What the WNBA, Caitlin Clark can learn from NBA, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson (2024)

Everyone these days has an opinion about Caitlin Clark, especially in the nonstop opinion-fest that's the sports talk world. Is she getting all of this attention—some good and some bad—because she's white? Did she get left off the Olympic team because the WNBA is sticking it to the great white hope of women's basketball?

In an age where almost everything in America is racialized, sports is the one place where performance tops all. Luca Doncic and Nikola Jokic are not getting rave reviews because they're white players—it's because they're great players.

In a league that's overwhelmingly Black, we can safely say that NBA fans—white and Black—love great players. And we only wish that Doncic (born in Slovenia) and Jokic (born in Serbia) were on our favorite teams. We'd rather have them playing for us than against us.

Just like we'd rather have Jason Tatum, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, Jimmy Butler, Tyrese Maxey, Tyrese Haliburton, Zion Williamson, Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving, Jalen Brunson, Anthony Edwards or Stephen Curry playing for our favorite team.

The fact is, it's a player's league. And one player, Clark, is hands down the most exciting player to come down the women's basketball pike in a generation. Her downtown shooting, her ball-handling skills, her court vision and passing skills, her competitive drive—and the sheer force of her personality—all combine to make her the single most exciting and important women's basketball player in the sport's history, Black or white.

And that's not my opinion, it's America's, white and Black and brown. The TV ratings and the fan turnout don't lie.

That a small handful of pundits, players and critics believe that Clark is the beneficiary of some sort of "white privilege"—or, as The View's Sunny Hostin said, "pretty privilege"—reveals more about their own biases and psychoses than Clark's talents.

But Hostin wasn't finished. After letting The View's audience know that nearly one-third of WNBA players are gay (news flash, America! Gay women play sports!), she added this: "I think people have a problem with basketball-playing women that are lesbians."

That may have been true back when Martina Navratilova bravely announced her sexuality to the world back in 1981. Today's American sports fans don't care who you sleep with or how often: Talent and merit rule the day in the NBA, not your identity—ethnic, racial or sexual.

To properly understand what Clark is now going through—and what the WNBA is going through too—it's first important to tell the story of that older men's league: the NBA.

In its earliest days, the 1940s and '50s, the NBA was a regional league with no franchise west of St. Louis. For the first two decades, baseball, football and even horse racing had more fans and got more attention in the media. "It was for the longest time a second-tier professional league," Pete Croatto, author of From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA. "If you read player autobiographies of the day, a lot of these players had second jobs," he told Newsweek.

It was two players (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson) and one NBA executive (David Stern) who would breathe life into the NBA, lifting it from a second-tier sport that struggled financially to the worldwide phenomenon it is now.

As the executive vice president of the NBA in the late '70s and early '80s—and in charge of marketing, television and public relations—Stern understood one thing that the owners and executives in the league failed to grasp in the past: It's the players that make the game, not the franchises, the coaches or the owners.

"That to me was David Stern's genius. The star system is what sustained the NBA and what sustains it to this day," Croatto said.

And it wasn't just a marketing maneuver. Stern created a revenue-sharing system, effectively making the players and owners strategic financial partners too.

On the backs of many generations of NBA talent, including many older players in the league at the time, two generational talents entered in 1979: Bird and Johnson. The hype surrounding them would create all kinds of opportunities for the league to reach a wider audience.

But older players in the league were not thrilled. Sure, they were great college players, but could Bird and Johnson play with the grown-ups? The NBA is littered with first-round draft picks who never lived up to the hype. Were Bird and Johnson good enough, tough enough and strong enough to compete with men a decade older and wiser? No one knew for sure.

The league and the world would soon find out, but not without all kinds of conflict. In Los Angeles, Johnson faced resentment even within his own locker room, especially from Lakers captain and big man Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This was his team, and the rookie was testing his leadership.

By the end of his first season, Johnson had not only lived up to the hype; he exceeded it. In the epic Game Six of the NBA Finals in Philadelphia against a loaded Philadelphia 76ers team, Johnson, with an injured Abdul-Jabbar on the bench, scored 42 points and added 15 rebounds, seven assists, and three steals.

But that early success was not without consequence. "Magic flexed his muscles as team leader over Kareem," Lakers coach Paul Westhead wrote in his memoir, The Speed Game. He had gotten too much, too soon. We had a monster on our hands and someone was getting hurt."

Over time, that rift would heal itself: Magic humbled himself, and Kareem came to see Magic as a true generational talent and team leader.

Bird came into the league with some of the same resentment from older players, and with some of the same questions they had for Johnson, but with an added racial dimension. Was this slow, odd-looking white guy from French Lick, Indiana, all hype too?

It didn't take long for Bird to dispel the myth that he was overrated—and overrated because he was white. In his first year, he led the Boston Celtics to the largest single-season turnaround in NBA history—a 32-win improvement over the prior year. He won the NBA's Rookie of the Year, averaging 21 points a game and 10 rebounds.

All the while, there were the usual quips and racial slights from the press and even some players in the league. As late as 1987—and after Bird's Celtics had defeated the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Eastern Finals—Isiah Thomas said this about Bird's three MVP awards (1981, 1984 and 1986): "The only reason he won all those MVPs is because he was white."

Thomas wasn't done: "If [Bird] was a Black man, he'd be just another player."

Those words revealed more about Thomas—and his racist attitudes—than anything. "Bird is not just a great player, he's a very great player," wrote sports writing legend Tony Kornheiser not long after Thomas' idiotic comments. "And if he were black, he'd be a very great player."

In the prologue to Bird's memoir, Drive: The Story of My Life, Johnson penned the forward. "Of all the players I play against, the only one I fear is Larry Bird," Johnson wrote.

In the end, Bird, like Johnson, exceeded the hype. And he never whined about how the older players, or a few couch critics, treated him. Or how some made his race an issue. Bird didn't care about any of it because he was too busy having fun dominating his sport.

This is Clark's challenge: to live up to the hype and exceed it or become just another college standout who couldn't take her game to the next level.

She has proved she can draw fans to the arenas and eyeballs to the TV screens, no doubt. But her biggest test has nothing to do with her skin color or the fact that she's pretty and straight. Or the fact that she's being hazed by the older players and picked apart by some in the league—and the press—who think she will fail.

There will be setbacks. When Clark recently learned she was excluded from the 2024 Olympic team, she took the news like a real competitor and champion. "I know it's the most competitive team in the world, and I knew it could've gone either way of me being on the team, me not being on the team. I'm excited for them. I'm going to be rooting them on to win gold."

Asked about her level of disappointment, she gave an equally impressive answer. "Honestly, no disappointment. I think it just gives you something to work for. It's a dream. Hopefully, one day I can be there.

Will Clark do what Johnson and Bird did and become one of the greats of the WNBA? If her early performances are any indication, she just may get there.

Here's one fan among millions rooting for her. If there's one thing we know about Clark, it's this: No one has made much money betting against her.