The internet unleashed its fury on Indiana Fever shooting guard Caitlin Clark over the weekend after she walked on stage Saturday night with country music star Morgan Wallen as he greeted a packed arena in Clark’s backyard: Indiana.

At issue for Clark are Wallen’s personal history and his choices. In 2020, Wallen ran afoul of Covid lockdown restrictions. The same year, he got kicked out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse in Nashville and was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. In 2024, he was arrested again — this time for throwing a chair off the balcony of another Nashville honky-tonk, a six-story bar. The piece of furniture crashed to the street below, narrowly missing two police officers. He entered a “conditional plea” and was sentenced to seven days at a DUI education center.

This behavior alone probably should have been enough to make Clark — the WNBA’s most marketable star — think twice about appearing with Wallen. But the biggest reason Clark should have stayed home Saturday night is a 2021 video posted by TMZ in which Wallen can be heard shouting the N-word and other obscenities. As journalist Sarah Spain wrote on social media over the weekend about Clark, “If Morgan Wallen using the N word wasn’t enough for you to stop supporting him — (forget all the other terrible s*** he’s done!) — I don’t know what to tell ya.”

A week after TMZ published its video, and after his record label suspended him indefinitely, Wallen called his use of that racial epithet  “unacceptable and inappropriate.” He blamed it on his drinking — “a bender” — and promised to do better.

Since the weekend, Clark’s fans have pointed out that other celebrities and prominent athletes —including Drake, Peyton Manning, Myles Garrett, Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift’s fiance Travis Kelce — have walked on stage with Wallen in recent months without controversy. If Hall of Famer Manning can stand next to Wallen in his throwback University of Tennessee football uniform, and NFL champions Mahomes and Kelce can bro it out with Wallen and be cheered, then why can’t Clark do the same? Isn’t that a double standard?

Absolutely, it is. But Clark’s fans are missing an important point here: None of the above stars has been dubbed a great white hope, a mantle that Clark has been shouldering since 2024. That’s the year she became the all-time leading scorer in women’s college basketball, the Indiana Fever’s No. 1 draft pick, the face of the WNBA, the player most fans wanted to see and Time magazine’s athlete of the year, spawning what one WNBA official called the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”

That level of fame, complicated by racial politics, comes at a cost. It means that everything Clark does gets scrutinized to determine what it might say about her, about us and about race in America. Clark should know that most of all. She’s been living in the unforgiving glare of the spotlight since before she played a minute in the WNBA. Even the NCAA tournament runs during her last two college seasons were seen by some as racial dramas, as she and her mostly white Iowa Hawkeyes teammates tipped off against mostly Black teams including South Carolina and LSU.

It’s a sports narrative that we have seen at least once before. In the late 1970s, Larry Bird, a back-to-back All-American at Indiana State, was labeled a great white hope, too. In 1979, Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” teed up a story on CBS’ “Evening News” not about Bird’s greatness, but about his whiteness. In that CBS report, white fans complained there weren’t enough white players to root for in professional basketball. “I don’t enjoy going to the basketball,” one white man told CBS, “and seeing all Black players.” The CBS feature argued that Bird was about to change that after he joined the league that June. Many others agreed — including, most importantly, league officials — and Bird did his best to answer questions about this sensitive topic, just like Clark today.

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But that’s where the similarities end between the two white stars. Bird’s status as the great white hope cloaked him in invincibility. He could blow off the mostly white press, refuse to talk for months and swear at reporters — and get away with it. He could throw punches at opposing fans — as he did twice in college — and get away with that, too.

Clark seems to have no invincibility. She’s a lightning rod for criticism, fair and unfair. Clark has tried to honor the Black stars who came before her, including her favorite player, Maya Moore. But these efforts haven’t won over her critics. Meanwhile, Clark has managed to infuriate white fans and conservative pundits like Megyn Kelly by admitting that white privilege exists.

Even her being declared the most transformative player in her sport rubbed some people the wrong way. When she was named Time magazine’s athlete of the year at the end of the 2024 season, Sheila Johnson, a Black owner of the Washington Mystics, said Time had gotten it wrong. “I feel really bad,” Johnson said, “because I’ve seen so many players of color that are equally as talented, and they never get the recognition that they should have.” Johnson suggested the entire league should have made the cover. “Because when you just keep singling out one player, it creates hard feelings.”

Personally, I’m OK with hard feelings in a multibillion-dollar business. By 2024, Clark had become bigger than the game. People who didn’t care about sports cared about her. The numbers proved it, and criticism or not, she was absolutely worthy of being on the cover of Time. But if you’re grateful for the opportunity of being a transcendent star in the polarized 2020s — as Clark says she is — then you need to make smarter choices.

As Clark and Wallen moved toward the stage Saturday night, Wallen’s social media team clicked into action. They chronicled Clark laughing and smiling with him. At one point, in a video Wallen’s team later posted to Instagram, Clark hugged him. Then he scampered off, high-fiving his fans and skipping with joy in front of his crowd. The show hadn’t even started, and Wallen had already won. He was bathed in the light of the great white hope.  

But Clark shouldn’t have been anywhere near that stage. The Fever had played its season opener that day and lost. She should have stayed home. She should have nursed the aching back she reported was already bothering her. She should have never put herself in a situation where people could talk again about her whiteness, instead of her talent. Most of all, she shouldn’t have let Wallen turn her transcendent greatness into an advertisement for him.

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