Angel Reese: How One Hand-Wave Became the Planet’s Newest Soft-Power Export
From Manila to Montevideo, the name “Angel Reese” now pings across group chats like a late-night World Cup goal. The LSU forward—equal parts rebounding savant and master provocateur—has become the latest American export that the rest of the planet never asked for but can’t stop doom-scrolling. We used to ship McDonald’s and drone strikes; now we AirDrop swaggering college athletes who turn championship games into geopolitical theater. Progress?
Reese’s crime, in the eyes of the chronically online, was taunting Iowa’s Caitlin Clark with the late-game “you can’t see me” hand-wave—a gesture borrowed from a WWE character who once body-slammed dictators for sport. Clark had been doing the same move all tournament, but when Reese, a Black woman with Louisiana vowels and acrylics, recycled it, the global commentariat suddenly remembered the Geneva Conventions. British pundits compared it to “unsporting behavior at Lord’s,” which is code for “we still miss empire.” A Tokyo sports anchor called it “excessive,” apparently forgetting that sumo wrestlers slap each other’s moobs for sport. Somewhere in Lagos, a fan shrugged: “Americans export outrage like it’s crude oil.”
This isn’t really about basketball, of course. It’s about who gets to own the stage in our 24-hour Colosseum, where the lions are algorithms and the emperor refreshes his feed. Reese understood the assignment: the women’s final out-rated most recent NBA Finals games, which is both a triumph and a bit of a cosmic joke—imagine if the Louvre suddenly outsold the NFT market. Nike, ever the parasite with a marketing degree, immediately floated an eight-figure deal. China’s Anta Sports countered with a “mystery package,” which insiders say is Mandarin for “please dunk on geopolitics.” Even the Saudi Public Investment Fund reportedly inquired, because nothing says women’s empowerment like sportswashing with a side of bone saw.
The wider implication? Soft power is now measured in memeable moments. France’s Macron, still recovering from pension-reform riots, tried to photobomb the discourse by inviting Reese to the Élysée Palace “for equality talks.” Translation: poll numbers are down and nothing boosts Gallic self-esteem like American talent posing under gilded ceilings. Meanwhile, South Korea’s KBL offered to rename a team the “Seoul Sashayers” if she’d play one exhibition—because nothing screams authenticity like corporate K-pop choreography at halftime.
Back home, Reese’s jersey outsold every NFL rookie in April, proving once again that the American dream is alive and well, provided you can monetize being vilified by people who type with their index fingers. Her Instagram following jumped from 400K to 2.9 million in a week, roughly the population of Jamaica, which now must endure think-pieces titled “What Angel Reese Can Teach Us About Caribbean Resilience.” The Jamaicans, sensibly, chose to keep watching actual track meets.
The cynical read—our specialty here at Dave’s Locker—is that Reese has become a Rorschach test for whatever grievance you carried into 2023. If you’re progressive, she’s a crusader against respectability politics. If you’re conservative, she’s Exhibit Q in the collapse of Western civility. If you’re the rest of the planet, she’s another American who discovered that the quickest route to global relevance is to piss off the right demographic on U.S. cable news, then cash the international appearance fees. Call it the Kardashian Doctrine.
And yet, beneath the noise, a subtler shift: women’s sports are now lucrative enough to weaponize. That’s both exhilarating and grim. Exhilarating because Title IX finally has currency arbitrage; grim because we’ve learned to commodify every damn thing, including the moment a 20-year-old taunts her rival with the same energy once reserved for gladiators and boy bands. The world keeps spinning, the ads keep rolling, and somewhere in the algorithm, Angel Reese dunks on us all, one sarcastic wave at a time.
