Culture
Team USA may have 'woke a monster' by not picking Clark for Olympics
INDIANAPOLIS — There are few teams, if any, Caitlin Clark hasn’t made in her life.
Team USA’s Olympic team is one of them.
Indiana Fever coach Christie Sides revealed Sunday after practice that they were on the team bus when Clark — the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer and the No. 1 pick in the 2024 Draft — recently found out that she didn’t make the cut to represent the U.S. at the Paris Olympics.
Her response?
“’Hey, coach, they woke a monster,’” Sides said, reciting Clark.
#IndianaFever HC Christie Sides said they were on the bus when Caitlin Clark found out she didn’t make Team USA. Clark then told her, “Hey coach, they woke a monster.”
I asked Sides how much more “monster” there is to wake up.
“That’s pretty scary, right?” | @TheAthleticWBB pic.twitter.com/3egzCyJBA8
— James Boyd (@RomeovilleKid) June 9, 2024
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Although an official roster has yet to be announced, Clark was not one of the 12 players selected, sources briefed on the decision said Saturday. Clark confirmed the decision Sunday, saying she recently received a call from USA Basketball that her first Olympic experience will have to wait.
“Honestly, no disappointment,” Clark said. “I think it just gives you something to work for. That’s a dream. Hopefully one day I can be there.
“I think it’s just a little more motivation. You remember that. Hopefully in four years, when four years comes back around, I can be there.”
Only four players have ever made the Olympic team the same year they finished their college careers: Diana Taurasi in 2004, Candace Parker and Sylvia Fowles in 2008, and Breanna Stewart in 2016.
More from #IndianaFever’s Caitlin Clark on not making the Olympic roster:
“There’s still a lot of positives in the time that I’m gonna have off. …”
Asked if she’d play as an injury replacement, she said it would be “a great opportunity” but was noncommittal.
“A lot of ifs.” pic.twitter.com/sjIiONLsAr
— James Boyd (@RomeovilleKid) June 9, 2024
In passing on the 22-year-old Clark, USA Basketball ultimately leaned toward a more veteran and accomplished roster featuring Taurasi, Stewart, A’ja Wilson, Brittney Griner, Alyssa Thomas, Napheesa Collier, Jewell Loyd, Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, Sabrina Ionescu, Chelsea Gray and Kahleah Copper. The youngest players in that group are Ionescu and Young, who are both 26. Ionescu is a two-time All-Star and two-time All-WNBA Second-Team honoree, while Young is also a two-time All-Star, made the All-WNBA Second Team last year and was named the league’s Most Improved Player in 2022.
Clark is aware of the talent and merit of the players chosen over her, calling the Olympic squad “the most competitive team in the world.” The 12-woman roster combines for 18 championship rings, four league MVPs, seven Finals MVPs, 42 all-WNBA selections and 55 All-Star selections. Team USA is also 70-3 all-time in Olympic play, hasn’t lost an Olympic contest since 1992 and hasn’t lost a tournament game overall since 2006. The program is eyeing its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal, which would break a tie with the men’s side (1936 to 1968) for the most consecutive Olympic team gold medals in history.
“We all know how talented that team is,” Clark said. “You look at that roster, (there are) a lot of players I’ve already had the opportunity to play (against) in this league that are just so good, and I know they’re gonna go out there and dominate, and I’m gonna be watching and cheering for them. It’ll be a lot of fun.”
Asked if she’d consider joining the team as an injury replacement, Clark said it would be “a great opportunity” but was noncommittal. She added that Team USA is already “in pretty good hands” with the 12 players who were initially chosen.
While Clark said she was excited to watch her countrywomen, her coach made it clear that the self-proclaimed “monster” would rather be playing alongside them.
Caitlin Clark shared a message with Fever head coach Christie Sides after finding out she did not make Team USA Women’s Basketball Olympic roster 😤
via @RomeovilleKid pic.twitter.com/5b8DqCmQ0Z
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 9, 2024
“That’s pretty scary, right?” Sides said of Clark using her Olympic omission as motivation. “She’s one of the most competitive people that I know. But she’s a worker, and that’s what she’s gonna do. This just gave her another opportunity to get in the gym and do more work.”
Clark is averaging 16.8 points, 6.3 assists and 5.3 rebounds through 12 WNBA games. She was named the WNBA Rookie of the Month for May after leading all rookies in points per game, field goals made, 3-point field goals made, free throws made and minutes played.
After being held to just three points — her career-low in college and the WNBA — in a loss at New York on June 2, Clark bounced back five days later by nailing a career-high seven 3s en route to tying her career-high with 30 points in a win at Washington. It still hasn’t been smooth sailing for Clark, who is shooting just 37.3 percent from the field and leads the league with 5.6 turnovers per game.
Even before her pro career began, Clark was one of 14 players to receive an invite to the U.S. national team’s final Cleveland-based training camp in April ahead of the Summer Games. The rookie may have had a better chance to make the Olympic team had she played directly with and against the players in the pool. However, although Clark was in Cleveland at the time, she was unable to attend the camp because Iowa advanced to the Final Four. The Hawkeyes ultimately lost in the national championship against undefeated South Carolina.
Despite the quick turnaround from her illustrious college career and her highly-anticipated pro debut, Clark still wanted to represent her country in the Olympics. But she’s not complaining about having a midseason pause to recharge and refocus after the Fever’s staggering start. Indiana played 11 games in 19 days to begin the season, the most compact schedule since Washington played 11 games in 20 days to open the 2007 campaign. The Fever will play its last game before the Olympic break at Dallas on July 17 and will resume play Aug. 17 at home against Phoenix.
“It’s gonna be really nice,” Clark said about the anticipated break. “I’ve loved competing every single second, but it’s gonna be a great month for my body to first of all get rest and get healthy, and just get a little time away from basketball and the craziness of everything that’s been going on and just find some peace and quiet for myself.
“But then additionally, it’s a great opportunity for us to work and get better.”
Required reading
(Photo: G Fiume / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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