Every professional athlete has that moment when they realize they’re not in college, or the minors, anymore, and that they are competing with and against the best of the best. It could be a game where they are completely overmatched, or it could be a singular play when they realize they’re not playing 18- to 22-year-olds anymore, and instead battling grown adults.
Caitlin Clark had that moment early in her rookie season with the Indiana Fever. She discussed it in detail when she joined the “New Heights” podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce.
Jason Kelce followed up by asking where she had popped her eardrum before, and Clark said it occurred on the water when she was launched off a tube.
“So, that was my welcome to the W moment,” Clark said, before discussing the recovery process that happens after a popped eardrum.
“There’s not really much you can do. It takes months to heal. After the season, the doctor had to go back in and look and see if it had closed. If it doesn’t close, you have to have a minor procedure, but lucky enough, it closed so I was fine.”
The player who set the screen was Jonquel Jones, the 2021 WNBA MVP who has roughly six inches and 75 pounds on Clark. It was a clean, albeit physical, play in which no foul was whistled. However, throughout Clark’s season, there was a notion that the veteran WNBA players were targeting the rookie because the hype she was getting was surpassing those who had spent years in the league.
Jones responded to the notion that players were going after Clark in an interview on the “Kickin It With Dee” podcast.
“It was never about trying to attack her. It was just about us going out there. ... The best sign of respect you can get from an opponent is them coming out there and playing you hard.”
While Clark labeled that screen as the precise moment, the play was only a microcosm of Clark’s introduction to the WNBA. Clark and the Fever were dominated by the Liberty, likely in a way that Clark had never been before on a basketball court.
The rookie shot 1 of 10 from the field, with just three points in 29 minutes of play. Her three points were a season-low, her 10 percent field goal percentage was a season-low, and the 104–68 victory for the Liberty meant that the 36-point defeat that Indiana suffered was its biggest blowout loss of the season.
Fortunately, for Clark, it was just one game, and she rebounded in a big way in her following game, five days later versus the Washington Mystics. Clark followed up her season-low by matching her season-high with 30 points, while also knocking down a career-high of seven 3-point attempts.
Possessing resiliency is a trait that’s needed for any athlete, and Clark again displayed that the next time she saw the Liberty and Jones.
Roughly a month after getting her eardrum popped, Clark went off for 19 points, 13 assists, and 12 rebounds in the Fever’s lone victory, out of four tries, against the Liberty. It was the first triple-double of Clark’s WNBA career, and it also made her both the first player in Fever franchise history, as well as the first rookie in WNBA history, to record a triple-double.
What makes that game, and roughly 75 percent of her rookie season, even more impressive in hindsight is that we now know she did it with a busted eardrum that takes months to fully heal. That final meeting with the Liberty was one of the highlights of Clark’s historic debut season, which included starting in the All-Star Game, leading the league in assists, winning Rookie of the Year, and being named All-WNBA First-Team.
