Angel Reese won a national championship Sunday. And then, with the wave of a hand, her face launched a thousand tweets. Or, 500,000 by one count.
Reese — a Randallstown native, St. Frances Academy graduate and University of Maryland transfer — capped an extraordinary season by leading LSU to its first NCAA women’s basketball title. She then celebrated with gestures aimed at rival star Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa sharpshooter and media sensation, which set off a firestorm of fury and debate.
In Baltimore, she also generated plenty of pride. Reese has been one of the most elite players in her age group for years and has been a champion at every level she’s played. She was an All-American at Maryland last year but left for LSU. The Tigers won nine games during the 2020-21 season; now, led by Reese, they’re national champions.
“It’s great for our city,” St. Frances girls basketball coach Jerome Shelton said Monday while standing in the school’s gym, where banners hang for the four Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland titles that Reese helped bring to the school. “It was the same thing when Carmelo Anthony won a gold medal, when Angel McCoughtry won a gold medal.”
Ron James coached Reese at Team Takeover, an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team based out of Washington, and he can remember her reaction when he suggested that Baltimore is a part of the DMV area. That prospect was a non-starter, he recalled, as she explained that Baltimore is its own entity. “She’s strong in her Baltimore roots,” he said.
“We’re doing this for the city,” Reese said before the title game, noting that Mayor Brandon Scott, the Ravens and the Orioles had reached out with support.
James had hoped to watch the Final Four, held in Dallas, in person, but instead spectated at home with his phone off to prevent any distraction. Seeing her win the title was “surreal.”
“She’s embracing her moment,” he said.
Reese has always been talented and passionate. Shelton described her as “ultra-competitive” and, in club basketball, she’d sometimes get whistled for technical fouls. But James also said she was a caring teammate and that on road trips, she was the one who typically washed her teammates’ uniforms or picked up everyone’s food order.
College coaches would sometimes ask James about Reese arguing with teammates, and James told them to pay attention to the content of their discussions.
“It was always about winning, about competing,” he said.
In her final year playing in the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL), the nation’s top club basketball circuit, Reese publicly proclaimed that her team would win the title.
Promising victory is not something James would have advised, but it was a mouth-written check that Reese did, in fact, cash. Team Takeover won the 2019 Nike National Championship.
The previous year, an Iowa team spearheaded by Clark had won the Nike championship and the two phenoms faced off once on the AAU circuit. Although they play with different styles (Reese is dominant inside the 3-point arc, while Clark excels from the outside), they also have similarities: Each was considered by ESPN to be a top-five player in the recruiting class of 2020, each is singularly talented, each is an effective trash-talker.
That last part became the central narrative Sunday as Reese’s late-game actions drew ire and admiration.
As the seconds ticked away, Reese approached Clark and waved her hand in front of her own face, mimicking wrestler John Cena’s “you-can’t-see-me” gesture that Clark had deployed against Louisville the week before. Reese then repeatedly tapped her ring finger, illustrating that LSU would soon receive championship rings.
It was celebratory and it was confident and for many observers, it was uncalled for. But even if the gesture was boastful, the vitriol she’s since received has been excessive. Many have labeled her on social media as “classless” or worse, while others have applauded her self-assuredness and talent. According to LSU, there were more than half a million tweets mentioning Reese, who would be named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, over the Final Four weekend.
Clark captivated the nation in recent weeks with brilliant offensive prowess, including the ability to make outrageously deep 3-pointers. More people than ever (9.9 million) tuned into the national championship, in large part because of Clark.
The Iowa guard also often complains to the referees and appeared to tell an opponent to “shut up” last week, pointing out that Iowa led by 15 points. But Clark, who has been likened to NBA star Steph Curry, has been almost exclusively applauded for making enthralling performances look routine; she became the first woman to score 40 points in back-to-back NCAA Tournament games.
Reese, who set an NCAA record with 34 double-doubles this year, also talks plenty of trash. She blocks shots and grabs rebounds, disparaging opponents as she does it.
“I’m from Baltimore where you hoop outside & talk trash,” she tweeted in January.
But many did not appreciate her gestures toward Clark on Sunday, saying she lacked grace. Clark, on the other hand, has not faced the same criticism.
“‘I’m too hood. I’m too ghetto.’ Y’all told me that all year,” Reese told reporters after the game. “But when other people do it, y’all say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me that’s going to speak up on what they believe in — it’s unapologetically you.”
When Clark waved in front of her face, she did it quickly, while Reese gestured for longer and directly toward the Iowa star. However, Kaye Whitehead, an associate professor of communication and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland, said that isn’t why people reacted negatively to Reese and not to Clark. Race was the underlying theme, Whitehead said, adding that if it were two athletes of color, “people wouldn’t be reacting the same way.”
Reese also already had a reputation for being a “showoff,” Whitehead pointed out.
“I don’t think it was the length of the gesture,” she said. “I think it was who was doing the gesture and how that person is framed in the sport.”
Whitehead said she wasn’t disappointed or surprised by the response to Reese’s celebration. “No, I’m exhausted,” she said.
Dante Jones, a former Paul Laurence Dunbar High School football player and Edmondson Westside High School coach, was tuned in to the game, like many Baltimore natives. He noted congruencies between each team’s star player.
“They both play with a lot of passion, they both trash talk,” he said, “but one is demonized and one is the hero.”
Trash talk is intrinsic to high-level sports, especially basketball. But in many examples, like when Allen Iverson stepped over Tyronn Lue in the 2001 NBA Finals, athletes are praised for it rather than scolded. It’s often debated, with reverence, who the greatest trash-talker of all time is: Michael Jordan? Larry Bird? Reggie Miller?
Reese tapping her finger was reminiscent of a different LSU champion, Joe Burrow, who celebrated in that manner when the Tigers won the football title in 2019 (although he did not direct it toward an opponent).
“The men do it,” McCoughtry, a Baltimore basketball legend who also played at St. Frances, noted on the Montgomery & Co. podcast before the national championship game. “Let the girls play like that, too.”
Some have said that Reese, by following Clark around in the game’s closing seconds, might have gone too far in her celebration. But others have been more than OK with it. LeBron James tweeted a message of support and Baltimore native Muggsy Bogues posted: “Talk that talk” with the hashtag “Baltimorebred.”
Among those on hand for LSU’s Final Four matchup with Virginia Tech was Maddy McDaniel, a Bishop McNamara High School junior and top recruit who plays for Team Takeover. When she was in eighth grade, her “big sister” on the club team was Reese, and the two still remain close. McDaniel said it was a “beautiful experience” to watch Reese on the grandest stage.
“It gives me chills actually,” she said. “The things people say about her, to really actually know her and see her overcome all those things is so great.”
Maybe Reese shouldn’t have celebrated as she did. Maybe she should have. People have shared plenty of vehement opinions, one way or the other, about Reese since she became a champion, once again.
“There are certain wines that are for people and there are certain wines that are not,” said James, her AAU coach. “That’s Angel. Angel ain’t for everybody.”
