Kyle Goon: Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark teamed up for gold. Can the racist narratives finally end?

For all the attention Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have seized the last few years, it’s strange that so few people seem to listen to them when they speak.

In 2023, when Randallstown native Reese drew ire for celebrating LSU’s national championship in Clark’s face, Clark said after that she didn’t think “Angel should be criticized at all.” In a postseason rematch a year later, Reese said, “Me and Caitlin Clark don’t hate each other.”

Maybe even then Reese and Clark were anticipating moments like Sunday at the FIBA World Cup, when they would be wearing the same jersey, accepting the same gold and taking swigs of the same brand of Champagne.

Winning has a way of following these two, who helped elevate their college programs into the national spotlight and now are two of the most promising young players on Team USA. But, as much as winning sticks with them, so does the nagging question that they’ve answered approximately 1 million times.

You can see Clark’s face sour the moment she hears it: “Are you guys friends now?”

Sometimes, Clark has responded to versions of this query with impassive body language. But now, 3 1/2 years into the never-ending discourse, she jabbed a finger at the reporter.

“We’ve always been friends,” she said. “Don’t try to do that. Don’t try to do that.”

For many years, the narrative has been that Clark and Reese are competitive foils and nothing else. Now that the world has gotten a chance to see them as teammates, it’s long past time to drop the trench warfare between these fanbases — especially the bad faith commentators who have delved into ugly racist tropes to criticize Reese.

If you tuned in to the World Cup to watch them, you might have noticed that Clark (Team USA’s assists leader) looks often for Reese in the post or in transition. You might have seen Reese picking up Clark after she was knocked to the ground. You might have seen them sitting next to each other on the bench or caught postgame TikToks as they sprayed each other with bubbly.

What else do they have to do? Sign a peace treaty?

There are people — fans who are more ardently supportive of the idea of Clark than women’s basketball as a whole — who won’t take any evidence that the relationship between the two is anything less than a blood feud. As much as I hate citing the words of someone as consistently wrong about everything as former coach and right-wing shill Dan Dakich, it’s representative of this worldview. After Clark’s FIBA moment, he called the response “a blatant lie” — because after all, who is better at explaining a woman’s own words than a man?

Saying Reese has always been “jealous or hateful” of Clark, Dakich added on Twitter: “Little Catie Clark decided to try to gaslight us.”

If it’s an act, it has sure been going on a long time — and Clark and Reese have always said the same thing: Their rivalry exists only on the court when they’re going head to head.

Even last year, as old flames were restoked when Reese laid a hard foul on her, Clark said afterward that she didn’t view it as malicious. “Let’s not make it something that it’s not,” she said.

The narrative is stronger, however, than the two women’s words and seemingly impossible to kill. From a marketing perspective, it’s tempting to see Reese and Clark as a modern-day Magic Johnson and Larry Bird for the WNBA, grabbing attention for a rivalry that just happens to cross racial lines. But, for everything that was beautiful about that NBA tête-à-tête, there was ugliness, too.

Plenty of folks who never cared much for basketball because the majority of its players were Black suddenly took up Bird as their favorite player — in large part because he symbolized white achievement. Especially in retirement, the two have found kinship, perhaps because only they could understand how the world forced them at odds beyond the bounds of the basketball court, proxies in a racial conflict they were never all that invested in.

It feels similar to the experiences of Clark and Reese, forced avatars of racial tensions that have risen to the surface in the WNBA in the last few years.

It’s not surprising that Reese has talked about wanting to be the inspiration for young Black girls to dream big, because she was once in that position as an aspiring star at Saint Frances Academy in Baltimore. Similarly, Clark has made a point to vouch for gender equality — as the NCAA’s record-holding scorer, man or woman, she represents how sports offer a platform for female stars to assert themselves among men.

But this is not strictly zero sum. One is not a star at the cost of another, and their causes are hardly mutually exclusive. Although the idea that Clark and Reese are always at each other’s throats is a compelling marketing narrative, they’ve each tried to squash that story for years.

When they have different jerseys on, they’re each trying to topple the other. When they play for the same team, what beautiful music they make.

For some viewers who desperately want to take sides and throw stones, the Clark and Reese team-up is an inconvenient development. But, if they’d been listening to their basketball idols all this time, they should have seen it coming.

“We’ve played against each other so many times, so I’m sure we know each other’s game like the back of each other’s hand,” Reese said. “We just continue to build chemistry because we know we’re gonna be USA teammates for a while.”

It’s time to start asking them a different question. The good news is we’ve got years of Reese and Clark ahead to dream one up.