Before one copy showed up on a bookstore shelf, Christine Brennan’s new book had women’s basketball abuzz. The longtime sports columnist began reporting On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports last summer, midway through Clark’s rookie season with the Indiana Fever. Upset by Brennan's lines of questioning during a playoff series between Indiana and Connecticut, the WNBA players’ union rebuked her in a rare public statement last September. “You cannot hide behind your tenure,” it read. Brennan countered that her question—whether DiJonai Carrington had intentionally poked Clark in the eye in a game—was just journalism.
Thus began the book tour. “A news-making and electrifying portrait,” the jacket copy promised. The video of Brennan's appearance on OutKick’s Hot Mic podcast was titled “Blacklisted WNBA Reporter Speaks Out.” She teased new details and scoops: Why was Caitlin Clark really left off the Olympic roster? Two weeks ago, Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve bought the book some extra hype. “Christine Brennan likes to have a villain in her storytelling,” she said in a TV hit. “I am Christine Brennan’s villain. That’s the sword she’s going to die on. And it's a fiction.” The weirder people in Brennan’s replies expect this book to take down the league’s shadowy lesbian cabal.
I will admit to being a little disappointed. At least the lesbian cabal exposé would have been interesting. On Her Game, for all the hoopla, turns out to be a pretty mundane book. That is no fault of the subject, a singular woman whose fame and game both merit study. It’s just that the writer is less interested in paying careful attention to the woman than in litigating all the attention that comes Clark's way.
On Her Game doesn’t quite solve the great challenge of sports profiles: how to set one athlete’s drive and devotion apart in an industry that selects for those traits. American sports superstars cut sharp figures in their high schools and hometowns, but their lives are increasingly similar to each other. You will not be surprised to learn that this pro athlete hooped in the driveway, evolved a real competitive streak, and dominated AAU.
Brennan also had little time to write. In On Her Game’s introduction, she says her book deal came together almost exactly one year ago. This sentence was written at 12:42 a.m. on the day I have to file, so I know well the signs of a nearing deadline. In place of shrewd analysis or vivid description, we get dense stacks of quotes, a lot of them press conference filler you can’t help but skip over. “Some nights, you know the shot’s going to fall, some nights it’s not. I stayed in it, found my teammates that were open, rebounded the ball well, was active on defense, and then made some big shots when we needed it. Honestly, just proud of myself,” says someone after a game between whatever and who cares. They’ll do in a pinch to pad out a game story, but these lines do not make for a scintillating book, and take up an unreasonable portion of its 272 pages. Brennan commits so fully to voicelessness that she just quotes her own tweets on occasion. In one chapter, an old USA Today column of hers appears as a three-page block quote.
These are no doubt also problems of access. Clark did not grant Brennan a sit-down interview, so the author was left to build a composite image. Some people are more helpful than others. Muffet McGraw, the former Notre Dame coach who recruited Clark, can only guess what the star is thinking when she turns the ball over late in a Fever game some six years after the recruitment process. But from her college coaches Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen, native Iowans familiar with the state’s women’s basketball tradition, we finally get the sense that Clark is a distinct person from a distinct time and place. A recent book by The Next’s Howard Megdal, Becoming Caitlin Clark, even narrows its focus to Iowa history to argue that Clark is both product and disruptor of the game's institutions.
Some players around Clark, too, are more willing to participate than others. In a story about the conflict between Brennan and the union, the Washington Post’s Ben Strauss reported last October that DeWanna Bonner, then on the Connecticut Sun, had an argument with Brennan outside the locker room during the playoffs. Brennan includes this in an odd final chapter called “Controversy” and adds one more story: Sitting with two Fever beat reporters outside Sun practice, she is confronted separately by Carrington and her girlfriend NaLyssa Smith, then on the Fever. These incidents are just sort of dumped in the “Controversy” chapter, perhaps as proof that WNBA players are combative and unreasonable. But this is something Brennan won’t come out and say. On Her Game is mostly argument by insinuation.
This is clearest in the chapter about the Olympic team. The decision to bring Clark to Paris or leave her off the roster, as I remember it, would not have been surprising either way. There were sensible arguments for and against a bunch of guards. In retrospect, the midseason break did Clark some good; upon her return, she put together a terrific second half and made first team All-WNBA. But as Brennan writes, or wrote in a column she then quoted in this book, “I’ve seen some bad team and athlete selection decisions in the 40 years I’ve covered the Olympics, but this is the worst by far.” We’re meant to understand that the deck was stacked against Clark from the beginning:
…when US Olympic head coach Cheryl Reeve was asked about Clark at the Team USA media summit, also in April, Reeve answered ominously, “I’ve never been in the trenches with her.”
A longer version of that quote appeared in a column by San Francisco Chronicle writer Ann Killion, who attended the April media summit held before the roster announcement. Asked what Clark would need to improve on to make the Olympic team, Reeve said, “I’ve never been in the trenches with her, so it is very premature for me to even suggest what she needs to improve on.”
Poking around for answers, Brennan hears secondhand that the team selection committee had a silly concern: that Clark’s fans would cause a stir when she received (as she was likely to) limited playing time. “The first time I heard this, I laughed,” Brennan writes. “What serious organization makes decisions based on such a thing? Concern about how fans will react has absolutely no place in US Olympic team selections.” This is a totally defensible position, though it’s undercut here by the point it then goes on to serve: that Clark should have been on the Olympic team to attract more coverage and fans.
Scandal after scandal is manufactured. Though Brennan’s qualification to write this book is four decades of sportswriting experience, they don’t seem to have endowed her with the best sense of proportion. “I’ve asked the WNBA for comment,” her response to the recent news that Clark would miss a few games with a quad strain, is a now-infamous line. There are yet more truth-seeking missions in the book. During the 2024 preseason, Reeve quote-tweeted a WNBA tweet promoting a Fever-Wings preseason game to note that there was also a Lynx preseason game that evening. “She appeared to place blame … on a rookie,” Brennan writes, when Reeve agreed with a reply that said a Lynx preseason game wasn’t being shown because “they only care about Caitlin.” Brennan recently posted that Reeve declined four different chances “to address this.” Another quest ends with a text message from a puzzled Cathy Engelbert: “You’re asking me why I didn’t mention Caitlin Clark during my WNBA Finals press conference?”
What Brennan gestures at, and gets other people to say outright, is that the WNBA was “unprepared” for this moment—not prepared to explode in popularity or to accommodate one of the country’s most famous people. Not wrong! As Brennan reports, the WNBA slapped together a charter flight program for players at the last minute, well after it was clear that, for her own safety, Caitlin Clark should not be schlepping to a gate at MSP. These questions are fair ones to ask of the WNBA, especially now. In a recent column for The Athletic, Sabreena Merchant wrote that the league’s expansion might soon outpace its operational capacity; the league has a very small staff and no off-site replay review center, for instance.
But in On Her Game, “prepared” has fuzzy psychological meaning, too. The book attributes the anti-Clark animus to the other players’ lack of training. Sociologist and activist Harry Edwards, interviewed for the book, suggests each team should have held a preseason “series of seminars” for players in which they were told, “You are the wind beneath the wings of Caitlin Clark, you made this possible because you are the WNBA. Take pride in that, lift her up, lift all the rookies up.” At the thought of my colleagues attending a seminar about me, I cringed so hard I had to put down the book.
A lot in Caitlin Clark’s life is unfair and outrageous. On Her Game considers her financial value to her team, league, and city. Left unsaid is that almost none of the money accrues to her. She is projected on and psychoanalyzed by really some of the worst people in the world. On a recent poor shooting night for her, I opened Twitter to speculation that she was fighting with her boyfriend, upset about a teammate leaving, or on her period. Maybe it’s accurate to say she’s conspired against: Huge swaths of public life, sports media among them, are determined to make women feel stupid and small. It’s hard for me to imagine another book suggesting earnestly that Gregg Popovich and Kevin Durant attend seminars where they learn to be sincere in press conferences and to write nicer tweets. In attempting to chronicle a rupture in “one of the last great bastions of male superiority,” Brennan ends up reproducing male superiority's worst instincts. In these pages, players are jealous shrews who need Emily Post. They're a free pass to condescend. “Frankly, our players just don’t get it,” a WNBA official tells Brennan after her argument with Bonner. The official is savvy enough to bash players anonymously. Oh, that we could all be as media trained as you.
What was Reeve’s point last year, anyway? Before it was spun as some personal conflict, she was arguing for better infrastructure in women’s basketball. “This isn’t Caitlin’s fault in any way,” Reeve told reporters at that Lynx preseason game, which approximately 200,000 viewers watched live on a stream from someone’s phone. “It’s more the recognition that there’s general excitement about the WNBA in ways we haven’t seen before. And so we have to capitalize. To really ensure that this is a movement, we have to capitalize on those things.” That doesn’t seem much different than what Brennan is writing herself.
It’s also hard for me, when I’m at a raucous Gainbridge Fieldhouse or watching sold-out Valkyries games or getting new press releases about ratings or learning that three people just paid $250 million a pop for a WNBA team, to understand the actual crisis here. I’ve always liked Brennan’s first book, Inside Edge, a vibrant dispatch from the ‘90s golden age of figure skating. (It’s also proof of an erstwhile interest in writing and style, the kind that seems to wither in newspaper columnists with each passing day.) The sport enchants Brennan because “no other sport heralds its precise moment of ultimate importance as figure skating does.” Up in the air, one's future is forked between glory and disaster, the margins as thin as a blade.
What a tiring way to live! Basketball, mercifully, is not much like figure skating. Its moments of importance are half-court shots, quiet screens and box-outs you only see on film the next day. The WNBA’s moments will be multiple, imprecise, unheralded, and never ultimate. The skater’s summit doesn’t apply here. This game’s too fun and too surprising to be written about some other way.
