Caitlin Clark left off US Women's Olympic Basketball team for being white and having a boyfriend

Star WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark, who caused a sensation in women’s college basketball by being able to shoot from extremely long distances like Steph Curry introduced to the NBA a decade ago, has been getting beaten up a lot during her first season by black lesbian players. Now, Clark, the biggest name in women’s basketball, has been left off the USA national women’s team at this summer’s Paris Olympics.

The National Basketball Association concocted the Women’s NBA in 1996 as a subsidized offshoot of the NBA. I presume that buying off feminists with cash infusions seemed like a good PR idea at the time, what with the tendency of NBA players to get in women trouble with the law.

But also, the WNBA seemed like it might someday make a little money: after all, Americans tend to get excited about women’s teams every four years at the Olympics or soccer World Cup. We like to see our lovely young ladies prove the superiority of the American Way of Life by beating foreign vixens.

And back then in the 1990s, it seemed possible that the demographics of the WNBA might turn out more like women’s volleyball with lots of elongated but attractive women.

For example, an early star of the WNBA was 6’5” Lisa Leslie. I long followed her friends’ efforts to find her a husband: She had four requirements:

• He needed to be black.

• He needed to be Christian.

• He needed a decent job. He didn’t need to make more than she did from personal appearances and the like, but he had to have a respectable job.

• And he had to be taller than her.

Finally, her friends found her a black, Christian cargo plane pilot who is 6’7.”

Last I checked, they have two children and live a nice life in the suburbs.

But, over time, it became more and more obvious that lesbians, especially black lesbians, had come to view the WNBA as their turf, which they had built (to the extent it has been built at all).

As I blogged in 2017:

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Wiggins: WNBA’s ‘harmful’ culture of bullying, jealousy

Candice Wiggins, La Jolla Country Day alumni and WNBA Woman of the Year recently described the WNBA as a “very very harmful” culture where she was bullied throughout her 8-year career.

Tod Leonard

… Wiggins, a four-time All-American at Stanford, asserts she was targeted for harassment from the time she was drafted by Minnesota because she is heterosexual and a nationally popular figure, of whom many other players were jealous.

“Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins’ baseball player father Alan stole 70 bases as the leadoff man for the 1984 National League champion San Diego Padres before massive drug problems led to his death in 1991.

Commenter O’Really notes:

Similarly, straight women do not merit protection from abuse and harassment by lesbians, in this case in the WNBA. Since coming out with her story of anti-heterosexual abuse, Candice Wiggins has not exactly received the unquestioning support offered to Jackie Coakley:

From ESPN:

WNBA has no comment, but many players dispute Candice Wiggins’ allegations of bullying culture

… But surely she realized comments to any newspaper would be disseminated globally online.

… I think I’ve finally figured out the psychology of why there is this big disparity between the success of women’s national teams and the failure of women’s city teams. In men’s team sports, national and city teams are both seen as Defenders of the Turf, just on different geographic scales. Our young men defend us from your young men.

On the other hand, young women don’t trigger our loyalty as the defenders of our turf, they represent the flower of our culture.

Commenter Black Sea sums up nicely what I was trying to say:

Genuinely popular men’s sports are more like battles; genuinely popular women’s sports are more like beauty contests.