An occasionally friendly columnist went to Sky practice Tuesday eager to make rookie Angel Reese’s acquaintance, pull her aside from the cameras and microphones and speak with her about being 22 and taking a huge bite out of life — new job, new city, happiness, homesickness, fears, dreams.
Columnists dream, too, usually about interviews that break beneath the surface like that.
Nowhere on the to-do list was relitigating any of the things Reese has said, done or been accused of saying or doing that have brought critics out of the woodwork and the worst of them out from under their rocks to sling vile and abusive insults and epithets — many of them straight-up racist — at her.
The thinking was she could use a break from all that. Meeting and answering a well-intentioned interloper’s questions would have to be punishment enough.
It went so well, the word ‘‘catastrophe’’ quickly came to mind.
A few questions in, it was clear that one- or two-word answers were the order of the day. And that something was wrong, even though Reese essentially had ignored a couple of questions by saying, dismissively, ‘‘I’m good.’’
But she wasn’t good, was she? She was asked whether she knew why the conversation, such as it was, was off to such an inauspicious start.
‘‘I know how y’all like to twist my words, so I’m just keeping it short and sweet,’’
she said.
The intention was very much not to do that, she was assured.
‘‘I can’t trust any of y’all,’’ she shot
back. ‘‘So I’m just letting you know — short and sweet.’’
Perhaps this is how Reese will attempt to navigate her media responsibilities for the next month-plus until the WNBA breaks for the Paris Olympics, then for the month or so when the league restarts until the end of the regular season. Get in, be brief, get out. Give ’em next to nothing, least of all your trust. Lean on a Sky organization that’s far too inclined to keep media at arm’s length for its own good and isn’t always doing its players any good in this regard.
It’s fine if she can pull it off.
But one wonders if she can.
Reactions to Reese have been supersized since she first exploded on the national scene at LSU. She taunted Caitlin Clark in the NCAA championship game in 2023, and an army of Clark supporters hated her for it. As a WNBA rookie, she said ‘‘not just one person’’ — meaning not Clark alone — was lifting women’s basketball to new heights, and the blowback was intense. After Reese committed a flagrant foul against Clark in the Sky’s last game, a 91-83 loss to the Fever that was the most-watched WNBA telecast in 23 years, a few influential imbeciles in the media world clapped back at Reese with a level of outrage generally reserved for someone who drop-kicks a puppy or punches the clown at a children’s birthday party.
And that was before Reese apparently made it worse for herself by knocking the refs and saying ‘‘some people [get] a special whistle.’’
The comments directed at Reese on social media — which she uses avidly and where she has cultivated a giant following — have, unfailingly, scraped the bottom of the barrel at every turn. We could argue the size of her role in rubbing people the wrong way, but the racist slurs and tropes used against her are uncalled-for and awful and would put anyone on guard.
So what is Reese supposed to do? Just zip it already? Make peace with being hated?
Ironically, a public-relations staffer intervened to nip this interview in the bud just as Reese seemed to be trying to get across that her aversion to talking wasn’t personal.
‘‘We’re good,’’ Reese said before being cut off.
There’s a lot of season left. Will she be good? Will she find some peace?
‘‘I think sometimes we fail to realize what the athlete might think,’’ coach Teresa Weatherspoon said. ‘‘What is she thinking? How does she feel? I think sometimes we just fail to realize that because it’s almost like every time she speaks, there’s something wrong with what she says. There’s something wrong with what she does. That’s what it seems like. But what we do here as a team, that’s really all that matters.’’
What the Sky are doing as a team is losing. If they drag their 4-9 record onto the court and win a couple of games in the coming days — including Sunday against Clark and the Fever in another game that will draw eyeballs galore — the team results will matter more widely.
But we already know how strongly everyone is reacting to Reese. And we already can see it’s weighing on her.
‘‘She’s fine,’’ Weatherspoon said. ‘‘She’s going to be fine. I mean, she’s fine.’’
The answers are coming.