First the results. On Sunday, the Louisiana State (Lady) Tigers demolished the Iowa Hawkeyes to win the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament 102-85 in Dallas. This is the Tigers' first national championship, as well as being coach Kim Mulkey's fourth title, with the first three coming at Baylor. The game was marked by questionable officiating, high scoring and a big to-do over who's zooming who (apologies to Aretha Franklin). More on this in a moment.
On Monday, the men's college basketball tournament was won by Connecticut in convincing fashion, a 76-59 win over San Diego State in Houston. In a tournament marked by upset upon upset, sending the top seeds home prematurely, the Huskies stuck around long enough to win its fifth NCAA title since the Millenium. That, for some reason, qualifies them as a blueblood program to go along with Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and UCLA. In other news, Jim Nantz has called his last college basketball game for CBS, meaning he can spend more time covering golf and the NFL. Ian Eagle takes over the Final Four mic next season.
But this is what people want to talk about: An in-your-face gesture made at the end of the game by LSU's Angel Reese toward Iowa scoring machine Caitlin Clark, hiding her face while pointing to her ring finger in anticipation of the title she and her team was about to win. Never mind that Clark had done the same thing in a previous game, this time a national TV audience saw what looked like a racial slap in the face. It wasn't necessary, but then we're not used to seeing women athletes trash talking.
The thing is, Reese was in the right. Her team had soundly defeated the Hawkeyes, she had won the Most Outstanding Player of the Women's Final Four, and certainly deserved that ring on her finger. But we live in a time when the accomplishments of black athletes are overshadowed by more marketable white athletes of either gender. So they have to resort to things like this.
Clark, who's set a bunch of records on the court this past season to get her team into the Women's Final Four and defeating defending champion South Carolina, is certainly marketable ESPN and ABC set viewing records for the tournament because people wanted to see her play, and because there was finally a reason to watch women's college basketball. If she keeps this up, Clark could do the same for the WNBA.
But if Caitlin Clark needed a reminder that sportsmanship is a two-way street, she got one from Angel Reese.
