What Caitlin Clark Is Afraid Of

Summary

Podcast Summary: "What Caitlin Clark Is Afraid Of"

Pablo Torre Finds Out – August 30, 2024
Host: Pablo Torre
Guest: Wright Thompson (ESPN journalist)

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Overview

In this deep-dive “talkumentary,” Pablo Torre and ESPN’s Wright Thompson explore the enigma of WNBA star Caitlin Clark — her meteoric rise, public scrutiny, emotional interiority, and how she manages the intense spotlight. They move beyond typical hot takes to investigate the real person behind the mythos, focusing on Clark’s self-awareness, challenges with empathy, and her navigation of "culture wars" in sports. Thompson, who spent months profiling Clark and her circle, shares rare, intimate insights, making for an episode that’s both revealing and empathetic.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon and Media Gap

• Pablo sets the stage ([00:11]): Clark is the country's most discussed and debated women’s basketball player, yet largely mysterious. Public discourse often projects onto her because she rarely reveals her inner thoughts.
• Quote:
  "We have this surplus of opinions, but a truly embarrassing deficit of reporting, of actual knowledge." – Pablo Torre [01:19]
• Clark’s unusual reluctance to engage online creates a vacuum filled by speculation and projection.

2. Wright Thompson’s Rare Access and Observations

• Thompson profiled Clark in depth, speaking with her, her coaches (Lisa Bluder, Jan Jensen), and teammates (Kate Martin, et al.) for months as she finished college.
• Thompson on Clark’s uniqueness:
  "She's the real thing... She's the most self aware college athlete I've ever met and I'm not even entirely sure who's second." [03:38]
• Her self-awareness is a revelation, rare even among superstar athletes.

3. Empathy, Isolation, and Growing as a Teammate

• Clark struggled to understand empathy as a teen, as recounted by her high school coach [05:39]. Her isolation as an elite athlete was profound until finding her “tribe” at Iowa.
• Teammates, especially Kate Martin, protected Clark and acknowledged the unique pressures she faced ([08:16]). Kate once said, "Heavy sits the crown."
• Coaches made Clark watch body language "lowlights" to help her become a better teammate, an innovative form of self-awareness training ([09:18]).
• Analogy:
  "Caitlin Clark has this unbelievably powerful vehicle that is her own talent and she's having to figure out how to drive it without spinning it into walls." – Wright Thompson [10:06]

4. Clark’s Evolving Game and On-Court Impact

• Pablo details Clark’s historic WNBA stats: rookie record for threes, leading assists per game, highlight-reel playmaking ([13:05]).
• Her teammates often struggle to “keep up with her torque,” with even professional players sometimes overwhelmed by her pace and vision ([15:01]).

5. Clark and a Different Kind of Mindset

• Comparison to Alex Honnold ("Free Solo") and the idea of atypical anxiety responses (“amygdala does not fire”) ([15:17]).
• Clark confesses to not feeling anxiety in performance situations, a fact that surprises teammates during a sports psychology exercise:
  • Quote:
    "I don't get nervous." – Caitlin Clark [17:41]
    "At times...they were definitely like, why is this girl a psycho?" – Clark (via Thompson) [18:08]
• Yet, she is extremely self-aware about how this appears to others.

6. Real Work Towards Self-Understanding

• Thompson and Pablo discuss that what makes Clark special is not just her quirks or talent but her relentless self-examination towards being the best possible player and teammate ([19:44]).
• Notable quote:
  "Just the degree to which she was doing really hard work with the stated goal of understanding herself in order to become the basketball player she wants to be was rare." – Wright Thompson [19:47]

7. "Culture War" Pressures and Clark’s Dilemma

• Pablo contextualizes public rivalry between Clark (white, finesse) and Angel Reese (Black, physical), and the disproportionate political discourse projected onto them ([30:00]).
• Despite massive online controversy, Clark herself avoids contributing, which surprises those who expect her to “choose sides.”
• When asked about Angel and issues of race on national TV, Clark responds supportively but experiences visible anxiety:
  • Quote:
    "She starts shaking. She has like, she's, her anxiety is so high, she starts shaking. She starts calling her mom and Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen... Was that okay? How did I do?... 'If you do one wrong thing, your life can really end.'" – Wright Thompson & Caitlin Clark [33:00–33:14]
• Clark is overwhelmed by the threat of performative misstep in a polarized landscape.

8. Personal Maturity, Detachment from Praise, and Growth

• Despite her youth, Clark is extremely aware of the addictiveness of praise and actively works to detach her sense of self from empty positive feedback ([29:09]).
• She self-polices, avoids “getting high off tweets,” and worries about the destructive potential of public adulation ([29:22]).
  • Quote:
    "She's so much more self aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50." – Wright Thompson [29:04]

9. Family, Faith, and Real Human Grounding

• Thompson describes the Clark family as thoughtful, superstitious, and grounding influences for Caitlin (“really Catholic, but not in the scary way”) ([37:07]).
• Simple rituals, strong values, and support are her non-glamorous but vital bedrock.

10. The Uncertain Future and Unfolding Drama

• Pablo and Wright agree that Clark’s story remains unwritten; the real drama is in seeing if self-awareness plus talent equals GOAT status ([38:22]).
  • Quote:
    "You're watching that person try to put all of those things together to be the greatest who ever was. And there's no way to know if that's going to happen. I mean that's the drama to me." – Wright Thompson [39:24]
• Thompson hopes to revisit the story in 10 years to see what Clark has become.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Caitlin’s Lack of Anxiety (17:41)

"I don't get nervous." – Caitlin Clark
[Teammates look around, stunned]

On Culture War Spotlight (33:14)

"If you do one wrong thing, your life can really end." – Caitlin Clark, recounted by Wright Thompson

Self-Awareness Compared to Legends (29:04)

"She's so much more self aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50." – Wright Thompson

On Managing Her Talent (10:06)

"Caitlin Clark has this unbelievably powerful vehicle that is her own talent and she's having to figure out how to drive it without spinning it into walls." – Wright Thompson

Relation to Fame and Praise (29:09)

Pablo: "The addiction to praise...I want to be at that point where I am not getting high off of tweets saying, great podcast."
Wright: "She says that because she was doing it, you know, I mean, she's googled herself and just that way lies madness."

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Important Timestamps

• 00:11 – Setting the stage: The Caitlin Clark phenomenon
• 01:31 – Clark on being left off Olympic team
• 03:17 – Wright sets out his catalog of profiles
• 05:39 – The empathy story (Clark not understanding empathy in high school)
• 07:41 – Teammates’ perspectives: “Heavy sits the crown”
• 09:18 – Clark watching “body language” lowlights during practice
• 10:06 – Ferrari analogy for Clark’s talent
• 13:05 – Statistics: Clark’s professional achievements in WNBA
• 17:41 – “When’s the last time you were afraid?” Clark’s non-anxious brain
• 29:04 – Clark’s self-awareness vs. Jordan
• 33:14 – Culture war stress; fear of saying the wrong thing
• 38:22 – Uncertainty of Clark’s career: the unfolding experiment

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Tone and Style

The conversation is investigative, warm, and unsparing—balancing humor, admiration, and skepticism. Both Torre and Thompson delve into big questions without lapsing into hagiography, offering a nuanced look at fame’s tolls, exceptional talent’s downsides, and the complex psychology of a superstar under a microscope.

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Conclusion

The episode delivers rare psychological depth on one of sports’ most scrutinized and intriguing young stars. Instead of reducing Caitlin Clark to a culture war mascot or highlight reel, Torre and Thompson reveal her as a singularly self-aware competitor navigating an impossible set of personal and public expectations — all while holding on to the possibility, and pressure, of greatness.

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For listeners interested in athlete psychology, media scrutiny, and the “making” of legends, this episode is a rich, thoughtful must-hear.

Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Wright Thompson]

She's so much more self aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50.

[Pablo Torre]

Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network. So just the very first thing that I need you to know today is that I, like much of America, have been paying a lot of attention to Caitlin Clark, who is a bonafide cultural phenomenon at this point, at age 22, having spent the last six months being the most popular and most overhyped and most underrated women's basketball player in existence. And that is on top by the way of being grade A clickbait for all of this online culture war bull, which we'll get to later. But what is wild to me most of all is that while we love arguing about Caitlin Clark as a country, Caitlin Clark herself never engages. Even as she was left off the US Olympic team and being debated all across the wnba. What was your level of disappointment not hearing your name on the roster?

[Caitlin Clark]

Honestly, no disappointment like I think it just gives you something, something to work for. You know, that's a dream. You know, hopefully one day I can be there. And I think it's just a little more motivation. You remember that. And you know, hopefully in four years, when four years comes back around, you know, I can be there.

[Pablo Torre]

I cannot think of another athlete in America right now who is this scrutinized and yet this hit him in plain sight. Because we don't really know what Caitlin Clark is really feeling. We mostly just project ourselves and our guesses at what we think she might be like. And she's also largely unplugged from social media despite being 22. And so we have this surplus of opinions, but a truly embarrassing deficit of reporting of actual knowledge. In fact, I know exactly one journalist who has reported a genuinely psychologically probing in depth profile of her where they interviewed Caitlin as well as her coaches like Lisa Bluder at Iowa and her teammates like Kate Martin while Caitlin was still just a college senior six months ago. All of which is why that same journalist, ESPN's Wright Thompson, is the exact person I had many questions for today.

[Wright Thompson]

No, man, it's absolutely my pleasure.

[Pablo Torre]

So how do you just sort of introduce yourself as a chronicler of people who are both incredibly, incredibly accomplished athletes and also kind of extreme figures? What's your catalog got in it? Right, for people who are not familiar with your work?

[Wright Thompson]

Well, I mean everybody from Michael Jordan twice to Tiger woods to Pat Riley sort of the white whale beat.

[Pablo Torre]

And so where is Caitlin Clark in this taxonomy of humans that have all done great things and are also all from the outside, kind of poorly understood?

[Wright Thompson]

Man, she's the real thing. And like the real thing in a way that honestly, I've been around a lot of college athletes. So have you. And this isn't hyperbole. She's the most self aware college athlete I've ever met and I'm not even entirely sure who's second.

[Pablo Torre]

So self aware to me was the big revelation. As I'm reading you, I'm hearing you talk about all the time you spent around her because introspection, right? For any profile writer out there, that's the dream. And you got it in ways that I would not have anticipated.

[Wright Thompson]

I walked out of that first interview and she was incredible and really thoughtful and really engaged in understanding what was happening to her, understanding the stakes. As you said at the top, everybody has an opinion on her and almost none of those opinions are rooted in any sort of reality. And so she is having to live a real life and a fake life along parallel tracks. And she seemed to understand that understanding and managing the fake one was absolutely essential for maximizing the real one. She was engaged in the process of understanding what it was that was happening to her. And she understood that this thing happening to her was completely out of her control. We started talking pretty regularly and, you know, I think I talked to her dad every day for six months. I mean, that's an exaggeration. Every other day for six months.

[Pablo Torre]

That is, that's, that's, that's stalkerish, right? At a certain point.

[Wright Thompson]

Hey, hey. You say potato, I say potato.

[Pablo Torre]

Empathy as a term in your story sort of hit me. So tell the empathy story, please.

[Wright Thompson]

So her high school basketball coach, who's a delight, said that she knew Caitlyn was different. And I think it was 10th or 11th grade, they had an assignment and Caitlyn didn't know the meaning of the word empathy and struggled a little bit to have it explained. You get the sense that until she found, especially Kate Martin, but until she found this Iowa team, that she had never had a tribe of people before and that she had always been isolated. You know, these great stars, and you have talked about this, you know, these elite athletes are lonely. I don't know the right way to say this. Lonely. That's it, that they're from a nation of their own talent.

[Pablo Torre]

So the quote from Kristen Meyer, who was her, her basketball coach when she was in the 10th grade, Caitlyn was upon getting this sort of this, this, this introduction to a person who quote, found it hard to understand what other people would feel, end quote. That coach, she turns out to be just one in a lineage, right, of people who are trying to make this person who can't naturally intuit empathy in Caitlin Clark realize what it's like to be on a team. And that is this through line in your reporting that just is undeniable.

[Wright Thompson]

What's incredible is that whatever Phil Jackson sold to Michael Jordan, Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen sold to Caitlin Clark, that this is a team, basketball players need other basketball players to be great because basketball is just how you occupy and then don't occupy space. It's interesting that Caitlin understood I have to be able to be an essential part of a team not to be praised, not because it was the right thing to do or she felt guilty for not doing it, but because if she's going to be Caitlin Clark, she to do that.

[Pablo Torre]

I want to establish the degree of difficulty though for Caitlyn Clark when it came to having to, to learn how to deal with people because this is something that comes up again and again in ways that we did not know with this level of detail, but certainly got to glimpse it at times as you watch her play these games in college. Which is to say Caitlin Clark behind the scenes in her private life had at times the appearance of a total nightmare hole to play with.

[Wright Thompson]

She has no poker face and her teammates saw the pressure she was under, specifically Kate Martin. I mean, Kate Martin is the unsung hero in all of this. And she recognized early and said in the team meeting, I think Caitlyn's freshman or sophomore year, like everybody thinks they want to be Caitlin, but I don't think you really do. And one of the things that Kate Martin said was heavy sits the crown. So her teammates were oddly protective of her. You know, there are a couple of her teammates, she just rode mercilessly. You know, there was eye rolling, there was frustration from the coaches. They would make Caitlin watch video not of games but of practice and game cut ups of her reactions after plays and tried to ask her, okay, pretend this is a stranger. Tell me like what do you think about this person? And so Caitlin was watching body language highlights, which is next level coach. I mean that's Phil Jackson stuff by incredible.

[Pablo Torre]

This, this is incredible.

[Wright Thompson]

This is one of the greatest coaching jobs that's ever been done by, you know, Julie Fitz and Lisa Bluder and.

[Pablo Torre]

Jan Jensen on those cutups, describe what they saw, what you saw watching Them watch it.

[Wright Thompson]

She was throwing her hands up in the air. She ran off the court once, so. So she wouldn't just start mother people on the court and that. She was like, well, I thought that was a good reaction. I didn't scream at anybody, right?

[Pablo Torre]

The spinning. She would spin around, right?

[Wright Thompson]

Like, oh, she would spin around and she would, you know, you. And you know what this is going to sound like serious, like a weird question. Have you ever driven a Ferrari? I asked because.

[Pablo Torre]

I asked because I had different expense reports, right. We had different expenses.

[Wright Thompson]

No, no. But I did once. It is so hard to learn how to start that car in first gear because of the torque. And so the thing I kept thinking about was Caitlin Clark has this unbelievably powerful vehicle that is her own talent and she's having to figure out how to drive it without spinning it into walls. And her teammates, by the way, understood in real time that this was never going to happen again. And that as opposed to complaining about it, whether it's the attention or her temper tantrums or her taking over a ball game, that especially I would say, Kate Martin understood. This is once in a lifetime stuff. You know that terrible baseball movie, the.

[Pablo Torre]

Kevin Costner one, For the love of the game. Was that it?

[Wright Thompson]

For the love of the game, yeah. Where the John C. Reilly character says, we're the best team in baseball right now, right this minute because of you. There was that sense that, like, they understood, like, it was beautiful actually to be around.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, it reminds me of the other sort of like, quote from that movie, which we're both going to make fun of while also committing it to memory, which is, you know, the pitching mount of Yankee Stadium is the loneliest place in the world. And there is Billy Chapel trying to push the sun back into the sky. Guy to give us one more day of summer. Give us one more day of summer. That with Caitlyn, it's like that's her spotlight. That's the person at the center, the gravitational center of all of this.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, you know, after they lost the national championship game her junior year, they all went to this sub terrible suburban Dallas bar. She got back to the hotel and was still wearing her uniform, saw her father. And that's when she lost it. Like, that's when it all the adrenaline came running out. And they went out and it was just this beautiful thing of the Iowa Hawkeyes. Some booster was like, can I buy you ladies a drink? And Caitlin was like, we'll take 22 shots. And so it was hilarious. They kept buying rounds of 22. And I went out to dinner with her for her birthday with her best, with a bunch of teammates and her parents just before she graduated. And they were all sort of telling the funny college stories that you didn't think you'd ever tell your parents, you know, because the whole power dynamic has changed by the time you're a senior. And it was just this beautiful nostalgic moment. There was that sense at the end of it that they all knew that something was ending and that it had been magic and that in some ways they would chase this for the rest of their lives. And that was really beautiful. And it was really palpable up close.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay, if you haven't checked in on what Caitlin Clark has been up to as a professional, you should just know that the shorthand that has been developed for her is still pretty accurate. Caitlin Clark remains the Steph Curry of the wnba, the single most unapologetic and entertaining practitioner of the three point shot. The rookie record for which Caitlin just broke, by the way, in a win over the Connecticut sun on Wednesday night. Austin had her 11th double double of the season and Clark hits a three at her 86 three pointer of the year and that is a new rookie record. But since the WNBA's Olympic break ended, the three pointer isn't even the thing that has most distinguished Caitlin Clark's game. The news here is that she leads the league in assists per game now with more than 88 per and she had 19 of them against the Dallas Wings back in July, which broke the all time single game record. And Caitlyn also just broke the rookie record for assists in a season just last week. It has been one long highlight reel of creative deliveries to her teammates.

[Wright Thompson]

The rebound. Here comes Clark bouncing to back Bentley, who lays it in.

[Pablo Torre]

Bark, bounce, pass it. Smith again.

[Wright Thompson]

And it allows them oh what a dime. My goodness, the pass.

[Pablo Torre]

So when Wright Thompson is talking about how Caitlin is this Ferrari with an engine that could power a team to the postseason or possibly spin out into a wall, it is worth remembering that her teammate's assignment here, given that torque can be absolutely terrifying because their job is to keep up.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, I mean the number of balls that bounce off people's hands and bounce off their heads.

[Pablo Torre]

I'm imagining what it's like to have been the others, the background singers and I imagine it's like coming into work and there's this weather system. Have you seen the movie Free Solo?

[Wright Thompson]

Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay. So I had the pleasure of at one of these sorts of boondoggles. I was in France interviewing Alex Honnold. Part of his legend in the documentary that I wanted to also invade his his privacy about was just the way his brain works. And his amygdala, as per the documentary, does not fire in the same ways that normal amygdalas do. You have no activation in your amygdala. There's just not much going on in my brain. It seems things that are typically stimulating for most of the rest of us.

[Caitlin Clark]

Are not really doing it for you.

[Pablo Torre]

And he has some pushback on this and he does not like the simplification of it. But the whole notion is, oh, that guy's brain works differently. And I wonder when you got to the part where you're learning about how Caitlyn feels about anxiety, I wonder if any of this began to look a little bit like each other.

[Wright Thompson]

Her brain definitely works different. I don't know if it works different in the way that Alex's works different, but she is definitely. There is a complexity to her understanding of herself, but also a deep, contagious simplicity. Her goals are not, I want this dollar shoe deal and I want to win this many rings and I want these stats. It's like I want to be the best that there ever was. She loves that song, the Luke Cohn song, Where the wild things are, the line in their hearts on fire and crazy dreams. Like, I think she likes those angry alive arenas. I was worried that the moment was going to get too big for her just as a cons, as someone who knew her family and like had become oddly invested, but it just never was. And like she's one of those people that the bigger the stage, the better.

[Pablo Torre]

There's this story that you report about anxiety and whether she even feels it. And again, it's in the context of Iowa doing all of this stuff, which I did not realize until your story where they are actively trying to make Caitlin Clark into a three dimensional teammate and human that everybody can understand a bit better. And so a sports psychologist visits them.

[Wright Thompson]

The sports psychologist asked him to go around the room, very simple, almost like name, rank, serial number, basic baseline questioning. And says, you know, when's the last time you were afraid? What are you afraid of? And it gets to Caitlin and now she's not flexing, she's embarrassed because she's trying to be honest, but she also knows how it's going to sound. And she's like, I don't get nervous. And everybody sort of looked at each.

[Pablo Torre]

Other like, holy, well, look, the teammates, you know, in this meeting with the sports Psychologist, they're all saying the stuff that you'd expect for basketball players of a certain age to describe even veterans, even retired players, right? Like oh, the free throw line, they struggle breathing, they have these sweaty palms. And Caitlyn, just to give you the quote that you have in the piece, she just says, quote, I never am. What was even more interesting to me than this, which was clearly non performative and actually sincere. A, a, a, a vulnerable confession of invulnerability. Right. What is, what is even more interesting is the self awareness that she goes on to explain to you, which is she says this quote at times speaking of her teammates. They were definitely like, why is this girl a psycho? And so there is just like the, I am this way and I know that and I can't always do what you want me to do about it, even if I know that you're trying to get me to change.

[Wright Thompson]

I hope this isn't speaking out of school and if it is, I apologize, Kate Martin, but when we finished our, we were, we talked on the phone one time, she said, are we done? I'm like, yeah, because can I ask you a question? So I guess she goes, you've been around a lot of really great athletes, right? And I was like, I mean I've been around some. Yeah. And she said, what, what does Caitlin have that they have? Like she was trying to understand and you know, legitimately and like what was just sort of like this is her best friend, right? Was just sort of like, like what.

[Pablo Torre]

Is she has that effect on people, right?

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. Like what, like what do you think is going on here? And I was just like, man, she's, I mean, I think exactly what I said was like, she's a real thing, man. Like I was blown away. Not like she's funny and smart and nice and all of that, but like so are lots of people. And that's not that interesting. Just the degree to which she was doing really hard work with the stated goal of understanding herself in order to become the basketball player she wants to be was rare. And ultimately, and I don't know if you agree or disagree with this, but like to me that's the pulsing energy of the whole story.

[Pablo Torre]

I want to get to the ways in which all of this can read like, oh, she's a bad teammate. Because when you are trying to understand someone who is forced to watch highlight reels of her lowlights, which are just body language videos, it makes me want to understand why she is that way.

[Wright Thompson]

I think two things. I think one, you know the caveat to that is always she's the best teammate there ever was. If it's a four on two break, you know what I mean? Like, you want an open look. She's the best teammate that ever was. You want to pass across the floor through three defenders. That hits you in the hand, perfectly in stride. She's a great teammate. I think how people are the way they are is less interesting than watching them try to be able to answer that question for themselves so that they can maximize whatever they want to maximize.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes.

[Wright Thompson]

Because, you know, I have no, I have all sorts of weird quirks and that the older I get, I'm just like, this is not normal.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, I've noticed.

[Wright Thompson]

And oh, that's great. Thanks. And. But I don't know why now. It's important to understand what of that is cosmetic. And one of that is like real interior load bearing that I have to deal with. Like, some of it's just funny, you know, I like to order for other people at a restaurant. That's fine.

[Pablo Torre]

I want America to know that you are the Caitlin Clark. Full court, perfectly dropped in pass of restaurant orders. I trust I'm pretty good. I trust you to deliver the ball where it needs to be.

[Wright Thompson]

I'm not saying you can't order. I'm just saying you have a vision. I want to play jazz. I want to order what I want to order, and I want us all to share it. Now, if you want to order something separate, I'm in no way offended or threatened by that, but I want to do my thing and I want the wine list. I'm sorry, but like, by the way, to bring it all the way back. I mean, first of all, Caitlin's brother, bourbon nerd. So that helped me on account of.

[Pablo Torre]

The pappy land kind of being one of America's foremost bourbon writers.

[Wright Thompson]

Do you know what that helps you more in the world of sports than you might imagine?

[Pablo Torre]

I am deeply unshocked to hear that on the level of access. Something that made me laugh reading your story about Caitlyn's teammates asking her to be like, hey, could you DM this celebrity now that you're Caitlyn?

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, dude, yeah, yeah. They wanted to know if Caitlin could get Drake to Iowa City. And Caitlyn was like, guys, I don't know Drake. Caitlyn did get him eras tour tickets. Which is like, that's, that's tough. I mean, I, I just had to get tickets for a three and a six year old to go to the Superdome. And I'm Going to be paying off favors for the rest of my life. All of which is to say though, that she was in chrysalis, in public, trying to understand what she was going to turn into in real time and do it fast enough to not self destruct.

[Pablo Torre]

There's a difference, as you put it, between being a watcher, which we are, we're in that category forever, and the watched. An inner circle human being who is watched.

[Wright Thompson]

One of the ways that I thought about the story was Caitlin Clark, who her whole life had been a watcher. I mean, she's an obsessive sports fan. And so, you know, she gossiped about people on the Internet. She loves Patrick Mahomes, she loves Travis Kelce before the Taylor Swift stuff. She's a huge Chiefs fan. She, she was transforming from being one of the watchers to one of the watched and was figuring out how that reorders everything about how you consume media, how you live your life, how you move through the real world and the virtual world, how you work on your craft, how you have to behave in public, whether or not you can go to Target. She loves Target and can't go to the Target in downtown Iowa City anymore, which is a heartbreaker for her. And so it. She's learning all this in real time while she's doing these interviews and playing these basketball games and is the absolute center of the world.

[Pablo Torre]

It's the depth that is unseen. When you just view someone as a culture war object. You realize, oh, wait a minute, hold on. She only talked to the sports psychologist. Not only was consensually watching cutups of how she was an, she has this performance consultant, Brett Ledbetter, who comes into the story. The degree to which she tried to be a better teammate because she wants to be better at basketball even better than she was. I do want to establish that this was done not from like a fuzzy woo woo. Like this was like, hey, we need to win games together. And there's this thing about taking off the cape that you quote here. What does that mean? How does this all sort of like meld together under the like old school desire to actually win in sports?

[Wright Thompson]

All of the work they were doing was not in some altruistic desire to, to create holistic young women to go out and better the world. You know, these are basketball coaches, very good ones, very competitive ones who want to win basketball games. She has to trust her teammates. She also has to know that she can just be a person around them, that she can be vulnerable, that she can talk about her hopes and Dreams and her heartbreaks and her, you know, and the things going on in her life. I mean, one of the reasons I think the team works so well is that they saw her like do superhuman things while dealing with things in her private life that never became public. And so, you know, they were watching in awe, you know, because I don't know how ought to handle that. But like, you know, the coaches and Caitlin were actively working against a loudly ticking clock to make this group of people be able to go out and win games.

[Pablo Torre]

One of the things, one of the tips that, that she was given by this coach was a thing that I think typically we're very wary of advising women to do, but Caitlyn seemed to get the premise, which was you gotta smile more. You gotta smile at people.

[Wright Thompson]

One of the things is I want you to smile at every person you encounter and then I want you to come back and tell me how they responded to you and how that was different than usual.

[Pablo Torre]

Just. But this is, this is part of the, you know, with Steve Jobs, it was the reality distortion field they used to talk about, like when you were in his presence, you were again orbiting him. And things seemed both possible and also at times awful. With Caitlin Clark, the power of a smile, because everybody is attending and watching her, it actually makes a difference on this very real human level. It sounds like she, and she's very.

[Wright Thompson]

Good with like, you know, remembering reporters names, little stuff that matters.

[Pablo Torre]

Super polite.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean, like, dude, like I sat next to the grizzled old Iowa beat writers at a game and they talked about her like she was Kurt Ference or Dan Gable, like nothing but respect. No caveats. No, she's great for a, just unequivocal, total respect.

[Pablo Torre]

The degree to which she is doing the stuff that for a sports writer, of course is catnip, like meditating upon what praise does to her. You know, like this is the, that you hope that this is stuff that you got from Michael Jordan at the very, very end. She's doing this at age 21.

[Wright Thompson]

She's so much more self aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50.

[Pablo Torre]

The addiction to praise and all. And that specifically her view on that is, is it's like I, I want to be at that point where I am not getting high off of tweets saying, great podcast.

[Wright Thompson]

And, and, and she like, and she says that because she was doing it, you know, I mean, she's googled herself and just that way lies madness. And you know, her getting caught in the culture war was terrifying to her. Because she understood how you can blow yourself up in that space.

[Pablo Torre]

All right, so I have been alluding to the culture war part of Caitlyn's story throughout this whole episode now. And I just gotta refresh your memory because Caitlin's primary antagonist is star forward Angel Reese from lsu, who was picked seventh overall by the Chicago sky in this year's draft. And there's a saying in boxing that I think applies here to Caitlyn and Angel and their now multi year rivalry. And that phrase is styles make fights. Caitlyn is a finesse but player. Angel leads the league in rebounding. Caitlyn is white, angel is black. Angel is a member of the majority group inside the WNBA that is a minority outside of it, as we have previously discussed on this show. And onto all of this is everything we want to project up to and including the presidential election, incidentally, even though Caitlyn has never self identified as a Republican and her idol growing up, just for the record, was Maya Moore. But one thing Caitlyn and Angel pretty clearly share is a mutual appreciation for demonstrative gestures which the nation saw when LSU beat Iowa to win the national title in April 2023. And Caitlin got a taste of her own celebration, the whole John Cena handed from of your face you can't see me thing. Which was followed by angel highlighting one particular finger and Angel Reese knows a ring is coming. Kaitlyn proceeded to beat angel in the Elite Eight in April of this year at a game that I was lucky enough to watch in person. But Caitlyn, conspicuously unlike the alleged fans who are all commenting all the time in her name on the Internet, she has refused any contribution to a verbal back and forth, which is an apparent anxiety that I did not realize Caitlin Clark could even feel until I got to one particular scene in Wright Thompson's story. The total lack of anxiety around on court, high pressure moments in contrast with the scene you have where she's being interviewed on television about Angel Reese.

[Wright Thompson]

You know, one of the things people talk about is, is race as a component of this. Your thoughts?

[Caitlin Clark]

Yeah. You know, I don't think angel should be criticized at all. You know, no matter which way it goes, you know, she should never be criticized for what she did. You know, I'm just one that competes and she competed. So I think everybody knew there was going to be a little trash talk in the entire tournament. It's not just me and angel. So, you know, I don't think she should be criticized. Like I said, LSU deserves that. They played so well and Like I said, I'm a big fan of hers.

[Pablo Torre]

What happens when Jeremy Shapp stops asking the questions and the interview ends?

[Wright Thompson]

She starts shaking. She has like, she's, her anxiety is so high, she starts shaking. She starts calling her mom and Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen be like, was that okay? How did I do? And what she said to me was.

[Pablo Torre]

If you do one wrong thing, your life can really end.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. And like, so she was caught up in a culture war that, you know, I think she and Angel Reese understand each other perfectly or at least, you.

[Pablo Torre]

Know, in a commercial game eventually.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah. It's funny because Angel Reese is Bird and Caitlyn is magic. They're incredible competitors. And Caitlin and I don't, I've never met angel, so I don't want to speak for angel, but I imagine watching how great she is. Dude, that game she had where they lost, where LSU lost to Iowa, where it was so clear that Angel Reese was hurt. Watching that performance, I imagine that both of them think all of the sort of maelstrom around a big game, all the talking and all the booing and cheering. I bet they love it. Like, as opposed to being threatened by it. I bet they love it. I mean, when, you know, this move, the shaping, shaking the ring finger. I bet on a certain level Caitlyn loves that and is like, all right, you know, you got me this time. So I. The, the culture war aspect of it was really interesting because it was non existent in her interior life and omnipresent in the life that people were projecting on her. And like, I mean, I thought that was really interesting story in the gap between those two things.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah. And look, I heard from people who, who played in the WNBA who, who wanted to hear her say things to weigh in on the culture war because, and this is, this is the Taylor Swift parallel. Like, what do you do, We've done episodes about this, right? What do you do when your Stan army, when your fan base even is doing things that you are not directing them to? Or even worse, what is it like when a bunch of people do stuff allegedly on your behalf and maybe they're not even fans, maybe they're just bots. Maybe they're just. So the question of a responsibility in that sort of online culture way is different, right. From everybody else that we're talking about, the older athletes have had to deal with.

[Wright Thompson]

If she were my friend or my sister or my daughter, I would say you, you don't ever engage, good or bad with the mob. The act of becoming Caitlyn Clark is revolutionary and way more revolutionary than what some dumb says on Twitter. She is actually changing the world for little girls and little boys and redefining what it means to be a sports hero and a sports fan. I mean, she's doing this on both ends of the commodity chain, right?

[Pablo Torre]

And the thing that's most exciting to me, having read your story, is that her philosophy, as much as she still struggles with it, and we see, by the way, in the wnba, we see her throwing looks at times, we see her spinning, right? It's not like she has cured herself of this thing, but her philosophy clearly is not might makes right. Her philosophy is not. Because I am so great. You must enable this. She has worked at trying to be better in ways that are so shocking given the history of how society has reverse engineered the way you should be based on how good you are at something. It's just a remarkable bit of actual human maturity.

[Wright Thompson]

Dude. It is. I mean, Brent Nan Clark did a great job because, like, that's real. And you know, like her, like her brother, like her family is like really Catholic, but in sort of that solid Midwestern. Not in the scary way.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, not in this.

[Wright Thompson]

You know What I mean?

[Pablo Torre]

J.D. vancian. You guys took the wrong message from the Da Vinci Code sort of a way.

[Wright Thompson]

They're just really thoughtful, intellectual people engaged in the sort of big idea of being a human being on a spinning rock. They say rosaries at the games. They're really superstitious. They have to sit in the same seats. It's, you know, was a hell of a thing that happened to all of them.

[Pablo Torre]

The fact that millions upon millions of people will follow her, will watch her, will make a point to pay attention to her at a time when attention is, is so scarcely paid to that magnitude is I. We just haven't seen it in that category from female athletes. We just have not seen that.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, dude, those, the, the, their last three games, those TV ratings were, you know, blew the World Series out of the water, blew the Sunday of the Masters out of the water.

[Pablo Torre]

NBA game on ESPN was beaten by Iowa basketball games.

[Wright Thompson]

And also the interesting thing is none of us know how this is going to end. She could be Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, whatever, you know, like, I don't want to get like. But it hasn't happened yet.

[Pablo Torre]

What do you think to yourself when you see in the WNBA the stuff that her coaches at Iowa put on those low light reels, when you see her get frustrated and begin to lapse, what goes through your mind?

[Wright Thompson]

Look man, people don't really change, you know, like, like, like you can, you can control it to a degree. But you know, I think, you know, as long as she's engaged in the intellectual fight to, to be self aware, to know when this helps fuel her and when it moves past the needle and starts becoming a hindrance, you know, as long as she's aware of the mask eating the face, then I think it's all good. I mean I don't, you know, Michael Jordan never turned it off. I would like us to have this exact same conversation 10 years from now and see what happened because I know what she wants. I know what we all would want for her and I know what seems possible, I mean even on certain days in the right light, likely, but we have no idea. And so what you're watching is someone with an enormous amount of potential, with a enormous capacity for work and for invention and reinvention and, and self analysis and really critical data driven looks in the mirror. You're watching that person try to put all of those things together to be the greatest who ever was. And there's no way to know if that's going to happen. I mean that's the drama to me. Can she realize these things that must feel both close enough to touch but so far away as to be deeply anxiety inducing? I mean that's interesting to me.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes. No, it's an experiment. We're watching and it's an experiment.

[Wright Thompson]

That's exactly right.

[Pablo Torre]

On terms that until I read your story I did not realize what was happening. So right. Thompson at the end here. I look forward to you ordering dinner for me in exactly 10 years, dude.

[Wright Thompson]

And I will be in New York at the end of September and oh.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, you will order dinner for me a lot sooner than that. Pablo Torre Finds out is produced by Michael Antonucci Walter Averoma Ryan Cortez Sam Dawig Juan Galindo Patrick Kim neely Loman Rob McGray Rachel Miller Howard Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tominello and Juliet Warren Engineering by RG Systems Sound design by NGW Post Our theme song by John Bravo. All of us will see you on Tuesday.