I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll do it,’” McNutt recalled recently over breakfast at a diner on Capitol Hill. “I thought it was going to be a 10-minute thing.”Forty commercial-free minutes later, McNutt, 34, was a viral star, and the sports media world was afire in takes about how to talk — and how not to talk — about women’s sports.
Smith and Sharpe were emphatic that Clark, the former Iowa star whose fame had jet-boosted WNBA ratings and attendance, was being targeted by her opponents. They wanted McNutt to admit that players were jealous of Clark.
“Say it!” Smith yelled.
“Say it!” Sharpe yelled.
No, dude, Monica McNutt does not need your WNBA take
As the WNBA grows, so does tension between players and media
“This is not a ballet performance,” she eventually shot back. She said the league had a history of rough play, and she implored the men to not generalize about all of the players in the league.
“The league rooting against Caitlin Clark is an absolute farce,” she said.
Then she threw her own haymaker, questioning the show’s lack of coverage of women’s sports.
“Stephen A., respectfully, with your platform, you could have been doing this three years ago if you wanted to.”
Smith, who is never speechless, was (almost) speechless.
“Wow,” he said.
Clark’s arrival in the WNBA and in the American sporting consciousness has thrust women’s basketball into uncharted territory: the center of the sports media universe, including the hot-take economy that fuels cable TV and social media.
The results have been dramatic — and revealing.
Charles Barkley, the bombastic TNT analyst: “Y’all should be thanking [Clark] for getting y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”
Pat McAfee, the sleeve-averse YouTuber turned ESPN star: “Just call it for what it is: There’s one White b---- for the Indiana team who is a superstar.” (He later apologized.)
Jemele Hill, the former ESPN pundit turned Atlantic columnist: “I have long dreamed of the day that female athletes would demand the level of media attention traditionally reserved for men. Now that day is finally here — and it’s a lot less satisfying than I imagined.”
Only Sheryl Swoopes, the TV analyst and former WNBA star, said nothing, but that was a statement in itself: She went conspicuously silent during a game she was calling that didn’t feature Clark when her broadcast partner discussed Clark’s accomplishments.
“Women’s basketball is not ready [for Caitlin Clark],” Colin Cowherd said on his Fox Sports radio show.
Now, with the WNBA playoffs starting Sunday, Clark and the WNBA are set to return to the national spotlight as her Indiana Fever prepares for a first-round series. While the Clark discourse continues, there remains no moment that crystallized it better — that revealed how men talk about women’s sports and how many women believe women’s sports should be talked about — than McNutt’s appearance on “First Take.”
“That’s the one time in television,” McNutt said, “that I got up at the end and was shaking.”
A FEW WEEKS AFTER the “First Take” appearance, McNutt was picking at her breakfast, reflecting on her viral fame. She had spent the weekend in D.C. for her bridal shower and now, in a pink blouse and heels, was toting a suitcase before returning to New York. She would get married to Justin Jackson, the director of operations for the National Basketball Players Association, back in D.C. later in the summer.
During the segment, McNutt explained, she received texts from people at ESPN. The message: Don’t let Smith and Sharpe bully you.
In the days that followed, she appeared on so many shows that she eventually turned down an NBC News segment. “I’ve never gone viral like that,” she recalled. “And I remember thinking, ‘This is annoying.’ I literally told my publicist, ‘We’re not doing any more.’ Five minutes later, Jon Stewart called.”
That Stewart would devote a segment of his show to Clark and the conversation around her was only more evidence that it reached peak cultural intrigue, which McNutt quickly acknowledged.
“Frankly, Jon, Caitlin Clark got me here,” McNutt told Stewart.
“Not true,” Stewart said. He added: “The viral moment maybe brought you to some national attention. … Your voice, your knowledge, your passion has cut through it for me.”
McNutt grew up in D.C.’s Maryland suburbs, not far from NBA star Kevin Durant, and played college basketball at Georgetown, where she was second-team all-Big East as a junior and helped the Hoyas to the Sweet 16 as a senior. She still has a practicable jump shot, she says.
She got a master’s degree in broadcast journalism at Maryland before grinding her way to prominence in the media business. She was laid off twice from local TV stations, spent time as a substitute teacher and freelanced (including for The Washington Post), then caught on as an analyst on ACC Network. She landed the radio analyst job for the New York Knicks in 2023 and is now a regular across ESPN’s basketball coverage.
McNutt, in the diner, emphasized that she and Smith were on good terms. But she admitted she was still sorting through her feelings, particularly around one phrase Smith had used.
“Protect the asset,” he had said repeatedly, arguing that the WNBA risked tremendous damage to the league if Clark was harmed by another player.
“Please tell me what it means to protect the asset and compete at a high level,” McNutt said. “It’s like suddenly y’all don’t know how to talk about competition because there’s vaginas involved.”
There was also the idea of jealousy and the way Sharpe and Smith demanded she admit that other WNBA players were jealous of Clark’s money and fame as if it were an important revelation.
“You mean to tell me that nobody in the NBA and NFL is jealous?” McNutt asked at breakfast. “Why is this a thing that women can’t be?”
She compared those accusations to Smith’s very public contract demands, in which he often has declared that he deserves to be the highest-paid talent at ESPN.
“The numbers he’s going after because of McAfee, [Troy] Aikman, [Joe] Buck, he might say they’re raising market value,” she said. “But at the bottom of that is, ‘They’re not about to get paid more than me.’”
“Sounds like jealousy to me,” she added, “but I haven’t seen ‘Inside Out 2.’”
To McNutt, there was a disconnect not just in how talking heads were talking about women’s sports but how they talked about women.
“You’re telling women how to exist,” she said. “If we’re going to talk about athletes, let’s talk about athletes. Let’s not tell women how to compete, because that’s something different.”
As for Smith?
“We don’t have any issues,” she said. “He’s a machine. The news cycle kept moving, and he kept moving, as did I.”
SPORTS, AND BY EXTENSION sports TV, have forever been the domain of men. It wasn’t long ago that female reporters weren’t allowed into men’s locker rooms and women’s sports were barely televised or covered.
By any metric, though — TV ratings, franchise values, attendance, exposure — women’s sports are growing fast. The WNBA just inked a media rights deal valued at more than $2 billion over 11 years. The National Women’s Soccer League and the NCAA women’s basketball tournament have scored big increases in recent deals, too. A study by Wasserman found women’s sports have jumped from 5 percent to 15 percent of all media coverage.
Clark is at the center of it, and the discourse is playing catch-up.
“Talking about sports has [historically] been talking about men,” said Bomani Jones, a sports commentator and host of “The Right Time” podcast. “And there are ways you can’t talk about women in public. … So you have this study in masculinity, and we add women into the equation, and not everybody is sure how to talk about it.”
Consider, he said, the athletes’ bodies. Much of sports commentary revolves around whether a player is big enough, or too big, or big in the right or wrong ways. The same questions apply to women’s sports, obviously. But just a few years ago, a WNBA coach was fined and suspended for suggesting to a referee that an opposing player weighed 300 pounds.
Women’s sports have suffered through decades of neglect, but Jones also noted that even in places that have earned plaudits for their attention to women’s sports, some still struggle to talk about players as competitors. He recalled an “Around the Horn” segment on ESPN several years ago that focused on a big loss by the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
“I was listening to how everybody was talking so kindly, and I had to say, ‘Are we going to talk about them as athletes?’” Jones said. “Because they were not being talked about like the U.S. men’s basketball team; they were being talked about like some delicate flower.”
Another dynamic that can’t be ignored, said Elle Duncan, a “SportsCenter” host who is involved in women’s basketball coverage at ESPN, is what happens after someone such as Barkley, a prominent broadcaster with legions of male followers, talks about the WNBA, a league made up of predominantly Black and many queer women.
“When we have someone that [has a giant platform] and says, ‘Oh, the girls in the WNBA hate Caitlin Clark,’ that immediately sends the nastier parts of the internet to target them,” Duncan said. “When they are generalizing a group of women in particular, a subgroup of women — predominantly Black, many of them queer — it becomes an attack on them. I’ve got [WNBA] players that will send me screenshots [from social media], and you see the responses to posts that have nothing to do with Caitlin Clark: ‘You couldn’t [hold a candle to Clark], you n----- b----.’”
Smith, in an interview with The Post, acknowledged the line he was trying to toe in his WNBA comments.
“Ladies are very protective of products that have to do with ladies,” he said. “And rightfully so. … [They] have been victimized and marginalized and haven’t gotten the love or the shine that they have so richly deserved. But I’m also mindful of women who have a lot to say and also don’t want to be placated. They want you to come at them like you will come at anybody else.”
If the two sides of that equation are ever at odds, it’s clear which side Smith gravitates to. After the “First Take” segment with McNutt, he devoted an episode of his podcast to her appearance. “You ever hear of Monica McNutt?” he asked. “Well, you have now because she’s on ‘First Take’ a lot.”
“In everything from the last couple of weeks, I could have done without that,” McNutt said of that podcast episode.
MCNUTT IMAGINED A BETTER WAY. Instead of a single flagrant foul in an early-season game, WNBA coverage could be centered around the juggernaut New York Liberty or the historic season A’ja Wilson put together. She had a key word, “mindfulness,” that she wanted to anchor the discussions.
Craving more diverse coverage from a show such as “First Take,” though, is not a new experience for some sports fans. The show rarely talks about Major League Baseball or the NHL — unless an off-the-field controversy promises ratings. When the Denver Nuggets won the NBA title two seasons ago, they were often shunted to the background in favor of the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James. Hard fouls on Caitlin Clark, meanwhile, clearly drive eyeballs.
“You might be right that there isn’t mindfulness in other discussions,” McNutt said when asked about “First Take” and its sport-agnostic obsession with ratings. She added: “I’m not asking you to lead with Aces vs. Liberty, but there’s a way to do it.”
Smith was incredulous that “First Take” owed women’s sports anything.
“I could have gone to [ESPN Chairman] Jimmy Pitaro and them and said: ‘Bring the trucks, bring the directors, bring the producers, bring everybody else? Spend all of this money to go and cover this WNBA event that wasn’t nearly as popular four or five years ago as it is now?’ That’s where [McNutt] was wrong,” he said.
But women’s basketball is personal for McNutt, which she acknowledges. And that meant another question: Was all of this ultimately good for the WNBA? Did the growing relevance of women’s basketball, which now meant Nikki Haley could score political points by throwing shade at the Olympic team for leaving Clark off the roster, actually represent … progress?
McNutt said she had talked with people around the WNBA who were openly debating it. In the league office, there were staffers who were thrilled with 40 minutes of uninterrupted WNBA talk on “First Take.”
“As a media-savvy person, I can recognize it got us talking,” she said. “But for me, knowing how hard these women have fought for coverage, they’re fighting for [a collective bargaining agreement], and they just want to be respected. And all of these intersectional identities that already get pushed off to the corner and just general society at large, you might just take a deep breath, recognize you just got here [and] you’re not the expert. So I don’t know — is that unfair? Am I being too altruistic? Possibly.”
“You’ve got to bring the joy,” McNutt said. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
After breakfast, McNutt walked a few blocks to a park to pose for a portrait. She sat down on a bench and played a song by George Benson on her phone, filling the park with music. She turned up the volume and sang along, shuffling her feet and snapping her fingers. The discourse would, inevitably, rage again. But it was still all hoops.
Turn your love around
Don’t you turn me down
“You’ve got to bring the joy,” McNutt said.
