INDIANAPOLIS – Although she has played in only 53 WNBA games, Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark has become a singular force in women’s basketball – a symbol of the game’s monumental growth and a name nearly synonymous with the sport itself.
Clark, who is in her second season, is expected to miss her 19th straight game because of a lingering groin injury when the Fever visit the Phoenix Mercury Tuesday night at PHX Arena.
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However, despite the long absence, Clark has brought the WNBA unprecedented media attention, a surge in ticket sales and soaring team valuations.
On a recent Wednesday night in Indianapolis, Clark’s popularity was on full display. “Clark” jerseys could be spotted everywhere. Fans screamed the star’s name as she sat on the sideline with teammates in her black Fever t-shirt and gray sweatpants. Down the street from Gainbridge Fieldhouse, hundreds of fans gathered around the 140 screens at Tom’s Watch Bar showing the Fever’s game against the Mercury.
“Caitlin Clark is a metric phenomenon like we have never seen in the history of women’s basketball,” said Ryan Ruocco, ESPN’s lead WNBA play-by-play broadcaster. “The best comparison would be Tiger Woods and what he did for golf when it comes to viewership, merchandise, attendance, ratings.
“To deny that is to deny reality.”
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There is no denying the numbers. The Fever’s attendance skyrocketed from 4,067 fans per game in 2023 before Clark arrived to more than 17,036 during her rookie season in 2024, when the Fever set a WNBA total attendance record. And already the WNBA has set a league-wide attendance record in 2025.
Meanwhile, Indiana’s franchise value surged from about $90 million before Clark’s arrival to $335 million now, according to the sports business platform Sportico.
The shift hasn’t gone unnoticed by the players.
“Anytime you have that many eyes, that’s what we’ve always wanted, right?” said former Mercury standout Sophie Cunningham, who is now Clark’s teammate in Indiana.
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But with the spotlight comes distortion. In just two years, Clark has come to represent vastly different things to different people: a savior of the women’s game, a marketing engine, a victim, a cultural flashpoint, a source of national pride.
Fever coach Stephanie White, who was with the franchise from 2011-16, can attest to the increased scrutiny around the franchise since Clark entered the league.
“Everything is highlighted, there’s much more speculation about things that people don’t know about,” White said. “It creates more of a challenge to filter through that and keep what happens inside our locker room (private).”
The bigger Clark gets, the harder it is to separate the player from the projection.
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That symbolic weight is not lost on veteran journalist and author Howard Bryant, who has spent decades examining how sports reflect American identity.
“The entire Caitlin Clark story is very similar in a lot of ways to a lot of the big stories,” Bryant said. “It’ll sound very strange, but she’s in the same category in a lot of ways as O.J. Simpson or Michael Jordan or some of these other characters whose story becomes less and less about them and says more and more about us.”
Bryant added that, “You realize you’re not even talking about them anymore, because they become so divisive and representative. They become avatars for things that go beyond them.”
As a result, Clark is watched, praised, critiqued and mythologized in ways no other women’s basketball player has been. Her impact on the league is undeniable. But so is the fact that she has become a window through which larger battles — about gender, race, merit, and recognition — are viewed.
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Clark herself insists she’s just here to play the game.
“I just love playing basketball,” Clark said during her rookie season. “This is my job, this is what I’m here for. I’m not here for all the other stuff.”
But the “other stuff” has increasingly eclipsed what she does on the court.
Some see her as a revolutionary force lifting the league into the mainstream; others view her as a symbol of deeper cultural tensions playing out in real time. That level of attention has created an environment where narratives – sometimes celebratory, sometimes conspiratorial – can outpace the game itself.
As Ruocco noted, the platforms where those discussions are taking place are not always best equipped to handle them. There is little nuance to social media.
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“Twitter, or any other derivative of it, is not the best place for those conversations,” Ruocco said. “It’s too convenient and juicy in the places this is discussed to really get at the truth of it.”
And some, it would seem, are less interested in the truth.
Although Clark was voted as an All-Star starter this season, she has struggled with injuries. Playing in only 13 games, her shot has been unreliable. She has hit just 27.9% of her 3-point shots and is shooting only 36.7% overall.
Clark finished her career at Iowa as the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer and finished fourth in WNBA MVP voting as a rookie. But her performance this season hasn’t lived up to the sky-high hype or expectations.
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Much of the rhetoric around her, especially from figures like Christine Brennan, a long-time USA Today columnist who authored an unauthorized Clark biography, “On Her Game,” sidesteps this reality.
Brennan criticized Clark for not receiving more votes from fellow players in All-Star balloting, framing it as a slight the league should correct, despite Clark’s inconsistent performance and missed games due to injury.
And a recent survey of WNBA players by The Athletic found that 53.8% of the league’s players responded that Clark will be the face of the WNBA in five years. Although Clark led by a wide margin in the survey, Brennan saw it as evidence that players still fail to fully appreciate Clark.
Fundamental to Brennan’s argument is that players don’t appreciate that they’re benefitting from Clark’s presence in the league.
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Brennan is hardly alone.
A range of voices – from media figures such as Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee and Barstool’s Dave Portnoy to Clark’s most dedicated fans — have pushed competing narratives about Clark’s role.
In one moment, she’s a revolutionary, a lifeline for the league who is being undermined by jealous peers. In another, she’s a victim of bias and conspiratorial exclusion because she didn’t make the 2024 Olympic squad.
In this way, mythmaking has overtaken analysis. In some corners Clark is seen as mistreated by the league’s players because of jealousy.
Former WNBA star and ESPN broadcaster Rebecca Lobo said she has repeatedly had to counter those ideas.
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“In the last year, I’ve refuted the idea over and over that Caitlin is having to work against the league or the players in the league,” Lobo said. “Other players being jealous and that fueling physical play … for the most part, is not an accurate narrative.”
In these narratives, physical plays against Clark by Chicago’s Angel Reese or Minnesota’s Dijonai Carrington are viewed as personal attacks. Any physical play against Clark can turn into a referendum on intent.
After Carrington poked Clark in the eye during a playoff game last year – an incident that Clark herself dismissed as unintentional – quickly escalated into a full-blown controversy. Slow-motion replays and speculative tweets turned the moment into a national talking point.
In one interview, Brennan pressed Carrington about whether she had laughed at Clark’s injury – even after Carrington said she hadn’t seen the play and was unaware Clark had been hurt.
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Carrington wasn’t treated like a competitor – she was treated like a narrative device. The moment became less about what happened on the court, and more about how quickly Clark is cast as a victim, regardless of whether she rejects it.
Brennan later became the focus of a WNBPA statement asking for her media credentials to be revoked as a result. Brennan said she was confronted by Carrington’s teammate, DeWanna Bonner, who took exception to her approach.
Ruocco argued that these on-court moments are just reality as opponents try to contain a hoops phenomenon.
“Anytime people see zealous defense against Caitlin, they try to retrofit the narrative of, ‘Oh, she’s being targeted,’” Ruocco said. “Really what it is … is it’s people trying to defend the most unique offensive weapon this league has ever seen.”
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Morgan Campbell, a journalist who covers the intersections of race, gender and sports media, sees the framing of a league of players aligned against the new superstar as unfair.
“In the WNBA, it’s 144 players. So let’s call the other 143 players worker bees. All of them owe their visibility to Caitlin Clark,” Campbell said. “So what else do they owe her? Are they not supposed to defend her as hard as they would anyone else?
“No, they don’t owe her that.”
Still, the reactions to these moments reveal something deeper. Much of the public conversation about Clark has gestured clumsily toward race, as if simply naming her whiteness explains the entirety of her rise with the WNBA. But what’s happening is more layered than a matter of identity alone.
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For many observers, Clark’s whiteness is not incidental to her stardom – it shapes the terms of her recognition. She is able to represent progress and mainstream appeal in a way that players before her, Black or otherwise, could not. Rather than creating a racial double standard, it’s exposed one that has long existed, but could be ignored until the contrast became too stark.
The burden she carries, to grow the game, to justify attention, to symbolize progress, is not one she chose. But it is one she now has to navigate. As the league and media surrounding it wrestle with how to celebrate her without erasing others, the challenge isn’t whether Clark can live up to the hype. It’s whether the conversation around her can catch up to the complexity of her story.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark arrives in Phoenix with popularity intact
