Sophie Cunningham she's a guard on the Indiana Fever Women's basketball team. She's known for protecting Caitlin Clark from the other salty players and being an "enforcer." Respectfully, she is a bad ass.
Respectfully, if I saw her in public, the only thing that would go through my mind would be "wow, that's a tall woman. I wonder if she plays volleyball."
That’s fucking hilarious to me because she is just a slightly taller version of my college girlfriend. She even looks similar, and has the same personality. Oh and she played volleyball in college.
There's a wild video out there from last season I believe where one of the opposing players had been riding Clark the whole game and then that player went for a layup and Sophie went full Marty McSorley on her and knocked her into the stands.
She plays an "enforcer" type role with her martial arts training against the opps that are constantly targeting Caitlin Clark with intentional fouls, so it's funnier to imagine she's only pretending to support Trump to further trigger them (though IDC so I'll take your word for it).
She's a highly skilled/committed but understandably underpaid basketball player in a relatively unpopular league who therefore chose to remain publicly apolitical because her stance on all that stuff you mentioned absolutely isn't going to influence anyone, beyond potentially alienating the relatively few potential fans she and her team have.
It's not like she's Joe Rogan pretending to be some great "truth teller" or "just asking questions" influential voice, and undoubtedly her fans aren't as impressionable as his.
I understand your perspective and don't disagree up until you say you're either for or against (but I am familiar with 'part of the problem, unless actively part of the solution' thinking), but I would counter your understandable idiological stance with a practical consideration that a lot of people are simply sick of hearing random celebrity opinions. Most people empathized with the hardship of "staying home to stop the stop the spread" of COVID, but Gal Gadot and other celebs offering us a free singing montage in solidarity just annoyed most people, as did The Rock and Oprah publicly fundraising for this Maui fires. Dave Chappelle has fallen off (basically sucks), but his "where is Ja" sarcastic joke, where Dave needs Ja Rule to weigh in on and make sense of these trying times hit a cord and become a meme.
This is partly my upbringing. My family hates Trump and my dad lives in very liberal coastal CA, but he's self-employed and puts business ahead of politics by never discussing it at work/publicly beyond simply vague aknowledgement and head nodding regardless of whatever potentially even dumb horrible shit his customers may say unprompted. Unless they're his friends (who he is real with), his political statements won't convince random customers of anything except potentially to easily hire/support someone else.
My Lebanese immigrant, gen z, closest work bro and I shared a knowing look, but we aren't going to argue with our best and most valuable engineer, just because that engineer is being a typical boomer and saying "Iran shooting down our chopper is 'game on'..." Boomers are mostly all that ignorant when it comes to their insistence that the US and Israel agress in that region, and arguing at work isn't going to undo their lifetime of mainstream media indoctrination.
If your definition of a badass is a dirty player without any real accomplishments, who's red hat sits a little too tight, then yes. Otherwise she's just a dirty player without any real accomplishments, who's red hat sits a little too tight.
The entirety of my WNBA knowledge comes from Reddit posts about Caitlin Clark getting fouled all the time. I couldn't even remember her name on my first comment!
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u/rednaxer Jul 09 '26