Nike left a billion dollar bill on the sidewalk
Two years after Nike signed Caitlin Clark, there's no Caitlin Clark shoe yet.
Ethan Strauss’s Substack House of Strauss covers the business of sports and quite a business it is.
For example, why has Nike not blanketed the world with ads for their Caitlin Clark shoe? Indeed, why is there no Caitlin Clark shoe from Nike?
Nike Has Refused the Caitlin Clark Windfall
The reasons for why Nike has so far sabotaged its unicorn opportunity
Ethan Strauss
Sep 24, 2024
… back in 2021, I couldn’t foresee that the [Nike] megacorp would sign history’s biggest women’s college basketball phenom in 2022. How fortuitous. I also couldn’t foresee that this player would maintain that fame momentum through her entrance into the WNBA, where she’d finish All 1st Team as a rookie. And who could have predicted her games would average over a million viewers, contrasted against the games of other players that would register in the 300K range. Road arenas packed wherever she goes. Crowds of girls wearing her jersey in all these stadiums. Oh, and also? Nike’s re-signed her through 8 years at a cheap rate.
You tell me all that and I assume Nike’s doing fantastic in 2024 because it sounds like you’re describing a billion dollar athlete who suddenly appeals to previously unreached demos.
Doting dads with athletic daughters. Those guys spend money on their daughters.
The apparel behemoth has majority male customers and has long craved similar success with women. Fortunately, they signed the woman to build a brand around. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Caitlin Clark. Instead, in the early Clark Era, Nike’s stock has tanked over this span and the CEO just got ousted. By the way, though Clark got famous around 2022, if you want to buy her shoe, you could be waiting until 2026-27.
This is completely insane corporate malpractice and it’s being received as all very normal in the press that covers such matters. I read excuses about how much time and input is required to launch a shoe, as though LeBron James wasn’t playing in his own signature sneakers in his very first NBA game.
So, why did the overall business failure at the apparel giant happen? In my opinion, the refusal to make money off Clark is not incidental to continued issues within that massive company.
Again, you just have to wonder about a company in struggling straits that seems almost apathetic about reaping box office gold. In the last couple years, the corporation has done little to capitalize on this absolute unicorn, even though the NIL era blessed them with the opportunity to get started when she was breaking college records as a household name.
There was a Nike ad for Iowa Caitlin, though it wasn’t exactly pushed on the public. There has been no Nike commercial for Clark as a pro. Now Clark’s Fever are in the WNBA playoffs, and she’s wearing Kobe’s sneakers,
Kobe’s been dead for years. He died being a doting dad (hiring a helicopter to fly his daughter to her basketball game), but still …
instead of her own signature brand. In summary, Nike lucked into the marketing chance of a generation and they’re using that to advertise an old product. Why is it happening this way? Based on conversations with people in the know, it indeed has something to do with WNBA MVP and Nike athlete A'ja Wilson. But beyond Wilson, it’s about a culture at the company that’s more concerned with quelling noise rather than making it, as Nike once used to.
On House of Strauss, Nate Jones and I discussed this remarkable “dog that isn’t barking” story of Nike mostly ignoring Clark’s rise. ….
Read the whole thing there.
Let's file this away for the next time someone claims that DEImania aka Sacred White Guilt is just about money and/or corporate profit streams—anyone who says this must not know any upscale white liberals.
Group morality and the sacred totem pole/fetish object that the group gathers around is worth more than just about anything (up to and including your life) and if anyone's tempted to step out of line, the threat of being socially demonized and ostracised will make them think twice (and usually capitulate).
The White Guilt faith is founded on the Achilles' Heel of the white liberal—the absolute existential terror they feel about either being branded a bigot or being seen as bigot-adjacent aka resembling anything or anyone remotely "conservative".
White liberals will agree to almost any humiliation, will leave billion-dollar-bills lying around, will wash black feet and bow their heads in a Struggle Session, will denounce themselves, their families and countries—anything to not have to leave the house in the morning with the Scarlet Letter R branded on their faces.
And people say America is secular! lol
A follow-up here that further illustrates what Caitlin Clark was facing in her first WNBA season.
Clark's team, the Indiana Fever, made the playoffs, improving greatly from their past few seasons, mostly because of Clark, but they lost their opening series to the higher-seeded Connecticut Sun. Okay, seems quite straightforward.
But here, so far as I can glean from a variety of sources, is what Clark faced in those two games. It's hard to get straightforward accounts of these incidents because major sports media sources --- especially ESPN -- are working so hard to hide or obfuscate them.
In the first game, Clark was poked in the eye by a black lesbian Connecticut player named DiJonai Carrington. No foul was called.
In the second game, Clark was undercut as she tried to land after shooting a jump shot by a black lesbian Connecticut player named DeWanna Bonner. Normally this would be an automatic flagrant foul, but no foul of any sort was called.
Bad enough. But there was much more going on off-court. DeWanna Bonner's lesbian 'fiancée' (or would they prefer fiancé?) is her Connecticut teammate Alyssa Thomas. Thomas, all season long, and especially in the past few days, has been in the news for accusing Caitlin Clark and her fans of being racists.
So what does ESPN focus on? Well, it turns out they made a big deal of Bonner and Thomas's engagement in the broadcasts of these games. To wit, one of their play-by-play announcers was saying things like 'Bonner to her fiancée for the 2!' What ESPN wants to promote is pretty clear.
Now, one more little twist. You remember Connecticut Sun player DiJonai Carrington, she of the poky fingers in Game 1? She has also spent much of the season tweeting about how horrible Caitlin and her awful heterosexual whiteness are. Well, it turns out that DiJonai's lesbian girlfriend is Caitlin Clark's Indiana teammate NaLyssa Smith. Smith has been on X as well (as if that needed to be said at this point) whining that her poor sweet girlfriend DiJonai was being victimized by her (Smith's) own team's racist fans who were mad just because DiJonai poked Caitlin in the eye. It's also pretty clear where NaLyssa Smith's loyalties lie.
Okay, that's enough to try to keep straight. I'm sure you all get the bigger picture: Caitlin Clark has been trying to play her game in the face of vicious opposition from her league's power structure, including opposing players, coaches, and referees, and even her own teammates; she's had ESPN and the other mainstream press gunning for her and promoting her rivals at every opportunity; she's been dealing with constant vague -- but in her world, very real and dangerous -- accusations of racism; and she's almost completely kept above all of this roiling mess and maintained both the quality of her game and her dignity.