The whining about how little Caitlin Clark will earn on her WNBA contract reached the “Fast Money” financial show I watch nightly on CNBC, with the stereotypical outrage being expressed at her relatively low contract numbers.
Clark is the Goddess of women’s basketball, the all-time leading college hoops scorer, man or woman, with 3,685 points, surpassing the legendary ‘Pistol” Pete Maravich.
Clark has brought unprecedented interest to the women’s game, with the women’s championship contest even outdrawing the men’s title contest in terms of TV ratings.
Oh, Clark’s Iowa team still lost to South Carolina in the national championship game, 87-75, despite her 30 points.
Clark has gone on to be the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft and has signed a four-year contract worth a total of $338,056 with the Indiana Fever, which sounds more like a disease than a professional sports franchise.
The outrage being expressed centers on noting that the first overall pick in the past NBA draft signed a four-year deal worth $55 million.
The easy solution would seem to be just have Clark try out for an NBA team and use her abundance of talents to make a roster there. The NBA minimum salary is a bit more than $1 million.
Problem solved.
Failing that, before you feel too sorry for Clark, understand she’s already a millionaire based on NIL (name, image and likeness) revenue, the bastardization of college sports that allows so-called “amateur” athletes to benefit from endorsement deals while still performing for their college teams.
Disgust with what NIL and the transfer portal are doing to college sports was among the reasons legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban said influenced his decision to retire.
Even while Clark was firing up shots from every angle for good, old, Iowa, she had NIL deals worth $3.1 million as estimated by the financial folks at Dow Jones News Wires. Admittedly, it’s not $55 million, but is a lot more than $338,000 and change.
This would put Clark well into the top 1 percent of earners we all are supposed to envy and despise.
But the NIL money is given short shrift in the outrage reports. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Predictably, Clueless Joe Biden took to social media to support equal pay in sports. Of course, Biden would do anything to deflect attention from our porous borders, persistent inflation, his troubled son Biden, the bleak situation in Ukraine, etc., etc., etc., and to buy votes.
Get your student loan forgiveness here. How about a GoFundMe for Caitlin?
And Joe doesn’t have a problem with trans guys being girls and dominating women’s sports, a curious contradiction in his professed push for fairness between men and women.
Interestingly, the public whining about pay mirrors Clark’s career, something of which I was unaware until lately. An internet search for “Caitlin Clark whining” brings up a TikTok post with 65.1 million views, and, unexpectedly, among other citations, a post on psycho-cybernetics.com by a self-professed Iowa alum who is “not a fan of her whining and complaining.”
Wanting to see what all the excitement was about, I had watched an Iowa game in the NCAA tournament. In just a few minutes, I saw Clark twice commit turnovers, miss three of four shots and generally be less than anticipated.
Just a bad day, I presume.
But, looking at the complete box score for the championship game loss to South Carolina, I saw Clark hit just 10 of 28 shots from the field, a tick under 36 percent. The remainder of her team was good on 15 of 35 shot attempts, a tick under 43 percent. Hmmmm.
It seems Clark, like Maravich, never met a shot she wouldn’t take.
In researching this blog post, I found a humorous story about Maravich and Larry Bird from Bird’s rookie season with the Boston Celtics.
The tale, as relayed by their teammate at the time, Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell, was that the veteran Maravich chastised Bird for forcing up a shot while being double-teamed.
Shot back Bird, “If you were any damn good, they wouldn’t be double-teaming me”
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