After a week of cutting insults between former NFL teammates and ESPN colleagues Ryan Clark and Robert Griffin III, including cheap shots at family and personal life, Clark took to his podcast, The Pivot, to apologize to Griffin’s wife, Greta, and set the record straight on his opinions toward RGIII.
The whole saga began when RGIII went viral for a lengthy monologue on the Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese rivalry. In it, the former NFL quarterback stated that Reese “hates” Clark and painted Reese as the instigator of their on-court tensions. Clark took issue with RGIII’s perspective and suggested he only saw it that way because his wife was white.
Clark alsoattacked RGIII’s professionalism and personal relationships as a player and commentator, calling Clark “one of the worst teammates I ever had both on the field and on TV.”
However, with a few days to sit on it, Clark backtracked a bit on Friday’s episode of The Pivot. Continuing to bash his former colleague, Clark shrugged off RGIII’s assertion that he should be fired by ESPN but apologized to Grete for bringing her into the disagreement.
“To Grete, I was out of line. I was out of bounds. I apologize,” Clark said. “To all the people who don’t like RG’s take or takes or the way that he moves. Or even if you just, in this conversation, take my side and want to support me, leave his family alone.”
Clark clarified that he did not like the “optics” of RGIII “mocking” Reese in the original clip while Grete nodded along in the background, “almost seemingly as a prop.” However, he said that he regrets going as far as he did in criticizing her.
“Families should be off limits,” Clark added. “I started that by bringing her into it. I see that. No matter what my intent was, the impact was different.”
In previous arguments with guests like Andrew Schulz, Clark has frequently defended Black women in his content. Clark referenced a past episode of The Pivot with investor Alexis Ohanian, husband of Serena Williams, as an example of a positive conversation around interracial couples.
Clark takes issue with the way the Griffins discuss their relationship and racial background, but he acknowledged that bending that opinion into a response about Reese was a mistake.
“She should not have been brought up in me trying to make a point about how having Black women close to you, and the things that you learn from them, can help you in the way that you approach and speak to and about them,” Clark explained. “She didn’t need to be the illustration of that. I can speak positively about what they are without making the insinuation that it’s something that non-Black women don’t do well.”
Circling back to the original impetus for the beef, Clark described his feelings toward the Caitlin Clark-Reese dynamic. Ryan Clark gave the Indiana Fever star props and said “the game needs her,” while contrasting that by defending the hard feelings Reese may have from her side of their rivalry.
“In my opinion, it should be impossible to hate her,” Clark said of the Fever star. “Do her fans and the way that they attack others play into it? Absolutely. Does it feel like there’s a racial component to that? Absolutely. But the game needs her. The game needs to push her forward. And she is pushing the game forward.”
Notably, Clark did not take back his attacks on Griffin’s character or professionalism. The two were teammates in Washington in 2014 and then again on the Monday Night Countdown panel until last September, when ESPN laid Griffin off.
Clark painted himself as a supporter of RGIII despite their differences, but admitted he allowed his disdain for RGIII as a person to slip into their disagreement over the WNBA.
“Robert’s reaction to what I said wasn’t to engage me in conversation, it was to call for me to be fired. I don’t know what those next steps are,” Clark said.
“I do know that I’ve known him for 12 years, I’ve worked with him in two separate occasions, and I supported him in both of those.”
“No matter what our personal thing was, I knew that he needed someone to have his back when he wasn’t around. I allowed some of the things that happened between us to seep into my thoughts on what, at least, he thought was a sports take.”