Few jobs require less physical exertion than rebounding for Caitlin Clark. On an early-November morning in downtown Indianapolis, Clark, the two-time college national player of the year for the University of Iowa, reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year from the Indiana Fever, and emergent American sports icon, sprints to different spots along the three-point line at the Fever practice gym, trying to bang as many shots as possible over a six-minute span. A Fever coach has tasked me with standing under the basket to retrieve her misses. But as Clark runs all over the court to launch long-range bombs, I barely have to move. Swish, swish, swish. She hits 14 shots in a row. A dozen in a row. Eleven in a row. Swish, swish, swish. Nine in a row. Another nine.

Sure, she’s putting on this display in practice. But her ability is still mesmerizing. Clark, 22, takes shots with a degree of difficulty never before witnessed in the women’s game; her signature 30-ft. launches, from near half-court on team logos across America, are akin to home-run balls, hanging high in the air. Can she actually make that flabbergasting attempt? Yes! it turns out. Over and over again.

After her workout I fill Clark in on the statistics from her shooting session: 93 three-pointers in six minutes, good for an 85% success rate.

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“Wow,” she responds from the driver’s seat of her gray Lexus GX. “That’s pretty good.”

Nice to know that after wowing so many around the world throughout her record-breaking year, Clark can still impress herself. In February, she set the new NCAA Division 1 women’s basketball scoring record. A few weeks later, she broke Hall of Famer Pete Maravich’s mark, making her the top scorer overall. Her college championship game between Iowa and South Carolina averaged 18.9 million viewers, becoming the second most watched women’s sporting event, outside the Olympic Games, in the history of U.S. television, with American viewership outdrawing that of each game of the 2024 NBA Finals and World Series. And for the first time ever, more people tuned in for the women’s NCAA championship than the men’s. As a pro, she set a rookie record for most three-pointers made in a season, while also setting new all-time WNBA marks for most assists in a season and most assists in a single game. She signed a reported $28 million endorsement deal with Nike, the largest ever for a women’s basketball player. Clark’s Fever appeared in the most watched WNBA games ever on ABC, CBS, ESPN, and ESPN2. The WNBA attracted an all-time record of more than 54 million unique viewers across all its national broadcasting platforms during the regular season, and the league’s overall attendance jumped 48% year over year to its highest level in more than two decades. The Fever broke the WNBA record for home attendance by a single franchise, and Fever games were moved to NBA and NHL arenas in Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., to accommodate the hordes of fans, many donning Clark’s No. 22 jersey. The Washington Mystics-Fever regular-season finale set a new WNBA single-game attendance record of 20,711.

When asked to define her year in one word, Clark chooses historic. Clark, it quickly becomes clear, is polite and down-to-earth but also has not an ounce of false humility. “I’ve been able to captivate so many people that have never watched women’s sports, let alone women’s basketball, and turn them into fans,” she says. Good luck naming another player who altered the trajectory of their entire team sport within five months on the job. Lionel Messi had a monumental influence on Major League Soccer when he arrived in Miami last year, but he was in year 20 of his pro career. Michael Jordan energized the NBA in the mid-1980s, but Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had already put the league on solid footing. While other female athletes have pushed the limits of human achievement and created their own cultures—Serena Williams, Simone Biles, and the stars of the U.S. women’s national soccer team all come to mind—the Clark phenomenon is still unprecedented. It’s one thing to rally around athletes during global spectacles like tennis majors or an Olympics or a World Cup. It’s quite another to turn routine regular-season games in the WNBA, a league neglected for far too long over its 27-year history, into appointment viewing.

To be clear, Clark had plenty of help. The WNBA was already enjoying positive momentum going into the 2024 season, thanks to MVPs like A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, and some of Clark’s fellow rookies, like Angel Reese and Cameron Brink, brought their own followings. But Clark took the league—and the sport—to a new level. Even during a period when investment across women’s sports is surging, team valuations are on the rise, and fan interest and engagement are at all-time highs, her arrival was transformative.

Clark’s skyrocketing fame has upended her life at a dizzying rate. She now has an advance security squad. A fan asked her to sign a sonogram. “There’s just so much weird stuff,” she says. The Golf Channel covered her appearance at an LPGA pro-am event as if she were Tiger Woods in his prime, moving up its studio show by 90 minutes to provide live look-ins at her swings. “She’s box office,” says Atlanta Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery, a former WNBA player. 

At times, the plot proved unpleasant. All year, Clark found herself party to raging debates, even though she rarely, if ever, did anything to perpetrate them. “I tell people I feel like the most controversial person,” says Clark. “But I am not. It’s just because of all the storylines that surround me. I literally try to live and treat everybody in the same exact respectful, kind way. It just confuses me at times.” That her gender played a role in the level of scrutiny is hard to deny. Clark’s introductory press conference with the Fever was a harbinger of things to come: a male reporter appeared to make a cringeworthy attempt at flirtation with Clark; he was suspended and prohibited from covering the Fever. As the season progressed, more flashpoints emerged—whether concerning the marketing advantage granted by her race, fouls that players committed against her, or her exclusion from the U.S. Olympic team—that spurred her so-called defenders to push racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ narratives, or even threaten WNBA players directly. She calls this toxicity “upsetting” and “gross,” but during the season she addressed the discourse mostly when asked about it in courtside interviews or at press conferences rather than proactively engaging with it. “It’s not something I can control … and to be honest, I don’t see a lot of it,” she told the Athletic’s Jim Trotter in June. Her extended interview with TIME is the first time she’s talked at length about her year.

“All of this is really speaking to something much larger than Caitlin Clark,” says Theresa Runstedtler, a scholar of African American history at American University. “It’s speaking to our unresolved issues about race, gender, and sexuality in American society, at this particularly fraught moment in our political landscape.” 

Still, in the face of all this heaviness, joy remains the resonant vibe of Clark’s 2024. Her talent brought together communities—in SRO arenas, in sports bars and living rooms, on social media—to celebrate her fire, unselfish play, and ability to score in inconceivable ways when she needed to. Clark certainly fed off this electricity. “You feel powerful,” Clark says. “Instantly, everybody goes crazy. People are invested in the game, they love the game, and that’s what makes it so fun for me. These people aren’t supporting women’s sports to check a box. It’s going to be the new normal.”

The weekend before our interview, Clark attended back-to-back Taylor Swift shows at Lucas Oil Stadium. She met Swift’s mother and boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. When fans noticed her sitting in a suite, they turned around to take pictures or toss her friendship bracelets. “People are just going crazy that I’m there,” she says. “I thought people would be so in their own world, ready to see Taylor. And it was just completely the opposite.”

Swift gave Clark four bags of Eras Tour merchandise with a note saying Clark was inspiring to watch from afar. She said “Trav and I” were excited to get to a Fever game now that the tour was winding down and invited Clark to attend a Chiefs game with her. 

Clark has always seemed destined for greatness, if not friendship with the biggest pop star in the world. Her path to this women’s-sports paradigm shift started in West Des Moines, Iowa, where Clark played multiple sports as a kid before focusing on her best one. She’s the second of three children (Clark has two brothers); her father Brent Clark is executive vice president at a company that sells and distributes agricultural and industrial parts, and her mother Anne Nizzi-Clark is a retired marketing executive. Jan Jensen, an Iowa assistant coach at the time, first watched Clark play when she was in middle school: she hit a step-back three-pointer and threw a long pass her teammate couldn’t catch. But the ball was on the money. “You could see her swag,” says Jensen. “The way she walked. In a peewee game, when everybody’s like, ‘Your shot hit the rim, let’s go get ice cream,’ she’s like, ‘I don’t want any freaking ice cream. I want to win.’ That’s when the Caitlin Clark mission began.”

Her Catholic family wanted her to pick Notre Dame for college, but Clark shunned the Fighting Irish to play for her home-state school. She put up big numbers at Iowa immediately but had trouble hiding her frustrations. She’d shake her head when someone screwed up. Or take it out on a towel. Or a chair. “If somebody couldn’t catch a pass, she’d throw her hands up and do a pirouette,” says Lisa Bluder, the Iowa head coach during Clark’s years at the school (Bluder retired after last season, and Jensen now runs the program). The coaching staff worked with Clark to improve her body language, showing her video of her outbursts, and she reined it in for the most part. By her junior year, Iowa was knocking off undefeated South Carolina in the national semis to reach the finals against LSU.

That championship game was Clark’s inauguration into the 24-hour sports-news cycle. In the final moments, when it was clear LSU would win, Tigers forward Angel Reese approached Clark and pointed at her ring finger, a bit of trash-talking that sparked needlessly cruel backlash; Reese was labeled “classless” and worse. Clark and Reese were pitted against each other as rivals, a narrative that has carried over to the WNBA. “I don’t get that at all,” says Clark. “We’re not best friends, by any means, but we’re very respectful of one another. Yes, we have had tremendous battles. But when have I ever guarded her? And when has she guarded me?” She downplays Reese’s gesture. “I didn’t think it was taunting,” says Clark. “It really didn’t bother me. It’s just like, ‘Why don’t you talk about them winning? Or the incredible run that we went on that nobody would have thought we would have ever gone on?’ The only thing people cared about was this controversy that was really fabricated and made up, and then that has continued to be the case ever since.” 

Going into her senior year, Clark was in a much different position than women’s basketball players who have come before her. Iowa played summer exhibition games in Italy and Croatia, and with the help of name, image, and likeness (NIL) sponsorship money from brands like Nike, Buick, and the midwestern grocery chain Hy-Vee, Clark treated her teammates to a yacht outing in the Adriatic. “I wouldn’t say it was boozy,” says former Iowa manager Will McIntyre, now director of scouting and technology for the Rutgers women’s team. “I would say bougie.”  

Clark loved college life, and even considered returning for a fifth year instead of entering the 2024 WNBA draft. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, NCAA players were granted an extra year of eligibility. Around January, however, Clark knew it was time to move on. It helped that the Fever had won the draft lottery, assuring that Clark, unquestionably the No. 1 pick, would begin her career in the Midwest. She announced her intention to enter the draft at the end of February. Lin Dunn, then the Fever general manager—now a senior adviser—saw the news on X. “I would have done a back handspring if I wasn’t 77 years old,” says Dunn. 

About a month later, on the eve of this year’s NCAA tournament, West Virginia’s coach told his players “let’s send Caitlin Clark packing.” So after Iowa dispatched the Mountaineers in the second round, Clark took a microphone before practice, stood on the scorer’s table, and sang “Country Roads” at the top of her lungs. “I kind of just troll,” Clark says. She has a big, loud personality with people she’s comfortable with. When former Iowa teammate Kate Martin visited Clark’s Indy apartment as a member of the Las Vegas Aces in September, Clark serenaded her with Luke Combs songs on her karaoke machine. “She’s not a good singer at all,” says Martin. (For the record, Temi Fagbenle, who was Clark’s Fever teammate this season and will join Martin on the expansion team the Golden State Valkyries in 2025, disagrees. As a rookie, Clark was tasked with singing happy birthday to the team’s vets. “She wouldn’t just sing a regular happy birthday,” says Fagbenle, who gives Clark’s voice a 7.5 on a 10-point scale and believes her sense of humor and charisma are part of her appeal. “It would be a grandiose performance. She loves her moments.”)

After a much hyped Clark-Reese rematch in the Elite Eight that drew the second largest ESPN audience to any basketball game, college or pro, in a dozen years, the Hawkeyes fell short in the championship game for the second straight year, this time to once again undefeated South Carolina. During the podium celebration Dawn Staley, the venerated Gamecocks coach, clutched the mic and said, “I want to personally thank Caitlin Clark for lifting up our sport.”

Clark had little time to reflect on her accomplishments. Two days before the WNBA draft, she flew to New York City after staying up late in Los Angeles while receiving the Wooden Award as national player of the year, went straight to the Saturday Night Live set, and collapsed on a couch there from fatigue. She got big laughs during her “Weekend Update” segment needling co-host Michael Che for past jokes about women’s sports. Her favorite: after Che told Clark that he’d pass along a signed apron she gave him to his girlfriend, Clark quipped, “You don’t have a girlfriend, Michael.” The crowd howled. Clark says Jason Sudeikis, who had cheered her on at Iowa games, had suggested that add-on.    

Clark’s segment did include a more serious moment, as she thanked a quintet of Black women—Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Cynthia Cooper, Staley, and Maya Moore, Clark’s basketball hero growing up—for paving the way for her success.  These stars, despite their athletic prowess, were never rewarded with the same level of attention that Clark is now receiving. “America was founded on segregation and to this day is very much about Black and White,” Fagbenle, who loved playing with Clark, writes in a text message. “In a sport dominated by Black/African-American players, White America has rallied around Caitlin Clark. The support looks mostly amazing, sometimes fanatical and territorial, sometimes racist. It seems that the Great White Hope syndrome is at play again.” Going into the WNBA season, Wilson, a two-time league champion and now three-time WNBA MVP, told the Associated Press she thought Clark’s race was a “huge” contributor to her popularity. “It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug,” Wilson said. “That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.” 

Clark is cognizant of the racial underpinnings of her stardom. “I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” says Clark. “A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been Black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it’s very important. I have to continue to try to change that. The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.” 

When Clark and her fellow soon-to-be rookies arrived at the WNBA draft on April 15, it was clear that women’s basketball had entered a new era. Clark, whom fans had seen mostly in her jersey, gym shorts, and ponytail, became the first athlete, in the WNBA or NBA, to be dressed for the draft head-to-toe in Prada, right down to the tinted sunglasses she wore on the “orange carpet.” The event broke another viewership record, as ESPN’s audience more than quadrupled over the previous year. 

Clark’s Fever teammates received a taste of their new reality on a preseason trip to Dallas to play the Wings. For one of only two times this year, Indiana flew commercial–the WNBA instituted charter flights for the regular season–and autograph hounds greeted the team at the gate. “People were literally running after us-slash-Caitlin in the airport,” says Fever guard Lexie Hull. Cameras flashed as they went to baggage claim. The Fever needed to load the bus, so Clark didn’t have time to stop for pictures. One guy chastised her: “Caitlin, you’re not that big-time!” 

“I’m not big-time,” Clark says now. “But you just chased me through the terminal.” 

Christie Sides, the Fever coach this past season, recalls the throng of people gathered to watch Clark walk to the bus before her regular-season debut against the Connecticut Sun. “It was people my age,” says Sides, 47. “It was people my parents’ age. It was people between my and my parents’ age. I saw people crying. I saw people shaking. It made me think of the Beatles. Or Elvis.” 

Despite all the hype, however, the Fever’s season threatened to implode before it ever really got started. Clark committed 10 turnovers in that debut game, a new record for a career opener. The schedule offered no favors to the young team, which also included the reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year, Aliyah Boston, the No. 1 overall pick in 2023. The Fever faced the Sun, a league semifinalist this season, and the New York Liberty, the 2024 champs, in its first four contests, before heading west for a three-game swing that included a matchup against the 2023 champs, the Aces. “Clearly, there was zero flow within the team,” says Clark. “It was just so choppy, and no one really knew what the other person was doing. Our defense was really bad.”

Clark was also adjusting to the rigors of the WNBA. “Professional players and professional coaches—this is no disrespect to college women’s basketball—are a lot smarter,” she says. “I love women’s college basketball. But if you go back and watch the way people guarded me in college, it’s almost, like, concerning. They didn’t double me, they didn’t trap me, they weren’t physical. And it’s hard. It’s college. A lot of those women will never go on to play another basketball game in their life. They don’t have the IQ of understanding how the game works. So I completely understand it. And it’s no disrespect at all. They don’t have the IQ. You have to simplify it for girls at that age.” 

There were glimmers of hope during Indiana’s 1-8 start. Clark had a few big scoring games and was second in the league in assists. She was named league Rookie of the Month for May. She wasn’t having trouble getting her shot off. She just wasn’t making enough of them. She was spotting open teammates. She just needed to clean up some of the passes. “I never really got down because I knew everything was so controllable,” says Clark. “I would come home at night and would be like, ‘This is so annoying.’ Because I know I’m literally, like, right there, of being one of the best players in the league.” She holds her forefinger a milinch from her thumb. “I knew I was so close to doing so many amazing things.”

When the Fever hosted the Chicago Sky, and Reese, in the first pro meeting between the two college superstars on June 1, Indiana gutted out a 71-70 victory. Clark had skipped a Noah Kahan concert–“No. 1 on my bucket list”–the night before knowing it would be a bad look to be seen out given the team’s terrible record. But that contest won’t be remembered for the basketball. In the third quarter, Chicago’s Chennedy Carter hip-checked Clark to the floor. Carter was called for a foul, which the next day was upgraded to a flagrant-1 violation. But while the WNBA could revise the ruling, it could not stem the ensuing furor. That Reese jumped off the bench and appeared to cheer Carter only added fuel to another Clark-adjacent fire. Some pundits cited Carter’s foul as evidence that jealous players, particularly Black players, were targeting Clark. The Chicago Tribune weighed in with an editorial, imploring that Clark “must not be allowed to become a target for rule breakers.” The Tribune wrote that Carter’s foul would have been “seen as an assault” outside the sports arena. The intense commentary came with consequences. Security had to intervene at the Sky’s hotel a few days later when a man approached Carter with a camera. “I’ve been called every racial slur imaginable lately and my teammates have had it even worse,” Sky forward Brianna Turner wrote on X.

Clark casts aside any notion that envious opponents were coming after her. “I never thought I was being targeted,” says Clark. “Obviously, that shouldn’t ever happen within a game. But basketball is physical. Your emotions can get the best of you. My emotions have gotten the best of me many times.” She says she did not see Reese cheering from the bench. “I don’t even know if she really knew what happened,” says Clark. “Honestly, I don’t think she was cheering because somebody hit me. I really don’t think that would be the case. I hope not.” Reese’s representatives did not make her available for this article.

“A lot of people that wanted to have opinions on what was happening probably didn’t even watch half the games that they were trying to have a take on and hadn’t supported the W for a really long time,” says Clark.

The day after the incident, in a matchup against the Liberty, Clark ran into a Jonquel Jones screen and ruptured her eardrum. “It was vibrating,” Clark says. “My hearing was really messed up.” She shot 1-10 from the field in a 36-point drubbing. A five-day reprieve in the schedule came at the perfect moment. 

During these off days, Clark shot extremely well during drills. “That gave me a lot of confidence,” says Clark. “It just reiterates, ‘You are one of the best shooters.’” In Indiana’s first game back, Clark hit seven three-pointers en route to a 30-point game and a Fever victory. On the bus, Clark texted her agent that she hoped that performance helped her case to make the Olympic team for Paris. Clark’s agent responded immediately: I have to call you. 

“And I’m like, ‘Sh-t,’” says Clark. 

The news, predictably, was unpleasant: the Olympic roster was about to leak, and Clark wasn’t on it. USA basketball officials hopped on a call with Clark. “They were like, ‘Yeah, we haven’t selected you. Obviously, we think the world of how you play and blah, blah, blah.’” She wasn’t really listening. She knew she was good enough to be on the team. And she had heard rumblings that she would be. 

At the same time, she understood the decision. The 12 players selected included many future Hall of Famers and Olympic veterans. “A point everybody was making was like, ‘Who are you taking off the team?’” Clark says. “And that was a tremendous point.” Clark also admits that during her early stretch for the 3-9 Fever, “I gave them a lot of reasons to keep me off the team with my play.”

Many people, however, rushed to her defense. The gist of the pro-Clark case: women’s basketball missed a golden marketing opportunity to grow the sport, given Clark’s popularity. It’s an argument that Clark wholly rejects. “I don’t want to be there because I’m somebody that can bring attention,” says Clark. “I love that for the game of women’s basketball. But at the same time, I want to be there because they think I’m good enough. I don’t want to be some little person that is kind of dragged around for people to cheer about and only watch because I’m sitting on the bench. That whole narrative kind of upset me. Because that is not fair. It’s disrespectful to the people that were on the team, that had earned it and were really good. And it’s also disrespectful to myself. ”

For the second time in about a week, Clark was leading the sports-news cycle. No matter that the NBA Finals had just tipped off. Everyone had a hot take on Clark, except, it seemed, for Clark. “I have a great skill of just blocking it out,” says Clark. “I don’t care what people say about me.”

Clark told Sides the snub “woke a monster.” Making the 2028 team “is a huge, huge goal,” she says, and she believes being left off the Paris roster “will definitely motivate me my entire career.” She calls her exclusion a “blessing.” Not only did it fuel her to prove that she belonged on the team, it also granted her a much needed break: there’d be a one-month pause in the WNBA schedule to accommodate players competing at the Olympics.

The monster arose almost immediately, as the Fever began to turn their season around. Indiana went on a four-game winning streak in June. Clark recorded the first-ever rookie triple-double (at least 10 points, assists, and rebounds) during a home victory against the Liberty. Right before the WNBA All-Star Game, Clark had 19 assists, a new WNBA single-game record, against the Wings. She started in the All-Star Game—against the U.S. Olympic team—and her 10 assists helped her side to a 117-110 victory. Most importantly, her All-Star experience further dispelled the notion that her pro colleagues were out to put her in her place. Her fellow All-Stars, Clark says, “are all looking to me to call the plays. It just showed the sign of respect they really do have for me.” 

During the first week of the Olympic break, she escaped to Cabo San Lucas with her boyfriend, former Iowa basketball player Connor McCaffery, who spent the past season as a basketball-development staffer with the Pacers and is now an assistant coach at Butler University. She drank “a million” Shirley Temples, with Sprite; devoured French brioche; and read Emily Henry’s Happy Place. Refreshed, she returned to Indianapolis, where the Fever practiced over the break, participating in bonding activities like a wiffle-ball home-run derby. Clark once again displayed her troll side. “Nobody else was able to hit,” she says. “I was smashing bombs, and it was pissing everybody off. It was so good. Because I was talking crap, and then I backed it up.” 

When the Fever returned to the court for games, they won seven of their first eight. Clark led the team to the playoffs for the first time since 2016 and raised her play to All-WNBA First Team level. During the dog days of August, when sports radio is usually obsessing over the upcoming NFL season, hosts debated the Rookie of the Year race between Reese and Clark, who set a new WNBA record for double-doubles (at least 10 points and rebounds) in a season. 

By this point, Clark had gone global. The owner of a Chinese restaurant in West Des Moines recently told Clark’s mother that she overheard two kids talking about her daughter on a Taiwanese subway. Clark watch parties were held in Iceland. Fever president Allison Barber, who has since left the franchise to launch a youth sports complex for girls, was driving through northwest Indiana this summer when she stopped for soup. The owner of the joint saw the Fever logo on her shirt and asked if she had a connection to the team; as Barber was walking to her car, the owner chased her, holding his phone. He asked if she could say hello to her elderly dad, a Clark diehard in Greece.  

Charles Whitehead, a logistics worker from Orange, N.J., drove three hours to the Mohegan Sun Arena to watch Indiana take on Connecticut in the first round of the playoffs. Whitehead paid some $500 for his seat near the front row. “Caitlin got me here,” says Whitehead, 35, who’s wearing a red Clark Fever jersey. He points across the court, where Clark is signing autographs less than an hour before tipoff. “Rock star,” he says. I wonder if, before Clark’s emergence, Whitehead ever pictured himself wearing a women’s basketball jersey and paying good money for WNBA playoff tickets. “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” he says. “Never, never, never, never.”

Clark thought Indiana could make it to the championship. “People would probably laugh if they read that in this article,” she says. “But I was being dead serious.” In the end, however, the Sun swept the Fever—but not before Clark found herself at the center of one last controversy: in Game 1, Connecticut’s DiJonai Carrington poked Clark in the eye while trying to deflect a pass. The contact became more fodder for social media and elsewhere. After USA Today’s Christine Brennan asked Carrington if she intended to hit Clark in the eye—“Obviously, it’s never intentional,” Carrington said—the WNBA players union publicly called for Brennan’s credentials to be revoked, saying the interview was “a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media.” After the Sun eliminated the Fever, Connecticut’s Alyssa Thomas said, “I think that in my 11-year career I never experienced the racial comments [like] from the Indiana Fever fan base.”

This whole contretemps still annoys Clark. “Never once did that cross my mind, that it was on purpose,” she says. “I’ve been poked in the eye many times playing basketball. It happens.” Clark feels debate about intent reveals a gender double standard. “If that would have happened in the NBA, do you think people would have showed up the next day and been like, ‘Hey, Tyrese Haliburton, did you poke Steph Curry in the eye on purpose?’” she says. While Clark says she wasn’t aware that the union was going to reprimand Brennan, she supported its decision. “That whole line of questioning that [Carrington] got was not appropriate, and I did not like that,” she says. 

Many observers seem inclined to reserve judgment on Clark and her approach to confronting off-court issues given that she was a rookie adjusting to life as an athletic icon. “She should be afforded some grace,” Fagbenle texts. “Understanding the racial tensions in this country, could she have been more proactive about condemning her racist fans’ words and distancing herself from them? Sure–if she’s comfortable standing up for others and challenging her racist fans, unsolicited–but not everyone is built like that.” When asked if Clark did enough to combat the racist threats against other players, Montgomery, the Atlanta Dream co-owner and former player, declined to comment. Dream forward Cheyenne Parker-Tyus, meanwhile, says she thinks Clark handled it all well. “I’m not concerned about her and how she stands with racial comments or hateful comments,” she says. “She feels the way we all feel. She’s made that clear.” 

“I know people want her to say more and do more, and I’m like, at 22 years old, how many of us have the skill set, have the ability to be able to communicate?” says former Fever star and Hall of Famer Tamika Catchings, whose franchise rookie scoring record Clark broke this year. “She’s a game changer on the court, but having to be a game changer off the court and get into the politics part of it, I don’t know if that’s her responsibility.”

While Terri Jackson, executive director of WNBA players association, hopes Clark leans into her voice more down the road, “let’s be clear,” she says. “The responsibility for setting the tone and sending a message was absolutely at the league and team, but particularly at the league, level.” (During her WNBA Finals press conference, commissioner Cathy Engelbert promised to “attack” racism against its players “multidimensionally.” She hinted at potential online controls to help clean up the discourse. “There are some technology solutions out there that we could deploy and employ,” Engelbert said.)

“What comes with being a professional athlete is speaking on important issues,” says four-time WNBA champion and five-time Olympic gold medalist Sue Bird. “And so I imagine she’s going to continue to educate and get better at that as well. In today’s world, people will use you if you don’t speak about your own feelings and thoughts. So by getting more comfortable and confident in your voice, you can eliminate that.”

Clark says she really does stay off social media during the season and wasn’t aware that talk about the eye poke, for example, was percolating until she was asked about it. “It’s something I’m trying to navigate,” she says. “I’m trying to find a balance while being a rookie.” But she hears the calls imploring her to step up for her colleagues, particularly in a league known for its outspokenness on social-justice issues. “I’m probably the most popular player in the league at the moment, and somebody a lot of people turn to to have a voice on this type of stuff,” says Clark. “I hope we can do a better job as a league of protecting our players and putting better resources around them to make it a safer environment. And obviously, there’s only so much you can police on social media, because we don’t have full control over social media. But there is real responsibility. I understand that, and I acknowledge that.” So what’s her message to bad-faith actors harassing others in her name? “Just stop,” says Clark. “Because that’s not who I am.”

To get to lunch after her workout, I trail Clark down a rainy back alleyway that smells like garbage, past the “Ray’s Trash Service” bins, through the kitchen, down a narrow flight of stairs to a private room of a restaurant scouted by her security team. (She says her team gave her a 30-page pdf with instructions on how to navigate movements at the Swift concert.) I tell Clark and Hull, who has joined us, that the walk reminded me of the famous scene from Goodfellas where the mafioso played by Ray Liotta enters the Copacabana through the kitchen. They haven’t seen the film but appreciate the comparison. “We’re mobsters,” says Clark.

Over carnitas and fish tacos, we talk about their new head coach, Stephanie White, who had been hired three days earlier. Indiana had dismissed Sides in October; management wanted a coach with more playoff experience. White, a former Fever player, coached the Sun the past two seasons and led Indiana to  the WNBA Finals as head coach in 2015. Clark insists she had nothing to do with the change. “I’m actually not the general manager of the team,” she says. “Believe it or not!” adds Hull. 

Clark’s eyes are glued to the TV, where the USC women are playing Ole Miss on the opening day of college basketball. “I feel like if I was out there, I would literally have 50,” says Clark. “The college game is so much easier than professional.” 

But Clark knows she can get better. She expresses admiration for White’s game plans against the Fever. “We didn’t usually have the best game plan back,” Clark said when White stopped by the gym during her workout. “Like, here’s a ball screen, Caitlin. Figure it out.” 

At one point talk turned to Clark’s high school soccer career. “I would get so many yellow cards,” Clark said. 

“You still do,” said White. “What are you talking about?” 

Indeed, Clark finished her season with six technical fouls, tied for second most in the WNBA. “I only probably deserved, like—two.”

“Haaaaa!” White yelled. “She’s a comedian, too.” 

Controlling Clark’s fire has always been a challenge for her coaches. It makes her special, but techs can come back to bite you. Same with her mistakes: Clark shattered the WNBA’s all-time season record for turnovers, but you want her throwing some high-risk passes. As for other areas of improvement, Clark’s working on her midrange shooting. “I used to have a middie bag,” she says. “I just never had to use it.” And she wants to get stronger. “Teams’ No. 1 tactic of stopping me is, ‘be physical with her,’” Clark says. “Because they know either I don’t like it or it can throw me off.”

Speculation was swirling about whether Clark would play in Unrivaled, the new 3-on-3 league founded by Stewart and Napheesa Collier that begins in January. The startup has attracted attention as a way for WNBA players to make more money without having to play overseas. Still, Clark—who made $75,535 in salary her first year on the Fever but thanks to her many endorsements is doing just fine financially—is taking a pass. “I didn’t rule out doing it in the future, but this year is just not the best for me,” she says. She thinks spending the winter lifting weights and working solo in the gym will elevate her game. “It’s going to be good for me to do my own thing and have my own space,” she says. “I kind of want to just stay out of the spotlight.”

She’ll be back there soon enough. “Personally, I’m just scratching the surface of what I can do and hopefully how I can change the world and impact people,” she says. “There’s also been so many people that are not involved in women’s sports, that are just in the workforce, or whatever they do, and they’re just like, ‘Thank you for what you do for women.’ I’ve heard that a million times.” With lunch wrapped, Clark drives to White’s press conference, where she sits front row with Boston and Hull. Her day concludes at historic Hinkle Fieldhouse where she watches McCaffery’s Butler team win its season opener. 

Fifth grader Ellie Dillon and a friend—both wearing Clark shirts—wait more than a half hour after the game to catch Clark, who as she’s leaving the gym with McCaffery stops to give them autographs. “It almost doesn’t feel real,” says Dillon moments after meeting Clark. “That that’s actually her, standing right in front of you.”

Styled by Adri Zgirdea; hair and make-up by Erin Lee smith; production by The Wall Productions