The photograph of Caitlin Clark on the cover of Time magazine honoring her as its athlete of the year is a stunner. Her dark hair blows back breezily as she faces the camera with a confident half-smile. Her workout top exposes her muscular midriff and sinewy arms, while the fingers on her right hand are perfectly poised to dribble the basketball. Inside, the magazine devotes close to 7,000 words describing her off-the-court life (new BFF: Taylor Swift), her basketball brilliance (“her signature 30-ft. launches. . . are akin to home-run balls”), and her impact on the WNBA during her rookie year with the Indiana Fever (incalculable).
In its 27-year existence, the WNBA has languished in relative obscurity, with most basketball fans viewing it as inferior to the men’s game. A WNBA playoff game almost never drew as many as 1 million viewers before Caitlin Clark arrived, while a typical NBA playoff game had more than 10 million viewers. Salary caps for entire WNBA teams was $1.4 million—not much more than the $1.1 million minimum salary for a single player in the NBA.
So you would think the league and its players would be overjoyed to have one of their own on the cover of Time.
