Sheryl Swoopes reached out to Caitlin Clark and admitted that she made a mistake. Her viral comments about the greatest scorer in women’s college basketball history were incorrect.
She owned it.
Sheryl Swoopes was misinformed.
All of this manufactured “controversy” stems from a conversation with Gilbert Arenas on his podcast ‘Gil’s Arena.’ Swoopes, just like she did back in October, said that Clark and Angel Reese will need time to transition to the WNBA. Even if people disagree with her opinion, the four-time WNBA champion was not trying to discredit either athlete.
But that is not the part that sparked the most backlash!
Swoopes said that Clark’s scoring record should not count because she played five years, while Kelsey Plum played four. That is not true. Clark is a fourth-year senior.
Swoopes was wrong and a clip of her incorrect opinion went extremely viral.
What those clips didn’t show is that Gil’s Arena co-host and executive producer Josiah Johnson actually set the record straight and clarified that this is Clark’s fourth year at Iowa. Arenas responded by saying, “so these stats matter, next year’s stats — that should just be, we don’t count that.” Swoopes said, “that is true.”
It ultimately didn’t matter. Her initial comments led to a lot of criticism and rightfully so! She was wrong. She looked dumb.
However, Swoopes is willing to own her blunder!
She spoke with Caitlin Clark.
Swoopes joined ESPN’s broadcast of Sunday’s game between Baylor and Texas Tech. The 52-year-old revealed that she spoke with both Reese and Clark after everything went down.
A couple of weeks ago, I reached out to (LSU’s Angel Reese) and had a really good conversation with Angel over the phone and sent a message to Caitlin. She responded. She and I went back and forth. I won’t share what she said, I’ll leave that to her if she wants to share. But I will say, what I said to her was, ‘I made a mistake in saying it was your fifth year when it is your fourth.’
I have nothing but respect for what she has done for the game. If she wants to share what her response was and how that conversation went, I’ll leave that to her. But it was a really good conversation.
— Sheryl Swoopes
It sounds like the hatchet has been buried. At least to some extent.
And yet, there will be plenty of people who will still try to factor race into the equation, even though she stepped up to admit her wrongdoing. They will point to Swoopes as the perfect example of how white people are actually the victims in modern society (even though Plum is also white), if they have not already. Unfortunately, those people have a very limited knowledge of ball and many (most?) of them have never watched more than a few minutes of Caitlin Clark on the court. If that…
On one end of the conversation, Swoopes is entitled to her opinion about Clark’s ability to dominate the WNBA as a rookie. She shares those same thoughts about Reese and they talked about it together!
On the other side of things, Swoopes looked extremely dumb with her opinion about Clark’s scoring record. Mistakes happen. She owned that mistake.
What more can you ask?