Caitlin Clark’s boyfriend Connor McCaffery was hired to a new job as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Butler University, the program announced Tuesday. 

“Following a high-level playing career, Connor has had the opportunity to both contribute and learn alongside one of the best staffs in the NBA,” Butler head coach Thad Matta said in a statement. “Those experiences will be very valuable to our staff. He obviously comes from a basketball family that I know very well and I’m excited for the impact he is going to have on our program both quickly and in the long run.”

Clark expressed her feelings for his new job in an Instagram story on Tuesday. 

“Yayy!! So happy for you,” Clark, 22, wrote alongside a white heart emoji and McCaffery’s Instagram handle.

McCaffery will now get to coach his younger brother, Jack, an incoming freshman at Butler in the class of 2025. Connor will have some experience about coaching family members, but from the other side of the equation.

Connor played for his father, Fran McCaffery, who has been the coach at Iowa since 2010, across six collegiate season from 2017-23. 

McCaffery played in 166 games, which ranks second in Iowa history. He dealt with injuries throughout the majority of his college career, but a redshirt year and COVID-19 campaign allotted him six seasons. He reached the NCAA tournament in each of his full seasons apart from his COVID season. He averaged 4.5 points and 3.0 rebounds, and played in 111 wins, tying Jordan Bohannon for most in program history. His career assist-to-turnover ratio of 3.59 (527 assists to 147 turnovers) is the second best in NCAA history.

Iowa is also where McCaffery met Clark when she was starring for the women’s team from 2020-24. The couple started dating in April 2023 after Clark had led Iowa on a run to the NCAA title game. But McCaffery was a senior at that time, and began his coaching career right after graduating. 

WNBA ICON SHERYL SWOOPES EXPLAINS FALSE CAITLIN CLARK STATEMENTS, SPEAKS OUT AGAINST EX-FRIEND NANCY LIEBERMAN

Iowa forward Patrick McCaffery drives to the basket against Michigan State on Feb. 22, 2022, at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Iowa City. (Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

In May of that year, he began his career as an assistant coach for the Indiana Pacers. McCaffrey ended up with a job in Indiana before Clark even knew she was going to be playing for the Indiana Fever. By fate, the Fever finished with a bad enough record last season to earn the top pick in the WNBA Draft lottery this year, which sent Clark to Indiana too.

Now, even with McCaffery’s new job, the Butler campus would be just seven miles from the Fever’s arena, Gainbridge Field House. So, their fates will stay in Indianapolis together for now. 

The couple celebrated their first anniversary on April 24, 2024, as seen in an Instagram post by Connor on that day.

“One year [with] the best doing life [with] [you] has been easy, and you never cease to amaze me.. can’t wait to watch [you] live out ur dreams in person, love you,” he wrote in the caption.

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark hugs her boyfriend Connor McCaffery after defeating the Phoenix Mercury at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Aug. 16, 2024, in Indianapolis. (Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Clark is gearing up to lead the Fever on its first playoff run in eight years. She toppled another WNBA rookie record in the Indiana Fever’s 110-109 victory over the Dallas Wings in their final home game of the regular season. Clark had a career-high 35 points as she broke the WNBA mark for most points scored by a rookie in a single season. Seimone Augusts set the bar 18 years ago when she scored 744 points in her first season with the Minnesota Lynx.

Just days before that she broke the WNBA’s single-season assist record. 

However, Clark’s rookie season has also come with controversy. She is just one technical foul away from earning her first WNBA suspension, which is automatically dealt to any player who racks up seven technical fouls in a single season. This issue resulted in her teammates forcefully trying to hold her back during a tense moment against the Wings, preventing her from putting herself at risk with the referees. 

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In 2009, superstar tight end Aaron Hernandez helped the Florida Gators win a national championship. In 2012, Hernandez played in a Super Bowl for the New England Patriots and signed a $40-million contract extension.

But that same year he was investigated in connection with a double homicide. A year later he shot Alexander Bradley, one of his best friends, through the eye and murdered another man, Odin Lloyd. Two years later, Hernandez was convicted of Odin’s murder, and in 2017 Hernandez killed himself while in prison.

Those are the headlines of Hernandez’s brief and violent life and death, the details that reach beyond the die-hard football fan and create a hard-to-shake image in popular culture. While Hernandez clearly had drug problems, committed violent crimes and grew increasingly paranoid, his fuller story is a complicated one: Hernandez suffered physical abuse in a violent and dysfunctional family; was sexually abused as a boy; felt compelled by society’s strictures to hide his homosexuality; was chewed up and spit out by college football’s powers-that-be; and his brain was severely damaged, resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that likely affected his behavior.

Those nuances and much more were uncovered and laid out by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team in 2018, in a series of newspaper articles and a podcast. That was followed by a 2020 Netflix docuseries, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.”

But these days, more Americans get their facts from scripted series than from newspaper series, podcasts and documentaries, whether it’s “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s Netflix limited series about the Central Park Five or the “American Crime Story” retellings of the O.J. Simpson saga and the murder of Gianni Versace. Now the “American Crime Story” producing team is branching out with “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” a 10-episode retelling of Hernandez’s life and death based on the Globe’s reporting. The limited series premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m. on FX with two episodes and streams the following day on Hulu.

Brad Simpson, one of the series’ executive producers, says they were tipped off by FX’s top executives, Nick Grad and John Landgraf, that the podcasts were about to be released, so they read the Globe’s articles.

“It had this deep reporting that we love to have in our shows, and we started developing the series with an eye toward it being part of our different franchises about the culture of America,” he says.

Simpson says fellow executive producer Ryan Murphy loved that this was a story about “a person with a fractured identity, as so many of our shows are.”

The reporting revealed a story that was “far more heartbreaking and complex than I had considered,” says Nina Jacobson, another executive producer. “When you think you know a story and then you come across something deeply reported, that really changes how you see it [and] that always makes me stand up at attention.”

She adds that since football is our national religion, Hernandez’s rise and fall “was not just the story of one person but a mirror back to us as a country.”

Numerous writers were interested in tackling the tale but the producers chose Stuart Zicherman because of his résumé — Simpson cites “The Americans” — but also because he is a passionate football fan who nonetheless has the emotional distance to see the damage the game can wreak on people. Simpson says Zicherman had a compelling pitch about the intersection of celebrity, sports, sexuality and masculinity.

“It’s character first and football second, and what made this story different from a million sports stories out there is the story about Aaron as well as his family, the people on his team and the coaches,” he says. “It becomes a Shakespearean tragedy with compelling characters at the center.”

Zicherman says he went in for his initial pitch with a huge scroll that, when unfurled, laid out all of the story’s twists and turns. “I love writing about stories people think they know but they really don’t,” he says. “We tend to label people, and Hernandez was a monster, but no one’s born a monster and I wanted to tell that story without forgiving him for what he did.”

Zicherman drew on the “American Crime Story” concept of “taking a crime or event and making it about something much bigger in the fabric of America.”

The show explores toxic masculinity at home and in locker rooms, how violence on the football field can spill into daily life, and how a dysfunctional family can be both a support and a trap.

Aaron Hernandez, left, in 2011 as a New England Patriots tight end. After his death, Hernandez was found to have the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

(Elise Amendola / Associated Press)

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There’s also the issue of CTE, the brain injury caused by repeated blows to the head. “We obviously don’t want to say CTE is what turned Aaron into a murderer — he’d been exposed to violence and was prone to violence — but he did become very paranoid with an even shorter temper,” Zicherman says, noting that Hernandez’s drug use also would have exacerbated his brain injuries.

He lays out the story to show the people and institutions who directly harmed Hernandez or at least failed to “change the narrative” because of their own selfish motivations, like then-Florida coach Urban Meyer, who seduced Hernandez and his family with promises he didn’t keep and then shoved the young man out the door when he became a challenge.

“We make commodities out of our athletes and we don’t always see what’s best for them,” Zicherman says. “The Patriots were also blinded by his talent.

“But I also want the audience to see that there’s a much bigger picture here and that we’re all a bit complicit — we raise our athletes up and pay them a fortune and build them up as heroes,” he says, only to turn on them when things go awry.

Beyond the big picture, Zicherman focused on Hernandez’s story as someone “trying to find his authentic self,” giving him a throughline as Hernandez jumps from childhood to high school to Florida, the NFL and eventually the world of drugs and crime that consumed him. “By the end he’s gone mad with all the secrets he was keeping.”

Zicherman says the Globe’s Spotlight team not only provided a meticulous and thorough story, they let him come to Boston “to ask a million questions” and then they visited the writers’ room to answer even more. “They’d talked to everybody and they’d done that work, and they were a tremendous resource,” he says.

But journalists and documentary filmmakers are hemmed in by what they can demonstrably prove. Zicherman says the series resists overt fictionalization, but they felt it had to go further than the Spotlight series.

Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez, who was convicted of the murder of Odin Lloyd, in a scene from “American Sports Story.”

(Eric Liebowitz / FX)

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“In the writers’ room we spent a lot of time connecting the dots and trying to emotionally figure out why things happen and give the answers to things,” he says.

Most important was explaining why Hernandez murdered Lloyd. “It always bothered me that in all the research no one knew,” Zicherman says. “It was a clumsy attempt that seemed unpremeditated and it didn’t make sense.”

Theories include that Hernandez wanted to keep a lid on his sexuality or his involvement in the double homicide, but Zicherman thinks it was more about how far Hernandez had descended.

“I built to the murder from the stew of all the moments throughout the season,” Zicherman says. “Hernandez is hiding so many secrets and suffusing them with drug use, and he’s paranoid as hell because he’s taken a lot of hits to the head. It’s all of those things combined; I don’t think it was a singular thing.”

Beyond the scripts, the most important factor would be casting Hernandez. Here, the team got lucky. Jacobson was producing “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” and watching Josh Rivera at work. “I got to really see what he was made of,” she says of Rivera, who had previously co-starred as Chino in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “He’s an incredibly sophisticated, grounded, natural and charismatic actor. And he was that on every take.”

But while Jacobson was sold, she also trusted Murphy’s judgment and wanted to let the audition process play out “to see if he would float to the top for Ryan as well.”

At the end of callbacks, after mixing and matching actors contending for various jobs, Murphy turned and said, “Well, it’s obviously Josh,” so they called him back in before he could leave the audition.

Zicherman says a lot of the other actors emphasized the violence and darkness, but Rivera “played the vulnerability and other emotional components and the interior emotionality. Once we had him I started stripping dialogue away to let moments play on his face — the other characters could talk and we can watch his heartbreak.”

(Rivera, he adds, is also a “goofball who likes to sing and dance and make jokes,” and that Hernandez, before things went bad, was the class clown.)

Rivera is in nearly every scene. Simpson notes that he had to work out regularly to stay big and endured multiple hours of makeup for the tattoos. “He shouldered it incredibly well and he was always game and enthusiastic,” Simpson says. “He was often exhausted, but the fact that he didn’t slip into a dark place is a testament to who Josh is as a human being. He set the tone for the set.”

Simpson recalls only one day where Rivera was, understandably, overwhelmed by the task. “We were in a muddy field at 3 a.m. reenacting the murder of Odin Lloyd, and there was just a moment where Josh had to stop. He turned to everybody and said, ‘This is just too incredibly sad,’” Simpson says. “I think we were all haunted by that moment.”

Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, the Davis Cup returned, there were two very short matches — in very different ways — and one women’s tournament bore the brunt of tennis schedule fatigue.

If you’d like to follow our fantastic tennis coverage, click here.

What’s going on in the Davis Cup?

The final eight for the Davis Cup group stage finals were decided over the weekend, with Canada and the Netherlands joining Italy, Australia, Spain, Germany, Argentina and the United States as the qualified nations. The latter topped their group last week in Zhuhai, China, despite being without any of Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton.

Spain’s qualification will be a particular relief to the tournament organizers given the finals are taking place in the Spanish city of Malaga. Home fans can look forward to seeing the star quality of Carlos Alcaraz — and possibly Rafael Nadal — with the former looking much more like himself in Spain’s group matches against France and the Czech Republic. Alcaraz produced a consummate performance to beat France’s Ugo Humbert 6-3, 6-3 after his first appearance since losing early at the U.S. Open ended quickly on Wednesday when Czech opponent Tomas Machac was forced to retire with cramp at one set apiece.

After the match with Humbert, Alcaraz reiterated what he said in New York about his performances over the U.S. hard-court swing not being good enough: “I have tried not to do the bad things that I did on the American tour. I had been training well, but training is one thing and competition is another.”

Others who struggled in New York also had satisfying performances last week.

The Canadian pair of Denis Shapovalov and Felix Auger Aliassime both went out of the U.S. Open in the first round but helped their country into the Davis Cup showpiece in November. Shapovalov recorded an impressive win over Great Britain’s Dan Evans 6-0, 7-5 in Manchester, England, on Sunday, while Auger-Aliassime won all three of his matches during the week, including a straight-sets success on Sunday against U.S. Open semifinalist Jack Draper. It was the first meeting between the two since the controversial ending to their match in Cincinnati last month when Draper won with a shot that video replays showed to have been illegal.

The Davis Cup group stage finals will take place in Malaga between November 19-24, with Italy looking to retain their title. Recent winners Great Britain, France and Croatia all failed to make the cut.

GO DEEPER

Why Draper and Auger-Aliassime’s match point should change tennis’ view on video replays

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Charlie Eccleshare

Thirteen games, 37 minutes, and one Benoit Paire

Scan those details of a men’s tennis match and a longtime tennis fan will likely think something like “Benoit Paire doing Benoit Paire things”. Paire, 35, is one of the most mercurial players in the sport, capable of drop volleys from heaven and tantrums from hell (spitting on a ball mark in a match against Francisco Cerundolo in 2021, packing his bag with at least one game left against Cameron Norrie at the 2022 U.S. Open, things of that nature.)

So look at a 6-1, 6-0 reverse to Britain’s Jacob Fearnley at the Blot Open in Rennes, France, and it’s easy to see all the same stuff. Well, not quite.

In reality, Fearnley got out of a 15-30 and then 30-30 service game in the first set, having broken Paire in the opening game. His misses were largely close to the lines, a few scary forehand returns into the lower part of the net notwithstanding. Make no mistake, this was a one-sided thrashing — it just wasn’t the histrionic kind easily associated with the Frenchman… Until the end. Blowing kisses to the crowd who jeered him to the handshake, Paire was not long off-court when he delivered his ultimate assessment of the match.

😂😂😂

— paire benoit (@benoitpaire) September 11, 2024

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Fearnley went on to win the whole tournament, coming back from a thrashing of his own in the final. Quentin Halys won their first set 6-0, before Fearnley took the second on a tiebreak, cruising past the dispirited Frenchman in the third.

In Monastir, Tunisia, fellow Brit Sonay Kartal won her first WTA title, triumphing in the 250-level event against Rebecca Sramkova.

James Hansen

What follows 37 minutes? Thirty-eight minutes

One of the great things about the Davis Cup is the way players somehow bridge huge ranking differentials to pull off major upsets. Or at least find ways to be competitive against far more vaunted opponents.

And then you get matches like the one on Saturday in Belgrade between 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic and the world No. 770 Ioannis Xilas, of Greece.

Xilas was playing in the tie against Serbia after Stefanos Tsitsipas pulled out and won a solitary game in a 6-0, 6-1 defeat that lasted 38 minutes. In a sport where the average set lasts longer than that, it was an astonishingly one-sided rout. Though less so given the 766 places Xilas was giving up in the rankings — so maybe the surprise is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

The following day, Djokovic teamed up with Hamad Medjedovic to secure victory in the tie with a 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 win in the doubles rubber against Aristotelis Thanos and Petros Tsitsipas.

The win means Serbia will compete in next year’s Davis Cup qualifiers for a chance to return to the group-stage finals.

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Charlie Eccleshare

How one unlucky tournament bore the brunt of tennis’ long summer

After she won the Seoul title in 2023, Jessica Pegula looked ahead to even better things in 2024.

“Hopefully, we can get even higher-ranked players and more girls to come here and play. The city is amazing and I’ve had so much fun here,” Pegula, who is half-Korean on her mother’s side, said after her victory over Yuan Yue.

The American, who reached the final of this year’s U.S. Open, was discussing the tournament’s elevation from 250-level to 500-level, beginning this year. But by the time it came around, world No. 3 Pegula had to pull out with a rib injury. Elena Rybakina, world No. 4, and Emma Navarro, world No. 8, also withdrew.

Jessica Pegula lost to Aryna Sabalenka in the U.S. Open final (Luke Hales / Getty Images)

And then the coup de grace, when world No. 1 Iga Swiatek informed tournament organizers she too would be skipping the event, citing fatigue. So, all four top-10 players are out in the first year of a newly-elevated tournament. The new top four seeds, Daria Kasatkina, Liudmila Samsonova, Beatriz Haddad Maia and Diana Shnaider will see great opportunity; the tennis calendar will see another example of its gruelling schedule doing more harm to the sport’s infrastructure than good.

GO DEEPER

How the fight to improve the tennis calendar risks destroying its soul

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James Hansen

Shot of the week

Carlos Alcaraz looking a bit more like Carlos Alcaraz here.

Recommended reading:

🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Vit Kopriva (5) def. Andrea Pellegrino 7-5. 6-2 to win the Szczecin Open (Challenger 125) in Szczecin, Poland. It is the Czech’s fourth Challenger title.
🏆 Christopher O’Connell (1) def. Sho Shimabukuro 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(5) to win the Guangzhou Open (Challenger 100) in Guangzhou, China. It is his sixth Challenger title.
🏆 Jacob Fearnley (8) def. Quentin Halys (4) 0-6, 7-6(5), 6-3 to win the Rennes Blot Open (Challenger 100) in Rennes, France. It is Fearnley’s third Challenger title.
🏆 Learner Tien (3) def. Tristan Boyer (6) 7-5, 1-6, 6-3 to win the Las Vegas Tennis Open (Challenger 75) in Las Vegas. It is Tien’s second Challenger title.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Magdalena Frech (5) def. Olivia Gadecki 7-6(5), 6-4 to win the Guadalajara Open in Guadalajara, Mexico. It is Frech’s first WTA Tour title.
🏆 Sonay Kartal def. Rebecca Sramkova 6-3, 7-5 to win the Jasmin Open (250) in Monastir, Tunisia. It is the Brit’s first WTA Tour title.
🏆 Jil Teichmann def. Nuria Parrizas Diaz 7-6(8), 6-4 to win the Zavarovalnica Sava Ljubljana (125) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is her first WTA 125 title.

📈 On the rise

📈 O’Connell moves up 12 places from No. 87 to No. 75 after his title in Guangzhou.
📈 Camila Osorio rises 20 places from No. 81 to No. 61 after her run to the semifinals in Guadalajara.
📈 Fearnley ascends 35 spots from No. 164 to No. 129 after his title in Rennes.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP 

📍Chengdu, China: Chengdu Open (250) featuring Lorenzo Musetti, Shang Juncheng, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, Nicolas Jarry.
📍Hangzhou, China: Hangzhou Open (250) featuring Marin Cilic (WC), Holger Rune, Zhang Zhizhen, Brandon Nakashima.
📍Berlin: Laver Cup featuring Carlos Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev, Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA

📍Seoul: Korea Open (500) featuring Daria Kasatkina, Amanda Anisimova, Emma Raducanu, Diana Shnaider.
📍Hua Hin, Thailand: Tournament (250) featuring Wang Xinyu, Katerina Siniakova, Katie Volynets, Mayar Sherif.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)