“I have never seen a group of people so determined to give up chartered jets to fly Spirit Airlines again.”

So quipped the inimitable Iowahawk, David Burge, when he saw the latest WNBA thug — in this case, Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter — take a cheap shot at rookie Caitlin Clark. You may be asking, Andrews, what the heck are you talking about here? Let me explain.

The cheap shots on Caitlin Clark are an embarrassment for the WNBA. This player should be suspended.

Clark is the only reason I’m even watching a WNBA game right now. What a joke. pic.twitter.com/iUagyHYgLK

— Jake Asman (@JakeAsman) June 1, 2024

The Women’s National Basketball Association pretty much sucks. Or at least it did suck for every moment of its 28-year Title IX-ish existence until Clark came into the league a few weeks ago. You see, the WNBA had lost money every year — which makes sense because there’s nothing compelling about the product the league keeps trotting out onto the floor unless one has a fetish for a shorter, slower, less athletic version of the woke NBA.

All that changed a few weeks ago, though, when Clark was drafted first overall by the lowly Indiana Fever, fresh off a collegiate career at the University of Iowa in which she’d remade the game and rewritten the record books. In her final season with the Hawkeyes, she became the NCAA’s all-time leading Division I scorer, having picked up two national player of the year awards along the way. Since that moment, folks have taken a greater interest in the WNBA.

Why? Because Clark is what you might call a step-change player — a generational talent who alters the way the game is played. Clark, as we noted three months ago, routinely pulls up and bombs from 30 feet. Women just don’t do that. Heck, hardly any men do that.

Numbers alone don’t tell the story, though. Last year, a record 10 million viewers tuned in to watch the NCAA women’s national championship game between Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes and the LSU Tigers. That viewership total was more than double that of the previous year’s title game and, for comparison, just a couple million viewers short of last year’s NBA Championship finals. And it was all because of Clark.

So Clark is the best thing that ever happened to this money-flushing joke of a league, and yet she’s been on the receiving end of one cheap shot after another. Some of this can be chalked up to rookie hazing, but not all of it. Clark, if you hadn’t noticed, is white, and the league, like the NBA, is mostly black.

And Burge is right about the league’s weird desire to fly coach and eat takeout: The WNBA has a meal ticket, a potential golden goose in Clark, but it seems determined to turn off her many fans.

“It’s not just race; it’s also sexuality,” says OutKick Sports founder Clay Travis, noting that the WNBA is 70% lesbian. “Caitlin Clark is a white heterosexual woman in a black lesbian league. And they resent and are jealous of all the attention and the shoe deal that she got. And instead of recognizing the truth, which is that great athletes who people care about … really do make everybody more money.”

And so, on Saturday, during a routine inbounds play, the aforementioned thug, Carter, simply walked up behind Clark and hip-checked her hockey style to the floor. As for fines and penalties, Fox News funnyman Greg Gutfeld quipped, “WNBA officials have been mostly silent, leading us to believe that they aren’t watching the games either.”

Kidding aside, the bitterness is easy to see. And it’s self-defeating. Clark is just 11 games into her WNBA career, so it’s still early. But she’s averaging just 15.6 points per game so far — which is a far cry from the 31.6 points per game she averaged during her senior season at Iowa. This is to be expected, though. The sledding is always tougher for rookies, especially those who were The Show in college. Even the best go from being big fish to not-so-big fish when they make the jump to the next level. They go from getting all the shots they want to getting only the shots their veteran teammates want them to get. Compounding all this, Clark clearly has a target on her back.

“I cannot express to you all how much I do not care about the WNBA,” posted a blogger named Clandestine. “However, if the roles were reversed, and Caitlin Clark was black, and her bullies were white, every single woke sports outlet and journo would be losing their minds and calling it racism. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

Travis noted both the racial and sexual minority status of Clark: “This creates two different identity politics universes that [Clark] doesn’t fit into in this league. They don’t like her because she’s white, and they don’t like her because she’s straight. And as a result, the league is coming apart around her.”

Maybe it’s too much to think that a single player can change the trajectory of a sports league. But Michael Jordan did. Just as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson did before him. If the WNBA does indeed blow its chance to grow because it can’t tolerate the whiteness or the straightness of the most exciting women’s player to ever come down the pike, it’ll serve them right.