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Sarah Spain, a sports media personality, took issue with Shane Gillis cracking jokes about female athletes during the ESPY Awards on Wednesday night.
Gillis’ jokes included a crack about Caitlin Clark working at a Waffle House when she retires from the WNBA to continue “fist-fighting Black women,” needling former U.S. women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe and tricking the crowd into believing his friend’s wife was a former WNBA player.
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Shane Gillis at the 2025 ESPY Awards held at the Dolby Theatre on July 16, 2025 in Los Angeles. (Christopher Polk/ via Getty Images)
“In a year of crazy growth for women’s sports choosing an ESPYs host who doesn’t even try to make clever jokes about women athletes (he at least *attempted* for the men) he goes with hacky ‘no one knows the WNBA’ bits, ‘Pinoe is a bad time’ & repeatedly insults Black women. COOL,” Spain wrote in a post on X.
For what it’s worth, the Clark joke didn’t appear to go over well with the crowd in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theatre.
COMEDIAN SHANE GILLIS CRACKS CAITLIN CLARK WAFFLE HOUSE JOKE AT ESPYS
Sarah Spain attends The Annual espnW: Women + Sports Summit day 1 at The Lodge at Torrey Pines on Oct. 18, 2021 in La Jolla, California. (Leon Bennett/Getty Images)
Gillis had jokes about President Donald Trump, Aaron Rodgers, Jeffrey Epstein and O.J. Simpson as well throughout the night.
Even he couldn’t believe that Disney allowed him to say some of the things he was saying.
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Shane Gillis’ jokes were hit or miss with fans over the course of the night. (Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty Images)
“They let me do it, I don’t know,” Gillis said after tearing into Belichick and his relationship with Jordon Hudson. “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.”
Fox News’ Scott Thompson contributed to this report.
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