Sports media personality Sarah Spain didn’t hold back after comedian Shane Gillis hosted the ESPY Awards on Wednesday night.
Gillis cracked several jokes about female athletes, which Spain said weren’t just lazy—they were offensive. One jab suggested WNBA star Caitlin Clark would retire and end up working at Waffle House, still “fist-fighting Black women.” He also joked about former soccer star Megan Rapinoe being “a bad time,” and tricked the audience into thinking a friend’s wife was a former WNBA player.
Spain took to X to call it out. “In a year of crazy growth for women's sports,” she wrote, “choosing an ESPYs host who doesn't even try to make clever jokes about women athletes… he goes with hacky ‘no one knows the WNBA’ bits, ‘Pinoe is a bad time’ & repeatedly insults Black women. COOL.”
The joke about Clark reportedly didn’t land well with the crowd at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Audience reaction was lukewarm at best.
Gillis didn’t just go after women in sports. He also made jokes about Donald Trump, Aaron Rodgers, Jeffrey Epstein, and O.J. Simpson. Some of those hit. Some didn’t.
Even Gillis seemed surprised Disney let him get away with the material. After a bit about Bill Belichick and girlfriend Jordon Hudson, he told the crowd, “They let me do it, I don’t know… This is Disney. They allowed that. Yeah, we should've taken that out. I had doubts going into that. That didn't work all week.”
While women’s sports continue to see record viewership and momentum, Spain—and many others—are questioning why ESPN chose a host who brought “lazy” jokes instead of clever commentary.