Is the WNBA Afraid of Caitlin Clark?

Riley slays it again!

Is the WNBA Afraid of Caitlin Clark?

The rookie is attracting new fans to the sport, but the league refuses to capitalize on the hype.

By Jason L. Riley

June 11, 2024 5:33 pm ET

I started playing golf after my father’s elder brother introduced me to the game during the summer of 1985, when I turned 14. Like millions of others, however, I started watching golf only because of Tiger Woods.

Uncle Larry was a military veteran who lived in suburban Washington, which gave him access to the nearby Andrews Air Force Base, where your tax dollars maintain two spectacular 18-hole championship golf courses frequented by service men and women, federal workers, presidents and in my case lucky nephews.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, golf was perceived mainly as a diversion for country club types, and while Mr. Woods wasn’t the first black professional golfer, his success has done more than anyone before or since to broaden the sport’s appeal. Along the way, he made professional golf far more lucrative for his fellow competitors. In 1996, the year Mr. Woods turned pro, purses on the PGA Tour totaled about $68 million. By 2018 that number had climbed to $363 million, and it had everything to do with the new eyeballs that Mr. Woods attracted to the game and the advertising dollars that followed.

“The tournaments he played in shattered attendance marks throughout the world and consistently set viewership records on television,” Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian wrote in their biography of Mr. Woods. “At the height of Tiger’s career, golf beat the NFL and the NBA in Nielsen ratings.” And in the process of making the sport more popular, “he helped make multimillionaires of more than four hundred Tour pros.”

There’s a lesson here for professional women’s basketball, yet the league seems to be in no danger of learning it anytime soon. In terms of popularity, WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is the Tiger Woods of her sport. She left college as the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader for women and men. When her University of Iowa Hawkeyes faced the South Carolina Gamecocks in the NCAA women’s championship game earlier this year, it drew a larger television audience than the men’s final for the first time in history. My 11-year-old daughter loves playing basketball, but she started watching women’s basketball only because of Caitlin Clark.

Yet somehow Ms. Clark didn’t earn a spot on the 12-player team that will represent the U.S. at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris. After the snub created a backlash, it was reported that she would be included on an alternates list in case a player on the team gets injured. The WNBA is desperate to expand its brand, but it won’t showcase the sport’s biggest star at an event that drew more than three billion viewers worldwide in 2020? This is self-sabotage.

According to the Sporting News, the average salary in the women’s professional league last year was around $148,000, and the highest-paid player makes a little more than $250,000. The league minimum in the men’s game is $1.1 million and the average salary is more than $10 million. Ms. Clark can’t close that gap, but she certainly could help narrow it.

One question is whether WNBA officials are queasy about having a straight white woman become the face of a league dominated by women who are black and gay. Fans don’t seem to care, but there are commentators who seem to think of little else. Sunny Hostin, a co-host on “The View,” attributed Ms. Clark’s fame to “white privilege.” Former ESPN co-anchor Jemele Hill said the hoop star’s acclaim was “a little problematic” and that “we would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity.”

Some have asked whose spot on the Olympic roster Ms. Clark should have taken, but as sportswriter Jason Whitlock noted on social media, that’s the wrong question. “The ‘who do you remove from the team?’ debate is comical,” he wrote. “Like it matters. For the first time in American history, women have the biggest star in sports and they don’t know how to utilize her. This is high comedy. They’re all Tito. She’s Michael. Beat it.”

Ms. Clark leads all rookies in scoring. She’s fourth in assists and second in 3-pointers made. More important for the league, she continues to do for pro basketball what she did in college—grow the sport. The WNBA has had to move games to larger arenas to accommodate the crowds that she draws. Television viewership has nearly tripled, and merchandise sales—pushed by her top-selling Indiana Fever jersey—are up by more than 230%.

Who knows if Ms. Clark will live up to the hype, but there’s no reason the WNBA shouldn’t be leveraging the hype while it lasts.