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Nancy Armour Wrote the Worst Paragraph of All Time
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Nancy Armour is a USA Today columnist. She has the byline on a Wednesday story titled “Caitlin Clark’s flopping isn’t just annoying — it’s becoming dangerous | Opinion,” which is making the rounds, and not because it’s a good column.
It’s a terrible column, in which Armour argues that Clark has done some recent flopping and complaining over minimal contact.
It starts off fine, then she gets social/political, writing the following:
It seems there is a white nationalist element to Clark’s fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic, made even more so because the WNBA is made up predominantly of Black women, many of them queer. When Clark claims fouls that don’t exist, when she goes on profanity-laced tirades at referees, those racists see her as a white woman in need of saving and take matters into their own hands.
(Chelsea) Gray posted just one of the messages she got following the Fever game, in which a man called her a racial slur. After fans identified the man, he was fired by his employer, Hilton Grand Vacations.
“Enough is kind of enough,” Gray said on July 15. “These messages are not the first of its kind. There was other stuff too … It was just time. I got fed up with it and I just decided to share it.”
The Caitlin Clark discourse is toxic, and always has been. She became a radioactive political football, which brought out the worst in both the right and the left and pushed many media members to the brink of the looney bin. She never asked for any of it; it was ridiculous punditry that built the circus, taking every routine foul and on-court spat and turning it into a high-level referendum on race relations, sexuality, and wokeness. Caitlin Clark bears no responsibility for some idiot sending a racist message to another player. In fact; this happens in every sport and it’s been happening since social media was invented. Some dipshit loses his fantasy football game and he’s in a player’s DMs calling them every slur under the sun. It’s hardly some pattern of behavior unique to the WNBA. It may not even be a story, which is sad, but true, as James Hetfield once said.
Then Armour delivers one of the most nonsensical paragraphs this world has ever seen:
It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The WNBA’s All-Star Game this weekend is in Chicago, Emmett Till’s hometown, and a local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the wider consequences of her actions.
Uhhhhhhh…. right. If you don’t know the story, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. He was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was abducted and lynched in the Jim Crow south. There is no valid point in mentioning Emmett Till in a story about basketball. It’s an insane reach that simultaneously trivializes the seriousness of an incident that became an iconic part of the Civil Rights movement. And then Armour asks Clark to “recognize” that complaining about marginal physical contact and lashing out verbally could result in racist dipshits getting into the DMs of black WNBA players and saying nasty things to them.
Cognizant or not, that is, again, not Caitlin Clark’s responsibility. She bears no culpability for the actions of shitty internet randos.
What would you have her do? Never open her mouth? Never argue a foul call? Never jaw with a black opponent? Imagine asking the same of Larry Bird or Dennis Rodman in the 1980s. The premise is preposterous.
Armour wraps up the column by saying that WNBA officiating needs to be better, and credits Clark for being difficult to guard. She just wants her to cut out “the Oscar auditions.”
But the Emmett Till paragraph is ludicrous. It’s one of the most insanely idiotic things we have ever heard. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having heard it.
EDIT – looks like she apologized for not providing “enough context” –
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com