Whoopi Goldberg defends her blatant foul on Kaitlyn Clark: “This is basketball!”

Media

By Hannah Banrick, Fox News

“The View” hosts, including Whoopi Goldberg, defended the WNBA player’s blatant foul on rising star Kaitlyn Clark on Monday, saying it happens all the time in basketball.

“Let’s be real, okay? This is basketball, okay?” said co-host Whoopi Goldberg. “This happens in basketball all the time. Angel Reyes lined up the other day.

Clark, the first overall pick by the Indiana Fever, received a foul on an off-ball hip check on Saturday from the Chicago Sky’s Chennedy Carter.

The moment went viral and led to discussions about whether Clark was a target because the star guard is attracting unprecedented attention to the WNBA.

People were reading too much into this moment, saying, “They’re there to win. And just because they’re women, get over yourselves, they’re athletes,” Goldberg said.

Co-host Sunny Hostin said this was about the fifth time “The View” – which focuses on women’s issues and viewpoints – has discussed the NBA in recent memory, before telling viewers that basketball is a “contact sport.” “.

Carter checked on Clark on the ground during Saturday’s Sky-Fever game after the Sky scored.

The Sky’s Angel Reese, who at LSU was a college rival of Iowa State’s Clark, jumped up and cheered the play from the bench.

Carter received a common foul call at the time, but the league upgraded it to a more serious -1 flagrant violation after later reviewing it.

“It’s not a tasty game. When you’re sitting there [and] You watch, sometimes when that happens you think, “Oh, wow.” “I couldn’t take it,” Hostin said, noting that Clark’s mistake was “obviously a blatant mistake.”

Hostin also brought up Connecticut Sun player Alyssa Thomas’ flagrant foul on Reese in late May.

Houston praised Reese’s reaction to the foul in her post-match press conference, where she said: “Thank you, AT, for texting me because I got back up, kept going and kept pushing.”

“It’s going to make them better. It’s going to make Kaitlyn better. It’s going to make the owners better. It’s going to make the league better,” Hostin said.

Clark is arguably the highest-profile WNBA player of all time after her breakout career at Iowa State made her a sensation.

Known for her outstanding shooting and passing, she finished her career as the all-time leading scorer in Division I basketball history and led Iowa State to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances in 2023 and 2024.

Her games set records in the women’s basketball rankings.

She made millions in NIL (name, image and likeness) deals while in college, and reportedly signed a staggering $28 million endorsement deal with Nike earlier this year.

Houston recently suggested that Clark was getting a lot of attention because of “white privilege” and “beautiful privilege.”

“Now, Kaitlyn Clark is bringing this money, this sponsorship, hopefully, to the league and other players will benefit from it. But I think she’s more relatable to more people because she’s white, because she’s attractive, and unfortunately, there’s still a stigma against the LGBTQ+ community.” Seventy Percent of the WNBA is Black. “One-third of the players are from the LGBTQ+ community, and we have to do something about that stigma in this country,” she said last month.

During Monday’s segment, co-host Ana Navarro echoed comments made by Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon.

“It gets interpreted that some of our minority black and brown women hate her because she’s white, and that’s not the case. Let’s take Caitlyn out of the picture,” Hammon said. “It’s not about Caitlyn. Give her her flowers. She did things that no man or woman, black or white, in college basketball has ever done. Give that woman her flowers.”

“Let’s not make it about race, it’s about basketball,” Navarro said after quoting Hammon.