Cheap shots on Clark aren't helping WNBA.

Caitlin Clark (right) hits the floor after taking a cheap shot from Chicago's Chennedy Carter.

A very good female friend who was a basketball player of considerable talent told me something years ago, and I've been reminded recently of its wisdom.

She said, "There is no worse form of jealousy than what some female athletes have for other female athletes."

Ladies and gentlemen of the court of public opinion, I present to you Exhibit I in the case of Jealous Athletes v. Caitlin Clark.

I turned on the TV promptly at noon Saturday to watch the WNBA game between the Chicago Sky and the Indiana Fever in Indianapolis. That brought my season total of WNBA games viewed to seven, which is at least seven more than I had watched in the previous 26 seasons of WNBA competition. And while I did have some warmth in my heart for the Chicago franchise (you may recall that Bishop Feehan's own Missy Traversi had a tryout with them during their inaugural training camp in 2006), I found myself rooting for Indiana to earn its second victory of the Caitlin Clark era.

They love the Fever in Indianapolis.

And why not? Just about everyone that watches the WNBA these days is doing it only because Clark, the former Iowa star, has brought her formidable, attention-grabbing talents from college to the pros. And please, don't try to tell me otherwise. If not for her arrival in the league and the immediate boost of popularity it has gotten in return, the WNBA would still be lingering deep at the bottom level of sports limbo. 

For example -- The Fever defeated the Sky, 71-70, before more than 18,000 fans at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indy. Right after the game, ESPN switched to the regular-season finale in the United Football League pitting the Michigan Panthers against the Birmingham Stallions in the latter city. Birmingham won, 20-19, before a crowd that can best described as "relatives and close friends." Even the UFL website left the attendance line blank in the official box score, embarrassing as it must have been. There was no camera angle possible that could make it look as if there was anything other than empty seats within the 47,100-seat Protective Stadium.

The times, they are a'changing -- but rather than embrace its newfound popularity, the WNBA seems to be bound and determined to undermine it.

With very little time left in the third quarter of play, Clark was positioned by herself to the right of the lane, about basket-high, as the play started to head to the other end of the court. Before Clark turned to join the play, however, Chicago reserve forward Chennedy Carter came from nowhere to slam into Clark, slamming both hip and shoulder into the 6-foot (and considerably more slender) guard and sending her careening to the floor.

It was, by all definitions, the textbook example of a cheap shot -- totally unnecessary contact away from the ball. Various video replays that caught Carter's approach not only showed Clark's entire body seemingly rippling with impact waves from the violent force of the contact, but they also caught Carter shouting something at Clark before laying the check on her (I'm no lip-reader, but it surely looked like, "Yo, bitch!").

It was ruled just a common foul, and not what should have been a flagrant foul worthy of ejection from the game. (Sunday update: After reviewing the play, the WNBA upgraded Carter's foul to a Flagrant 1, which is little more than an "our bad" admission.)

TV replays also caught Sky rookie forward Angel Reese, she of the celebrated rivalry with Clark during their LSU vs. Iowa games, embracing Carter as she came off the floor and celebrating the cheap hit her teammate dropped on the league's leading rookie scorer, and arguably, its most popular player.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

After the game, during the post-game press conference involving Carter and Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon, reporters did their jobs and asked Carter directly about the play.

"I ain't answering no Caitlin Clark questions," Carter said. At that point, Weatherspoon, a first-year coach but a former WNBA star who suffered the indignities of playing in a league that nobody cared about, called an abrupt halt to the press conference. The only thing missing was a Bill Belichick-like "We're on to New York," referring to her next game on Tuesday against the Liberty.

Not only shameful, but classless.

(Another Sunday update: The WNBA has fined the Sky franchise $5,000 for not following WNBA media-availability policies and Reese $1,000 for not making herself available to reporters. I bet their wrists stung for a couple of seconds.)

The WNBA is squandering its meal ticket.

Look, I'm not saying that Caitlin Clark should be enveloped in bubble wrap and treated like a piece of fine china. She broke every scoring record in the NCAA record books. Of course, players in the WNBA were eager to see if the increased level of physicality in the pro game would take her down a peg. And from what I hear, she does her share of trash talking and occasionally overacts when hit, trying to draw the foul. Legendary Celtics' announcer Johnny Most used to call that the "Stanislavski method" of flopping when opponents tried to get a call. Of course, he never described flopping by the Celtics that way.

So far, there have been adjustments. Clark rarely gets free for her signature "logo threes" from way downtown. Her defense has been pedestrian at best, but she's still getting plenty of points and lots of assists -- although she'd be getting a lot more of the latter if her teammates had the skills to be where they can handle Clark's thread-the-needle passes. 

Clark certainly should not be leading the WNBA in turnovers, but the Indiana Fever have her for a reason. They're not a very good team, and they didn't get much better even with the previous year's No. 1 draft pick, forward Aliyah Boston, who is only starting to figure out the potential benefits of playing with Clark.

It doesn't help that Christie Sides, in her second year coaching the Fever, acts like she could be seriously outcoached by at least four of the women that coach high school basketball locally. She has no idea when or why to get Clark out of a ballgame for rest. In at least two notable circumstances I've seen recently, Indiana had tenuous leads going into the middle of the fourth quarter when Sides put Clark on the bench for extended stretches -- during which time the opposition went off on runs and either took the lead or cut the margin significantly.

Christie Sides: She's overmatched.

Nor has Sides had the courage to come to her star player's defense. She has one technical foul so far, earned in protesting one of the many away-from-the-play hits that Clark has taken. Even after Saturday's game, she told assembled reporters that she was sending films of the questionable hits to the commissioner's office, but then she paused -- and said meekly that she didn't want to be fined as a result of her comments.

That was considerably spineless of her.

Also spineless has been the response of Clark's own teammates to her travails. Maybe there was some initial jealousy of Clark's popularity when she first arrived, but at least some members of the Fever are starting to realize that she is their meal ticket. Now, they have to learn how to defend her when she is being assaulted. 

Maybe players like Carter or Reese (the latter who looks like she'd be afraid to get her makeup smeared) would think twice about trying to put Clark out of a game if they knew they were going to get a right hook to the jaw from Boston immediately afterward. I'm not a fan of retaliation -- and I have a story to tell at the end of this to illustrate why -- but Clark's teammates absolutely have to let her know that they have her back if they are to continue to grow and prosper.

Also, the WNBA clearly needs to step in at some point. Weatherspoon should be fined and Carter suspended for a few games to send a message to the rest of the league that this behavior is unacceptable.

Sure, the league wasn't even a sports fan's afterthought until Clark arrived on the scene. There is evidence to suggest that some of these issues may be racially motivated -- I find it interesting that, aside from Diana Taurasi's early comment about the W being a next-level challenge for Clark and how that was misinterpreted somewhat, much of the negativity about Clark's popularity seems to come from Black athletes that believe they and their predecessors were wrongfully shortchanged before Whitey White Girl arrived on the scene.

Well, maybe they're right. That was wrong. But now, America seems to care about women's basketball in a way that it has never cared before -- and now is not the time to re-open old wounds and to let anger over past mistakes derail a promising but fragile chance for widespread acceptance.

What sort of message is this crusade against Caitlin Clark sending to the most important fans of all, the next generation of female basketball players that will be the league's lifeblood in the decades to come? I've covered high school sports for 56 years now, and the one thing that is constant is that young athletes tend to emulate what they see from their heroes in the pros. Even to this day, boys and girls alike will slap the bottoms of their sneakers exactly the same way that Larry Bird used to, although my guess is hardly any of them realize that's where the practice originated.

I've also seen that girls have been more resistant than the boys to some of the more negative influences of pro players' excesses. I see a lot of jawing and posturing in the boys' game, and frequent mugging to the crowd. There was one game I covered in last year's MIAA boys' tournament where one kid on a visiting team kept complaining to an official about an obvious call long after he should have stopped, and then he turned to the crowd and started gesturing. Having seen enough of that, I was quite pointed in my broadcast commentary about the lack of wisdom being displayed by the athlete and his coach for letting that behavior continue.  

Girls don't do that. I can say without hesitation that coaches like Foxboro's Lisa Downs, Bishop Feehan's Amy Dolores, Mansfield's Heather McPherson and Attleboro's Bri Bracken would nip it in the bud quickly if it did. And I can also guarantee that none of these coaches want to see future players showing up in their practices acting like the ladies in the WNBA that believe they need to deliver "messages" to Caitlin Clark.

Defend the hell out of her, yes. Faceguard her. Bump her around when it's legit. Make her work for every point, rebound and assist. Stop her if you can. And if you can't, don't blame her for the reasons why people ignored the WNBA for the better part of three decades and just work harder the next time.

To do anything else -- including this ridiculous rookie initiation of Clark that is totally classless, thoroughly undignified and potentially injurious -- is to spit in the face of young girls everywhere that want to grow up to be the next WNBA superstars.

I did say I had one more story to tell, about why I'm not a big fan of retribution even when it seems justified, and here it is.

Many years ago, a good friend of mine played for what was then Bryant College. She was a double-figure scorer and rebounder and a pretty dynamic player, so naturally, a lot of her opponents tried just about everything to limit the damage she could do in a game.

One day, she was playing in a game at St. Anselm and was doing just about all of the good things she always does. And at some point, somebody from St. A's decided to do something about it.

In action under the boards, an outside shot had already clanged off the rim and was heading long and outside the paint. My friend was poised in rebounding position but was already aware that the ball was going elsewhere, so for a brief moment, her guard was down. Suddenly, a St. Anselm forward of equal size raced into the paint and delivered a hip check into my friend's side that sent her backside and waist going in a direction neither was designed to do -- almost identical to the hit that Carter delivered to Clark on Saturday.

Not expecting the violent level of contact, my friend was sent reeling from under the basket to almost out of the lane entirely. But she kept her feet -- and outraged by the painful and unnecessary nature of the hit, she wheeled around and delivered a roundhouse right to the back of the offending player.

Of course, the official under the basket did not see the initial contact. He only saw the retaliatory punch, blew his whistle, called a technical foul and ejected my friend from the game -- which, I suppose, was warranted. As far as St. Anselm was concerned, it was "mission accomplished."

No, I'm not overreacting just because the player was my friend. I have it on videotape, it's exactly as I described it, and the tape is still as clear as day. It was the cheapest of cheap shots, and I definitely had flashbacks to that moment Saturday as I watched Caitlin Clark careening to the floor. 

There is no place for that nonsense in basketball at any level, for any reason. 

The game is more physical than it used to be, no doubt, and it should not become anything else. I don't want to see it go back to six-girl rules or peach baskets. But there needs to be a proper context for the physicality, and that absolutely does not include trying to injure a player just because she made your league a lot more interesting than it was at any time in the 26 years that preceded her arrival in it.

The WNBA needs to act upon this, and quickly, lest the progress of recent months be undermined by petty jealousies and a failure to see what's best for the long-range future of women's basketball.

Mark Farinella has covered women's basketball at the high school and college levels since 1977, and he's loved every minute of it. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.