Caitlin Clark put the WNBA on the map.
Her new Nike sneaker is flying off shelves while the rest of the company sinks.
And one Fox News host just said out loud why she won’t be buying Clark’s jersey.
Lisa Boothe draws her line on Outnumbered
Fox News political analyst Lisa Boothe sat on the Outnumbered panel during a recent segment about Clark’s new Nike signature sneaker.
The shoe is selling fast. Mediaite reported that it’s one of the few things going right for Nike at the moment.
Boothe wasn’t in a celebrating mood.
“The reason why I’m not the biggest Caitlin Clark fan is she’s sort of soft-woke,” Boothe said.
Then she laid out her case. “She liked a post from Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris, she’s made comments about white privilege to reporters . . . either don’t take a lane at all, or take a lane. So I don’t really actually respect her.”
And Boothe had a recommendation for anybody shopping for a jersey. “If you’re trying to appeal to conservatives, go with Sophie Cunningham.”
Cunningham plays alongside Clark on the Indiana Fever. She told ESPN she doesn’t support biological males competing against women athletes, and conservative fans have loved her for it ever since.
Left-wing fans and colleagues came after Cunningham for saying so. Mediaite noted that one coach even showed up in a shirt reading “Trans Kids Belong” as a not-so-subtle jab at her.
Cunningham shrugged. At one point she climbed up on a bar top and belted out a country song.
Nike’s ten-year losing streak with its own customers
Nike’s latest earnings report showed revenue down 4% to $11.2 billion. Sales in Communist China dropped 26% year-over-year. The stock has lost 80% of its value over the past five years, and the company told investors to expect revenue to keep sliding heading into 2027.
Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones offered Nike some free advice. “Maybe they should just start loving America again.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade pointed out that critics blame Nike’s slide on the “woke stunts” the company pulled over the last decade.
Nike made Colin Kaepernick, the malcontent who started the anthem protests, a face of the brand. Kneeling for the anthem insulted every service member who died fighting under that flag, and Nike handed the man a paycheck for it.
Then in 2019 Nike pulled a Fourth of July sneaker featuring the Betsy Ross flag. CNBC, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported at the time that Kaepernick had complained to the company about the design.
Nike also partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
So a company spends ten years telling patriotic customers to get lost, and the one product saving its bacon belongs to a point guard from Iowa who mostly seems to want to play basketball. Funny how that works.
What the soft-woke jab leaves out about Clark and the WNBA
Boothe’s frustration makes sense to a lot of conservatives. Athletes who wink at the Left while cashing checks from fans in red states wore out their welcome a long time ago.
But Clark is a strange target.
Ryan Brewer, an economist at Indiana University Columbus, ran the numbers for the Indianapolis Star and calculated that Clark accounted for nearly 27% of the WNBA’s economic activity during the 2024 season. NBC News reported that average league attendance jumped from 6,615 in 2023 to 9,807 once Clark arrived, and Brewer attributed about 60% of that increase to her alone.
One player. More than a quarter of the league’s economic activity.
And the WNBA’s leftist, woke culture never quite knew what to do with her. Cunningham said on her own podcast that players around the league have tried to toughen Clark up. The league spent years lecturing fans about politics, and fans who just wanted to watch basketball tuned out. Then Clark showed up and the seats filled. The audience told everybody what it wanted.
Maybe that’s the piece Boothe’s “take a lane” demand skips past. Clark’s lane is basketball. A social media like and a comment to reporters, which is how Boothe herself described the evidence, make for a pretty thin file next to the full-time activism of the league around her. Then again, stars have burned conservatives before by staying quiet right up until the moment the Left needed them. Hard to blame Boothe for keeping her guard up.
Cunningham took the harder road, and she deserves the credit Boothe gave her. On biological males in women’s sports, nobody gets a comfortable middle seat. A league that bans males from women’s competition admits that identifying as a woman doesn’t change anyone’s sex. A league that lets them in will watch teams recruit male athletes who identify as women, and women’s sports will stop existing as a meaningful category. Cunningham said the common-sense thing out loud, and the ideological enforcers in her own sport punished her for it.
But Cunningham and Clark share a locker room and a fan base. Plenty of the people buying Clark’s shoe are the same people cheering Cunningham on.
Nike will lean on Clark harder as its numbers keep falling. And the pressure Boothe described will hit Clark from the other direction too, because the Left won’t settle for a like on a post from somebody carrying that much of the league on her back.
Clark will have to decide what her lane is before somebody at Nike or the WNBA decides it for her.
And Lawrence Jones already handed Nike the answer for nothing.
Sources:
Mediaite, “Fox Host Says She Doesn’t Respect ‘Soft Woke’ Caitlin Clark After She Liked a Taylor Swift Post and Talked About ‘White Privilege'”
NBC News, “Caitlin Clark’s impact on the WNBA could eclipse ‘a billion dollars'”
CNBC, “Nike pulls sneakers with ‘Betsy Ross’ American flag after Colin Kaepernick complains”