Culture
With the WNBA Draft nearing, what's next for Caitlin Clark?
Caitlin Clark’s college career ended Sunday with a loss to South Carolina in the national championship. But the Iowa star’s popularity won’t be going away.
“I know what’s next is soon,” she said.
Eight days, to be exact.
That’s when Clark will be in New York for the WNBA Draft, where she’s expected to be the No. 1 pick by the Indiana Fever. After rising to national prominence during her collegiate career, there are already signs that she will make an impact in the professional league.
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What to know about the WNBA Draft
The draft will take place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York at 7:30 p.m. (ET) on April 15. ESPN will air the draft and it will also stream on Fubo.
Here’s the first-round order of the draft:
1. Indiana Fever
2. Los Angeles Sparks
3. Chicago Sky (via Phoenix)
4. Los Angeles Sparks (via Seattle)
5. Dallas Wings (via Chicago)
6. Washington Mystics
7. Minnesota Lynx
8. Chicago Sky (via Atlanta)
9. Dallas Wings
10. Connecticut Sun
11. New York Liberty
12. Atlanta Dream (via Las Vegas)
What kind of impact will Clark make in the WNBA?
Let’s start on the court. Clark will have to work harder for her shot, of course. (Don’t think these veterans aren’t licking their chops to shut her down.) But her seemingly limitless range and astounding accuracy will still make her tough to guard. Where she can make an immediate impact is her passing.
She’s already one of the best all-time passers in college, finishing her career with a Division I record of 1,144 assists. Clark’s Iowa teammates weren’t always adept down low at converting her passes. Now imagine what Aliyah Boston, the 2023 Rookie of the Year, will do with incoming keen passes from Clark.
In terms of marketing and star power, the WNBA better be prepared. The Fever are seeing spikes in ticket sales, and the Las Vegas Aces already announced moving to a bigger arena to accommodate more fans when she comes to town. Last season, the Fever had the second lowest attendance in the league, ahead of only Atlanta, which plays in a much larger arena and averaged 85 percent capacity. The Fever likely will be one of the most popular fan destinations.
Similar to her experience at Iowa, Fever road games should see record numbers, too. The Hawkeyes sold out all but two of their games this season — home, road or postseason. Her fans aren’t going anywhere.
Will she lose money by going to the WNBA?
This narrative has been shot down several times over, but it still persists by some who don’t factor in her endorsement power. Clark has the most high-profile endorsement deals of any college basketball player. (You’ve seen the State Farm ads, right?) Those aren’t going away, and expect a lucrative sneaker deal to be coming her way.
GO DEEPER
The Caitlin Clark business is booming. Here’s how her WNBA sponsorships are lining up
As the presumptive No. 1 selection, she would be guaranteed $76,535 in her first season. (She didn’t make a salary at Iowa.) She can also make up to $250,000 in a league marketing deal and up to $100,000 in a team marketing contract if she opts not to play abroad next WNBA offseason. If she does go abroad, she can expect a lucrative contract from a team in Europe or China.
But with her marketing power, she’s likely to be signed to even more endorsement deals.
Did Clark have to go pro?
No. Like other seniors, Clark was granted an extra season of eligibility by the NCAA because of the pandemic disruption. She announced on Feb. 29 that she would not be returning to Iowa City, raising the stakes to go out with a bang in the tournament.
Who else will be in the draft?
Look for The Athletic’s post-tournament mock draft coming in a few days. But other potential stars are expected to hear their names called.
South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, Stanford’s Cameron Brink and Tennessee’s Rickea Jackson are expected to be early selections. LSU’s Angel Reese is expected to be picked around No. 8.
GO DEEPER
WNBA Mock Draft: Where will Angel Reese land? Who will be picked after Caitlin Clark?
Required reading
(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Culture
Jason Kelce’s new late-night show needs more Kelce, less comedy: Takeaways
For all the talk of Tom Brady’s TV debut in 2024, few pro athletes have made the transition off the field and into the pop-culture landscape more effectively than Jason Kelce, whose unique professional and personal alchemy includes: notable on-field success, including All-Pro honors, a Super Bowl title in Philadelphia and a role as a lead performer of the Eagles’ “Tush Push”; off-field media stardom as a co-host, with brother Travis, of the wildly popular “New Heights” podcast; and commercial ubiquity (Buffalo Wild Wings and Campbell’s Chunky Soup, among others).
That led to a multiyear deal with ESPN, including participating on “Monday Night Countdown” and, as of 1 a.m. ET on Saturday morning, a new role as late-night talk show host — arguably one of the the most challenging jobs in TV.
Taped in front of a live audience at Philadelphia’s Union Transfer, “They Call It Late Night With Jason Kelce” was the first of a four-week “pop-up” experiment in sports TV leading up to the Super Bowl, and the results were a not-unexpected mix of raucous, ragged and relatable.
Here are key takeaways from the show’s debut:
Kelce’s bearded, beer-swilling “everyman” vibe is at the heart of his charm
And the show leaned right into that. Kelce wore a letterman’s jacket and T-shirt, with jeans and work boots.
He set a tone quickly, asking his audience: “How did we get here?” Actually, his very first words were “Holy s—.” The late-night license to curse was used liberally but not particularly gratuitously (the s-word went unbleeped, the f-word was bleeped).
From the show’s name, logo and intro to its retro-fun set to a few of its bits, there was a running homage to the best of NFL Films. “They Call It Pro Football” was one of NFL Films’ earliest projects, and the appreciation Kelce has for NFL history popped, from a warm studio cameo and toast with Hall of Fame Eagles receiver Harold Carmichael to Kelce’s awe for framed photos of the NFL’s most famous “mangled hands” hanging in the studio.
First pics of Jason Kelce’s new show ‘They Call It Late Night’
📸: @ESPNPR pic.twitter.com/PPKD0lZ2qN
— Kelce Brothers (@kelcebrothers) January 4, 2025
Kelce’s opening monologue gets graded on a curve
That’s because the late-night host monologue in front of an audience is among the most challenging work in all of TV — let alone by someone with limited hosting experience. The audience was friendly and forgiving of the occasional faltering riff, if not laughing their heads off. The bits involving actors — like a segment where Kelce met himself as a 14-year-old and as an older person — were more cringe than comedy.
The second segment shined
The show was at its best in the second segment, when Kelce brought out a roundtable of guests: the rapper and actor Dave “Lil Dicky” Burd, the NFL TV analyst Brian Baldinger and — in an impressive flex by Kelce and ESPN — Charles Barkley.
Their roundtable conversation felt like listening to a podcast in all the right ways — casual and conversational. From his experience co-hosting “New Heights,” Kelce seemed so much more comfortable as a moderator than solo star.
They covered some good “newsy” topics — the Eagles sitting Saquon Barkley before he could try to set the NFL single-season rushing record (Charles Barkley: “I’m glad he’s not playing.”), players’ mindset heading into Week 18 and Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell. Giving four professional talkers a classic sports-talk framework was a great idea.
The show could use a tighter run time
As the show got deeper into its hour-long run-time, the conceits and viewer experience got demonstrably more strained: A segment where the four panelists were tasked with doing their best impressions of legendary NFL Films voice (and Philly native) John Facenda was derailed by the panelists being totally unprepared to read their cue cards and the content of the cards being clunky and corny. (Burd: “I don’t know what I just read.”)
A final segment featuring four super-fans in a beer-chugging contest felt tacked on and featured the fastest chugger being disqualified for not ending by flipping his mug onto his head as instructed. (Watching it was even more raggedy than describing it.)
The show could — and would — benefit from a tighter run-time (30 minutes makes sense), which would allow it to really zero in on Kelce as an expert moderator of an interesting panel of guests.
The show needs more Kylie
One area where the show should not skimp going forward: Air-time for Kelce’s wife, Kylie, who sits at a table in the wings (“Kylie’s Korner”) and acts as lead voiceover, lamentably used only sparingly in the debut.
Kylie — who recently displaced Joe Rogan as the most popular podcast host on Spotify — is way too talented (and way too big of a star in her own right) to have such a minimal, marginal role. The show would benefit from way more Kylie, and it could easily replace the final two blocks with the couple bantering about topics together — or adding Kylie to the roundtable.
Kylie Kelce is an announcer for “They Call it Late Night with Jason Kelce” ❤️ @latenightwithjk | @JasonKelce pic.twitter.com/QnibuiP3eL
— espnW (@espnW) January 4, 2025
I have a lot of empathy and appreciation for a production team trying something new, and debut episodes are the moment all your fun ideas in the writers’ room meet reality.
In this case, they don’t need the canned bits and actors — they have Kelce, in all his authenticity and talent for holding a conversation; they have Kylie; they have ESPN’s convening power to get big names like Barkley; they have a friendly Philly crowd and a welcoming studio set-up — and they should double down on letting Kelce do what he is best at.
Required reading
(Photo: Andy Lewis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Culture
2 Books About the Moneyed Class
Dear readers,
When a friend forwarded some fresh ridiculous news about billionaires recently — you might have heard it’s a gangbusters time to be one — I scoffed the scoff of the comfortably righteous. Boo, hiss, the filthy feckless rich! Let them eat crypto, or whatever.
My reading preferences, though, tend to look a lot less proletarian. Tales of the 1 percent take up too many percentages of my personal library, a veritable Davos Forum of prosperity and privilege crammed into wonky Ikea bookshelves. Give me outrageous fortune in all its forms, fiction or non-: old money; new money; money so big it seems bottomless until in a dribble or a rush it’s gone, leaving a wash of disgraced tech moguls and shabby aristocrats in its wake.
All that abundance allows for endless subcategorization: The picks in this week’s newsletter were both published in the 1980s (didn’t they call it the Greed Decade?) but are set in the early years of the 20th century and were written by women who were, you could say, born to the material.
—Leah
“The Shooting Party,” by Isabel Colegate
Fiction, 1980
“The Shooting Party” opens on an English country manor, with a sprawling cast of characters and death on the mantel. But Colegate’s novel mostly swerves away from Agatha Christie territory; it’s not murder so much as class disparity and vast carelessness that snuff out a life in the last pages.
Along the way, Colegate introduces the many houseguests, residents and scurrying servants of Nettleby Park, a bucolic Northamptonshire estate that in the fall of 1913 contains only whispers of the war that will shortly upend the old world order still preserved there. Sir Randolph is hosting a hunt, and it takes a village to sustain the roundelay of white-tablecloth meals, shootable wildlife and social intrigue.
The pheasant body count is high, but most pursuits take place indoors: There is much covert coveting of other people’s partners and simmering rivalries among highborn men for whom day jobs are as foreign as dressing themselves for dinner. The service staff, from the scullery maids to the local laborers hired as “beaters” to bring out the game, have their own romances and resentments, and a lonely little boy spends a lot of time trying to track down his pet duck. Other odd birds emerge, including an earnest vegetarian schoolteacher eager to spread the gospel of animal equality to Nettleby.
Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” supposedly gleaned heavy inspiration from “The Shooting Party” (he wrote the introduction to a 2007 reissue). But Colegate has him beat for on-the-job training — her father was a knighted member of Parliament and her mother the daughter of a baronet. And her storytelling is drawn in finer ink than his gilded soap operas, even when the party turns to its final, fatal calamity.
Read if you like: Buckshot, in-depth descriptions of British flora, tasteful infidelity.
Available from: Penguin Modern Classics, or your favored local viscount.
“Once Upon a Time: A True Story,” by Gloria Vanderbilt
Nonfiction, 1985
The über alles of poor little rich girls, Vanderbilt lost her father, the industrialist heir Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt, before her first birthday. He was 45; her mother was 19 and not particularly bound to her husband’s social calendar. (On the night Reginald died at his Rhode Island estate, she was off at the theater in New York City with “a friend of the family,” Vanderbilt writes in “Once Upon a Time,” the second of six memoirs published before her death at 95 in 2019.)
Almost immediately, the custody of baby Gloria became a family power struggle and then a tabloid mainstay. Like the ongoing churn of nannies and chauffeurs she was largely parented by, it was all more or less normalized, though the battle dragged on long enough that her comprehension eventually caught up with the more sordid points of the case: “I tormented myself by imagining that the only clothes I wore were made of newspapers, and on each would be words in those black thick spider letters spelling out what I could no longer pretend not to read.”
Mostly, she pined for the barest crumbs from her mother (also named Gloria), a distant glamourpuss who slept past noon and regularly disappeared to London or Paris or Biarritz with some lover or another. Even when physically present, she was rarely there — taking a preteen Gloria for a promised meeting with her idol, Marlene Dietrich, for example, then ditching her in Dietrich’s driveway for hours while she slipped inside alone.
Vanderbilt recalls all this with the breathless prose of a bygone schoolgirl, crowding the page with whimsical nicknames (Big Elephant, Tootsie Eleanor, the Little Countess), and looping her most fervent words and phrases when she really means-means-means them. Still, it’s hard to resist her guileless takes on what passed for adolescent social events: weekends with William Randolph Hearst or the Prince of Wales; a “Wizard of Oz” premiere gala at the Waldorf Astoria (Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney never showed at the afterparty, nor a single munchkin, though Errol Flynn did).
And you know exactly what she means when she describes a boarding-school classmate as “cold-muffiny.” Vanderbilt was too warm for her world, a Dorothy who probably would have been happier in Kansas but learned to make Oz home.
Read if you like: Drinking soda pop at the Stork Club, vintage issues of Vogue, “scrambled eggs with brandied peaches and champagne” for breakfast.
Available from: Estate sales and eBay, generally.
Why don’t you …
-
Shake the family tree further via Consuelo Vanderbilt’s rococo 1952 memoir “The Glitter and the Gold”?
-
Dip into the preppy-handbook idyll of Will Vogt’s “These Americans”? Jay McInerney (naturally) wrote the foreword.
-
Consider the cautionary tale of Leona Helmsley’s late Maltese, Trouble, the abiding lap-dog heiress of our times?
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Culture
Luke Littler: How the 17-year-old achieved sporting greatness and put himself on a path alongside Pele and Serena Williams
At the end of the second set of the final of the World Darts Championship, the biggest game in one of the biggest indoor sports in the world, Luke Littler calmly strolled off stage, gave his family a wry, knowing smile and rubbed his hands together like he had the prescient foresight of the beating he was about to dish out.
The man, no, the boy that 3,000 people had crammed inside London’s Alexandra Palace to see produce history, plus millions more watching at home and in pubs around the UK and the world, was doing it not just with dispassionate ease, or with flamboyant style, but with disdainful relish.
Darts finals have been won more handsomely — the sport’s all-time great Phil Taylor dished out three 7-0 whitewashes in his heyday — but not like this. Never like this.
Luke Littler is 17. He has facial hair that men many years his senior yearn to grow and in a sport that has its history rooted in pubs, Littler is not yet able to drink alcohol in one.
And yet he already carries the bravado and stage persona of someone ready to lead the sport down roads it has never visited before, which is exactly what he is already doing.
Littler has already helped push darts further towards the mainstream in the UK, with viewing figures on Sky Sports, a subscription service, up almost 200 per cent for some tournaments in 2024, following record numbers of 4.8 million for last year’s final (the most watched non-football event in the broadcaster’s history), which a then-16-year-old Littler lost to Luke Humphries.
Now, by becoming world champion, he has earned the right to enter the pantheon of youthful sporting legends. Sure, Pele was good with a football at 17, but could he throw three treble-20s at a red, green and black board from almost two-and-a-half metres away?
Serena Williams won the US Open at 17, Ian Thorpe was the same age when he won Olympic gold in the pool, Sachin Tendulkar was 16 when he made his India debut and snooker magician Ronnie O’Sullivan was 17 when he won the UK Championship. What sets Littler apart in his particular field is that he has become the greatest current player in the world in the entire sport before he has become an adult.
GO DEEPER
How darts, a traditional ‘pub game’, became must-watch sport for Britons
Why is he so good? Is it natural talent? Well, he’s been playing darts since his dad bought him a magnetic dart board from the pound shop when he was 18 months old. He’s not old enough to vote, but he’s basically been practising for this moment almost his entire, short life.
And it’s not all youthful exuberance and freshness, either. Littler had mental scars from losing last year’s final despite being 4-2 up (he watched it back just hours before Friday’s match to recap what went wrong), but he was relentless and merciless in his pursuit of victory here in north London, bulldozing into a 4-0 lead against one of the greatest players to ever chuck an arrow, three-time champion Michael van Gerwen.
The youngster later said he felt nervous after taking that early lead, but his actions in obliterating one of the best players in the world suggested the exact opposite.
He unyieldingly hammered the treble bed like he was using a dart-sized jackhammer, ploughing perfect tiny holes in the helpless board as he sculpted his journey to greatness.
With the throwing hands of a sporting artist, Littler smiled and waved to the crowd, talking to them and himself throughout, in complete control of his own destiny.
He didn’t just try to win, he tried to produce darts from the Gods while he was at it. He kept leaving himself on 170, darts’ biggest outshot to win a leg, which happened too frequently to not be deliberate. Darts players normally look pained when they miss a nine-darter (i.e. darting perfection of winning a leg with the smallest possible number of throws), but Littler just gave a nonchalant shrug when he missed the seventh dart like he knew he would get another chance.
A powerless Van Gerwen, the winner of 157 PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) titles, could only scowl and grimace like Dick Dastardly in a lime green shirt.
The Dutchman was once the youngest world champion, aged 24. The symbolism of a weighty dart-shaped baton being passed to the next generation here was irresistible.
Van Gerwen rallied, as champions do, clinging to Littler’s coattails as they swapped the next six sets, but it was never going to be enough in front of a deliriously partisan crowd, drunk on booze and throwing. He may give off the appearance of a combination of Bond villains, part Blofeld with his shiny bald head, part Jaws with a grille across his chops, but he could only play the bad guy for so long against a tidal wave of trebles and tons.
Littler was just too good. Whenever Van Gerwen came up for air, the teenager pushed him back underwater with one hand and hit double 10 with the other.
“Wow… wow,” Littler said to himself as he welled up having just hit double 16 to win 7-3, confirm the title and become £500,000 ($621,056 at current conversion rates) richer. He muttered “I can’t believe it” three times in his immediate post-match interview.
“At 2-0 up, I started getting nervous, but I said to myself, ‘Just relax’.
“That first game against Ryan Meikle, it’s the game that really mattered.”
Littler cried on stage after that second-round victory over Meikle before Christmas. He broke down, couldn’t finish an interview, left the stage and went to give his mum a hug.
On the train journey down to London earlier that day, he couldn’t wait for the match to start, but when he threw his first dart he basically, paraphrasing his own words, bottled it.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” he later said after composing himself. “It was a weird feeling… it’s the biggest stage out there. It was probably the toughest game I’ve played.”
To prove his otherworldly nature, he had somehow produced the greatest set of darts ever seen in the history of the world championships at the end of that “toughest” match, averaging more than 140, but yes, he had started it like a glorified pub player by his own incredibly high standards.
“I’m thinking to myself; ‘What are you doing? Just relax’,” Littler said.
It’s no wonder, what with the enormous pressure on his young shoulders at being the favourite to lift the title aged just 17, a normal kid from Runcorn, a small town near Liverpool in the north-west of England, who eats kebabs and likes football.
Thereafter, throughout almost the whole tournament, he was imperious, reflecting the form that saw him rise from 164th to fourth in the world rankings last year.
Despite the unimaginable increase in money, fame, popularity and exposure, the 1.5 million Instagram followers, the endless television appearances and mixing it with Max Verstappen or his heroes at Manchester United, he stayed focused, winning 10 PDC titles, the Premier League, Grand Slam and World Series finals, plus hitting four perfect nine-darters along the way and earning more than £1million ($1.2m) in prize money.
He was the most searched athlete of the year on Google and the runner-up in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
“Littler has captivated people because he’s relatable,” Sky Sports darts presenter Emma Paton told The Athletic earlier in the tournament. “He’s taken the sport to different places… Darts has never had this exposure before. It’s not even because of what he’s done in the sport, which has been ridiculous by the way, but it’s the impact he’s had on it.
“Compared to a lot of other sportspeople, darts players are refreshingly honest and are basically just being themselves and Luke is no different. He’s just a kid at the end of the day.
“People have asked me, ‘What’s it like speaking to Luke Littler? It doesn’t seem like he has loads to say’. I’m like, ‘He’s just very chilled out, he doesn’t really care that much, he’s just a 17-year-old kid’.”
Darts obsessive Littler plays exactly like that, like a kid having fun on the stage, ticking off his own personal bucket list of darting dreams.
He has an uncanny ability to detach himself completely from the enormity of the event, chat to the crowd, ignore his opponent and just play his own game, the old sporting cliche.
He relishes showing off the skills he’s honed over years of practice, expanding on the possibilities and limits that we thought the sport previously had. He tries irregular setup shots, he hits double-doubles or two bullseyes. He essentially takes the practice board to the world stage.
And then, when he needs to, a steely glint of determination emanates from his eyes and an unforgiving rhythm of 180s ensues. He can turn it on like few in the sport ever have before.
“I sometimes say, every 17 years a star gets born,” a humbled Van Gerwen said. “He’s one of them… Every chance he got, every moment he had to hurt me, he did it.”
World champion, famous, a millionaire. What on earth next, other than impending adulthood?
“I just want to add to it, maybe get a few more,” Littler said. “If I want the 16 (Taylor’s record of world titles), then I’m sure I could possibly achieve it.
“I’ve been doing this since 18 months old on a magnetic board wearing a nappy.
“When I’d say to my mates I’ve got a darts competition, they’d be like, ‘Darts?!’ ‘Yeah, darts, have you not seen it?’”
They’re all seeing it now, thanks to an unassuming 17-year-old lad who can throw arrows like few ever have before.
(Top photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
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