it agrees with.

When Colin Kaepernick didn’t ‘shut up and dribble’ (or whatever they do in that sport of his), he was destroyed by the Right. When Serena Williams, arguably the greatest athlete of any gender of all time, openly displays the aggression on the court that makes her so good, the pearl-clutching is tangible.

But when Harrison Butker made a speech encouraging women to stay at home and have babies, the Right leaped to his defense, advocating wildly for his right to say it. There was no ‘shut up and kick’ for Butker.

But even Clark’s complete neutrality in the middle of all this hasn’t stopped the Right from trying to claim her as one of their own and steer her to their side. And we don’t really need to think too hard about why.

When Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter knocked Clark over in a game, Republican congressman Jim Banks wrote to the WNBA demanding Carter be punished.

That elected politicians feel the need to become involved in sporting matters is apparently fine, but when athletes become involved in politics, they should just shut up and dribble.

In the UK, football journalist and presenter Gary Lineker, former star of the England national team, wrote a tweet criticizing some of the government’s language around asylum seekers as echoing that of 1930s Germany. The uproar from the government was so strong that for a while, Lineker’s job looked on the line. Now, gloriously, the government’s job is on the line and Lineker is happily back at work. But whilst Lineker isn’t allowed to voice his opinion of politics, government ministers can happily tweet about who they want to see in the England team to their heart’s content.

When members of the LSU team, them again, missed the national anthem at the start of a game, Louisiana state governor, Jeff Landry threatened to take away their scholarships. And when LSU coach Kim Mulkey explained that the absence wasn’t deliberate and not the fault of the athletes being blamed, she was derided as ‘being woke’.

The Right are masters at getting angry at things. But even if they are met with a reasonable explanation, their anger is never sated. They are never satisfied. The Right never admits that an explanation is ‘reasonable’ and is never happy now that things have been cleared up. It is never even satisficed if the apparent offenders show remorse or apologize for having offended them. They simply lurch to the next outrage, frothing wildly at the mouth at whatever the next cab off the rank is.

Politics no longer matter to the political Right. Just outrage and anger. Across most of Western society, the Right wing now simply exists as a vehicle for largely manufactured outrage. They no longer have any policies that speak of improving the world beyond just making someone else’s life a bit shitter.

The Right cannot offer its supporters a way out of their poverty or offer relief for their tax burdens or lower mortgages or cheaper fuel, but it can absolutely promise instead that it will make the lives of Drag Queens or single mothers hell instead, just to make your life seem a little less shit.

You might be groveling in the gutter and the Right has no way, nor intention, of helping you out of it. But it can promise that you aren’t going to grovel down there on your own and they’ll see what they can do about sending some more people down there to grovel with you.

The Right used to be the ideological home of the hard-working white collar middle classes. Now it’s a baying bloodhound intent on taking everything and everyone it hates down with you. Not with them. With you.

And if it runs out of people to hate, don’t worry, they’ll just find some more. Once it’s run out of pregnant women, or black people, or couples on IVF to tear apart, it will just start on someone else because without the oxygen of hatred, they are nothing.

All Caitlin Clark does is try to win games of basketball. Yet she remains at the center of a storm she plays no part in.

Her responses to the fouls she receives are measured and reasonable. Her reaction to being left off the Olympic team was disappointment marked by a desire to prove herself and to make the team for 2028.

When she pushed back on the narrative of others to use her name to drive agendas driven by racism, homophobia and sexism, she pointedly tried to stay neutral:

“People should not be using my name to push those agendas. It’s disappointing. It’s not acceptable,” Clark said. “... Treating every single woman in this league with the same amount of respect, I think, it’s just a basic human thing that everybody should do.”

This met with some reaction in the other direction, with people demanding that she go further and openly denounce such things instead:

“Dawg. How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts,” wrote Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington . “We all see the shit. We all have a platform. We all have a voice & they all hold weight. Silence is a luxury.”

But Caitlin Clark is 22 years old and just wants to shut up and dribble and it’s hard to not have sympathy for her position. It’s not her fault she has suddenly become the hottest ticket in her sport, let alone one of the most famous women in America right now and there might come a time in the future when Caitlin Clark the Role Model finds a voice that she is happy to use. Right now, she is inadvertently being pulled towards conservative narratives in a way that is beyond her control and seem to have no basis in reality.

Most of those narratives are nothing to do with Caitlin Clark, or basketball. She is just a pawn in a sideshow where anything goes, as long as you can get angry as fuck about it. And even if you can’t get angry as fuck about it, you can pretend to be angry as fuck about it because tomorrow it won’t matter.

Tomorrow there will be another thing to get angry about instead, and more division to sow, more audiences to bait into joining in the fervor.

In the 21st Century, controversy doesn’t even have to be controversial anymore. A young woman playing basketball can be pulled, pushed and twisted in whatever way your narrative requires, as long as that narrative is at the expense of someone else who is never going to vote for your guy.

Caitlin Clark is a very talented athlete, and the Right should just shut up and let her dribble.