Angel Reese sometimes struggles with the persona she likes to project to the public and her fans. Some days she likes to be the bad girl. Other days, the victim.
She bounces back and forth between the two more than a game of ping pong.
Right now, it seems she’s on the victim kick. The Chicago Sky rookie posted a response to allegations that fans have been acting terribly towards many of the players in the WNBA.
In her tirade, Reese accused the media of having “benefited from my pain” in order “to create a narrative.”
“For the past 2 years, the media has benefited from my pain & me being villainized to create a narrative. They allowed this. This was beneficial to them,” she wrote on X.
“I sometimes share my experiences of things that have happened to me but I’ve also allowed this to happen to me for way too long and now other players in this league are dealing with & experiencing the same things.”
Angel Reese Embraced The Role Of Villain
I’m certainly not going to defend the media. They are collectively responsible for many of the narratives that negatively impact society. Especially when it comes to issues of race.
But Angel has embraced the role of villain for quite some time. And in many ways, it was also beneficial to her. If not for her being a foil to the most transcendent WNBA player to ever come along, the spotlight on her is very much diminished.
Prior to LSU’s game against Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Women’s college basketball tournament this past season, a column in the Los Angeles Times referred to the Tigers as “basketball villains.”
Reese seemed to embrace the role.
“We’re the good villains,” she said. “Everybody wants to beat LSU. Everybody wants to be LSU. Everybody wants to play against LSU.”
It was just last year that Reese was taunting Clark with a ‘you can’t see me’ gesture. As in, ‘Hey Caitlin, you’re not getting a championship ring.’
She has, often times, flaunted her role as the ‘villain’ in her rivalry with the Indiana Fever guard.
Early on in the WNBA season, Reese’s teammate Chennedy Carter delivered a flagrant foul to Clark while Angel cheered wildly on the sideline.
When that wasn’t enough, she delivered her own flagrant foul in another game against Indiana.
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Creating Her Own Narrative
Look, Angel Reese is not a villain. She’s a damn good basketball player who wears her emotions on her sleeve. Sometimes those emotions spill over and she gets labeled as the bad girl.
But you can’t have it both ways. And it doesn’t help when you denigrate an entire fan base – fans of Caitlin Clark – by painting them with a broad brush just because of a few online trolls that everybody on social media has to deal with.
“I think it’s really just the fans, her fans, the Iowa fans, now the Indiana fans, that are really just, they ride for her, and I respect that, respectfully. But sometimes it’s very disrespectful. I think there’s a lot of racism when it comes to it,” Reese said in a podcast recently.
She later thanked a supporter who claimed fans of Clark wanted their favorite player to be the “face of racism so bad.”
Odd, isn’t it, that Reese is complaining about being portrayed as a villain while simultaneously trying to portray fans of the Rookie of the Year as being villains?
“At the end of the day, I don’t want an apology nor do I think this will ever stop but something has to change,” she warned the media.
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