{"id":69894,"date":"2025-08-14T20:42:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T20:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/69894\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T20:42:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T20:42:13","slug":"michelle-obama-weighs-in-on-caitlin-clark-vs-angel-reese-debate-wnba-rivalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/69894\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Obama weighs in on Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, WNBA rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michelle Obama has spent time around a lot of important people, and she&#8217;s married to a huge basketball fan.<\/p>\n<p>That provides her quite the perspective on what happens on the hardwood for both male and female hoopers.<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, Obama got to share her thoughts on the never-ending Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, which started in college for Iowa and LSU and has continued into the WNBA with the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky.<\/p>\n<p>Now for those hoping that Obama would take a side, she wouldn&#8217;t. Instead, she discussed how social media has made an outsized impact on how people view these two stars and the rivalry they have.<\/p>\n<p>The former First Lady provided her perspective <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=C3LXGKG3Q-k\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">on the All The Smoke podcast<\/a> with former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think the tough thing is the social media element to it, but that&#8217;s true across the board. It just takes a normal occurrence, these young kids today what they have to go through and be able to withstand, because social media is such a huge part of their world, but now the hate is in your room on your phone with you all the time, and you can&#8217;t tell these kids to turn it off, because they&#8217;re making their living that way. They&#8217;re expected to stay engaged. As you point out, that&#8217;s happening across sports across gender. It&#8217;s just harder now to withstand peoples&#8217; horrible, horrible opinions.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The former NBA players on the show compared this to the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics&#8217; rivalry in the 1980s, when it was Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird. They acknowledged there had been plenty of hate then, too.<\/p>\n<p>But to Obama&#8217;s point, the hate couldn&#8217;t follow you home. Now, it can.<\/p>\n<p>The hosts generally agreed that rivalry and even the hero-villain motif is good for sports, but they also all recognized how it could cross a line.<\/p>\n<p>Clark and Reese both have long basketball futures ahead of them, and the discussion isn&#8217;t going anywhere. But as the former First Lady recognizes, it&#8217;s definitely important to keep a solid perspective and not let feelings on the rivalry get out of hand.<\/p>\n<p>MORE:\u00a0<a target=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/ca\/wnba\/indiana-fever\/news\/fever-sign-greek-champion-wnba-debut-point-guard-caitlin-clark-injured\/f12d552722604fe8e7869f9f\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Fever sign a Greek champion to play point guard with Caitlin Clark still injured<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle Obama has spent time around a lot of important people, and she&#8217;s married to a huge basketball&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-69894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}