Basketball and The Great White Hope: How the Grift Came To Be and How the NBA Can Learn from the WNBA

At the 2021 ESPYs, Paige Bueckers stood on stage and gave a heartfelt speech, rejecting praise to herself and rerouting it to the black women who had built the league she will soon join. It was a powerful statement, not just in the words that were being said, words that had been absent or unspoken on ESPN’s network for far too long, but because of what they meant. 

While Paige was coming up into the UConn powerhouse program, and dominating as a true freshman, winning women’s college player of the year, there were more nefarious plans made by certain media outlets. Right wing outlets had begun to write about Paige, not as a player or as a person, but as a symbol.

And Paige squashed all of that with a one-minute monologue. She made clear in no uncertain terms that she was no great white hope. She was thankful for the largely black and queer history of the WNBA and hoped to be a part of it as a collaborator.

But, this is not an essay about Paige Bueckers.

The great white hope has a long history. It began about 100 years ago when black boxer Jack Johnson chased heavyweight champ Tommy Burns halfway around the globe to get his title fight, eventually becoming the first ever black man to hold that belt. White face after white face was put up against Johnson, each one carrying the assumptions of white superiority that had existed for years on their shoulders, and each one was defeated and sent home. This led Jack London, yes, that Jack London, to pen a letter in which he called for the retired Jim Jeffries to “save the white man.” 

Two years later, in 1910, Jeffries took the canvas against Johnson. 16,000 people rushed to their seats. 1,500 broke down the gate at the entrance. Jeffries, the pride of the white race, would reclaim boxing for them. 

Instead, Jeffries quit after he hit the floor for the first time. The fallout? Race riots across the country left hundreds of black people injured and many dead. And there was another white boxer in the ring a few months later. 

From Flynn to Moran to Williard, there would be another great white hope around the corner to face Johnson. 

Just as boxing spent most of the 1910s looking for their white messiah, bad faith actors have been trying to find their representative in the WNBA. Over the past half decade alone, there was Sabrina Ionescu, the aforementioned Paige Bueckers, and our focus for this essay. 

Through little fault of her own, Caitlin Clark has become the Jim Jeffries of the current WNBA, a symbol of the conservative, hate-filled campaign against the left-leaning safe space of the WNBA.

Before Caitlin Clark was the face of the Indiana Fever, before she held records for most points in a season and in a career at the college level, and before she was in the Iowa yellow and black, Caitlin Clark was from a downtrodden city in a red state. 

While Paige had separated herself from those seeking to use her, whether it was due to an unpreparedness for a platform Clark had gained or a lack of care for what it would mean, Caitlin decided not to push against any self-proclaimed fans of hers. Just like that, the in-state player from Iowa had become their white messiah.

All of this came to a head when Clark was hit in the eye by Dijonai Carrington. The right-wing sites and companies were quick to call “reverse racism” and hurl racialized insults at Carrington. They had done the same to Angel Reese at LSU and again when the Fever played the Sky. Racist slurs in DM requests, personal emails littered with hate speech, and vile photoshops were all posted by the players that had faced them. Unfortunately and all too expectedly, they did little, if anything, to quell the frequency of the abuse. 

It is not an issue that is new to the WNBA. It is sadly unsurprising that racist and homophobic fraudsters would attack a league filled with gay and/or black players. But, given the constant call for the WNBA to justify its own existence, the league has always had to fight for each other. 

The WNBA’s standing made it a safe space for many of those spit out by jock-like sports environments. It was like a barrier, a force multiplier of strength that only happens when the league office, players, and fans are in lockstep. That barrier is being tested now. This, however, is new intensity for a league far more politicized than its male counterpart. 

A statement from Clark was eventually issued, one that felt full of malaise and unsureness, followed by one from the WNBA itself, more forceful and direct. “The WNBA will not tolerate racist, derogatory, or threatening comments…”

It’s here where we need to speak to the obvious measure of responsibility. Is Clark responsible for the statements that one-sided associators on Twitter make? Absolutely not. But, in the same way that Real Madrid should’ve made a stronger statement to protect Vinicius from racist abuse in La Liga, Clark has a responsibility to do everything in her power to protect teammates from hate speech. 

The context of the WNBA, where Clark clearly thrives on the court, requires her action off of it as well. Sports fans will regularly talk about keeping politics out of sports. There is nothing political about refusing to associate with or enable racists. It is a question of morals, not of politics. 

Ultimately, it remains to be seen where we go from here. Clark has grown to be a speaker and presenter of her own platform as one of the young faces of the WNBA. It’s clear she feels no connection to the hate speech being placed alongside her, but the responsibility to refute it is her own. She must choose the course her own growth takes.

I am going to create a thought experiment here that compares the NBA and the WNBA. Typically, such comparisons are made to minimize the WNBA by implying that women’s basketball is only relevant when compared to the men’s league. I want to do the opposite here. I am not drawing a line from the NBA to the WNBA. I am drawing a line from the WNBA to the NBA: the NBA needs to learn from the WNBA response to racism.

There hasn’t been a white American superstar in the NBA since Larry Bird. John Stockton was carried by his heinous co-star. Adam Morrison was hammered for mental health struggles until his career had crumbled to punchline. Tyler Hansborough, Cody Zeller, the Plumlee brothers; none of them ever became more than decent backups despite college success. 

As such, those same ultra conservative reporters have had to limit their hit pieces from a nebulous area. “Shut up and Dribble” was aimed at LeBron James, but also at the league itself. The words themselves came from Laura Ingraham however, but were not accompanied with the presumed face of a notable name in the NBA. While it didn’t lack the hate, it lacked the lent legitimacy. 

As Cooper Flagg enters the NBA, this conversation needs to be had:

How can the NBA protect itself from the influx of racist fans looking for another white hope in its league?

Cooper Flagg has not engaged this himself, but the same trend that was set with Paige Bueckers and Caitlin Clark is being set again. Feelers are being put out. Is it premature to prepare?

Far right outlet Outkick has already published four articles about Flagg, two of which frame him as the new anti-woke face of men’s college basketball. While that pales in comparison to the over 400 articles marked as about Caitlin Clark that Outkick has published just since they lost their WNBA credentials in April, the trend remains.

There’s a lot left to this conversation. It’s one that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver must work on. His first action as commissioner was to banish outed racist in Donald Sterling. That was supposed to set a tone of accountability. However, in the same voice of praise we can have for his handling of the Sterling tapes, Silver has failed to apply the same standard to domestic and sexual violence perpetrators, both for coaches and players. Silver’s tenure has coincided with the most profitable era in NBA history as well as the one where political movements have been defanged down to league permitted slogans printed on jerseys in the Disneyworld bubble.

Despite what one of those slogans said, there is no simple solution that will “end racism”. As long as there are rage-filled idiots looking for scapegoats, there will be racists. However, considering the way that a very specific group of fans have embraced white European players, especially when they get into fights with non-white players, or the way that the president-elect spoke about a franchise’s best player in Wisconsin, it’s clear that there are people chomping at the bit for a face they can poster up as their proxy. 

I hope that symbol doesn’t come to pass. I hope Caitlin Clark can distance herself from a movement that seeks to turn her into a weapon against her league-mates. I hope Cooper Flagg isn’t used to harass other players the way Clark unfortunately already has been. 

The truth will remain that sports are political. They always have been, and they always will be. These leagues know that. They are also both businesses that depend on advertisers they do not want to offend. The WNBA has put its emphasis on protecting its players and fans and has built and now must rebuild robust defenses to do so. The NBA has begun to see their grip on preventing hate speech in their fanbase slip and falter.

The question on this next era of basketball comes down to two things: management and vocality. We’ll get our answers soon, and hopefully they will protect the players that make this whole thing go.

Until then, we will have to hope, blindly, that players speak out if only because it is the moral thing to do.