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Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, the popular “enforcer” teammate of Caitlin Clark, gave an inside look into the treatment of Clark by other teams, and the consequences of the tension it has created during WNBA games.
Cunningam revealed how her former team, the Phoenix Mercury, planned to play Clark during the phenom’s rookie season in 2024. Cunningham played her first five seasons in Phoenix before leaving to join the Fever this past offseason.
“You have seen players in our league try to, like, toughen up Caitlin… Even when I wasn’t on her team, I know the talks that Phoenix had in the locker room, like ‘no, we’re going to show her what the W really is,’ and I get it to a certain extent, and every rookie coming into the league, that’s how you’re going to treat em, but there’s just more for her,” Cunningham said on her podcast.
“And now being on her team and seeing it, I’m like ‘what are people doing,’ actually, it’s just too much, it’s too much. I’m over it, and if I think it’s too much, it’s probably too much.”
Cunningham was on the other side of the situation when she started a fight to defend Clark during a game against the Connecticut Sun earlier this season. Cunningham said that after the game, Clark exclaimed “finally!” in the locker room.
“In the locker room, she goes, I think she’s like, ‘Finally!’” Cunningham said. “But I think it kind of had our team together as a whole. Everyone was like, ‘we do have to protect eachother.’”
The scuffle went down in Connecticut on June 17, when Cunningham committed a hard foul on Sun guard Jacy Sheldon. Sheldon poked Clark in the eye earlier in the game, and then fellow Sun player Marina Mabrey shoved Clark to the ground.
So Cunningham chased Sheldon in the fourth quarter to commit a payback foul.
“Last second-intrusive thought, I was like ‘f— it,'” Cunningham said of her decision to instigate the fight.
Their heated exchange turned into a shoving match before players from both teams came over to break it up.
Cunningham, Sheldon and Sun guard Lindsay Allen were ejected from the game with about 40 seconds left before the Fever took home the victory.
But Cunningham alleges that the interaction left its mark on her face.
“She didn’t mean to do it, but she did chip my tooth,” Cunningham said. “It’s a little discolored… we literally cracked teeth in the middle of the game, like, face-to-face.
“There’s a couple players on their team that just do a little bit extra stuff.”
WHO IS SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM? CAITLIN CLARK’S NEW ‘BODYGUARD’ TEAMMATE
Cunningham also claimed she was fined “like, $900,” by the WNBA for the fight. But also claims it was “her moment” as her followers on Instagram and TikTok quickly surged past one million in the days following the game. Cunningham previously claimed she was also fined $500 for a TikTok that jokingly criticized WNBA referees.
She previously called out referees just days after the June 17 fight while speaking to reporters, for not protecting Clark, when she had to first address the fight publicly.
“During that, it was just part of the game. I think the refs had a lot to do with that. It was a build-up for a couple years now of them just not protecting the star player of the WNBA,” Cunningham said. “At the end of the day, I’m going to protect my teammates. That’s what I do.”
Cunningham has become a folk hero to many, and her popularity has skyrocketed in the days since the fight.
With Cunningham earning the nickname “the enforcer” for the Fever, fans counting on her to protect Caitlin Clark can rest easy knowing she is a black belt in the Korean martial art of Taekwondo.
She earned the black belt at the age of 6.
Her father Jim played football at the University of Missouri, and she ended up following in her dad’s footsteps on the football field.
A 2014 article by the Columbia Missourian reported Cunningham was the first female to ever score any points for the team in history, when she kicked two of four extra points in place of the team’s regular kicker, who had torn an ACL.
Cunningham even handled kickoff duties.
“I was so nervous,” Cunningham told the outlet. “I mean, I’ve never played football before in all my life. Right when I got the ball (on the opening kickoff), I couldn’t hear anything. I just put the ball down and kicked it.”
Cunningham comes from a family of farmers and credits that upbringing for the person she is today, according to five-part feature series by the University of Missouri.
“So much of our success goes back to what we learned here,” Cunningham said of working on the farm. “We loved coming out to the farm to help. We found out how to work hard and work together. It made us farm strong.”
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