On Tuesday, OutKick explained that the conversation around Caitlin Clark cannot shift toward basketball until the players and media members fueling the hysteria acknowledge their role in creating it.
Case in point: former ESPN host Elle Duncan.
Hours after our column was published, Duncan blamed the drama on — wait for it — Caitlin Clark and her fans. Who else? According to Duncan, it’s Clark’s responsibility to denounce fans who allegedly co-opt her name to serve their own agendas.
SOME WNBA PLAYERS ACT LIKE THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO RECEIVE MEAN SOCIAL MEDIA MESSAGES
“I would love for it to be very clear to the people who think they are her fans but are using her, if she would say, ‘stop that sh–, I don’t want it, I’m tired of it.’ As opposed to what we’ve seen, which is ‘the media makes up these narratives, the media makes up this discourse,'” Duncan said on “The Sports Gossip Show” podcast.
Duncan was referring to Clark telling ESPN over the weekend that the media “controls the narrative” around her and is “sometimes so far out of touch with what is reality.”
“The media highlights the stories, and they show it, but at the same time, like, the media did not make up that members of Congress are trying to get literal government intervention into whether you get fouled too hard,” Duncan continued. “Like, this stuff has to stop.”
Duncan’s attempt to defend the media’s role in the hostility surrounding Clark is especially telling, coming less than a week after USA Today published an op-ed arguing that Clark’s style of play could get Black and queer women lynched like Emmett Till. No, that’s not satire. The outlet really published that story.
You almost have to laugh at Duncan’s proposed solution. In her view, the way to calm things down is for Clark to denounce the very fans defending her while players drive forearms into her throat and television analysts smear her character.
Moreover, Duncan completely ignores that Clark has repeatedly done exactly what Duncan accuses her of avoiding.
“People should not be using my name to push those agendas. It’s disappointing. It’s not acceptable,” Clark said in 2024. “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.”
Perhaps Duncan would prefer that Clark spend less time focusing on her game and more time responding to every manufactured controversy.
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New York Post columnist Kirsten Fleming elaborated on this point Wednesday:
“No matter how many times CC has said the thing everyone wants her to say, it’s not enough. They demand more. They want her to respond to every drop of nonsense and give it way more oxygen than it deserves. It gives women a bad name. This isn’t Bravo, it’s hoops. Let her hoop.”
Indeed.
Further, it’s not as if Clark has a magic wand to stop random people on the internet from posting. By Duncan’s logic, Elle Duncan is responsible for every racist threat directed at Clark on social media.
Later in the episode, Duncan dismisses Clark’s supporters as “fake” because she assumes everyone approaches sports fandom the way she does: as an extension of culture and identity politics. Duncan has likely adopted fandom for players like Lamar Jackson, Angel Reese, or Jalen Hurts for reasons that extend well beyond sports.
But that is not how the average fan views sports.
Most fans are simply drawn to compelling, generational athletes. Caitlin Clark is one of them. So were Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Steph Curry, Serena Williams and Patrick Mahomes.
Duncan is telling on herself. It’s called projection.
OutKick asked Duncan via text message why she discounts the media’s role in the firestorm surrounding Caitlin Clark. She did not respond before publication. We will update this story if she does.
As we concluded earlier this week, the conversation around Caitlin Clark cannot return to basketball as long as these bad-faith actors remain at the center.
Racial idolaters like Duncan, Monica McNutt, Angel Reese, Jemele Hill, Nancy Armour and others will never admit fault because of how deeply their resentment of Clark’s success runs.
The only way they can reconcile a straight White woman from Iowa transcending their niche sport is by insisting her popularity is merely a product of racism and privilege.
Just listen to the contempt with which Duncan speaks. She claims to care about the WNBA. Based on her commentary, she’d rather see the league revert to obscurity than succeed on the back of Caitlin Clark.
