ESPN analyst Ryan Clark on Friday issued an apology to Robert Griffin III and his wife, Grete, for some of his recent comments.
In Monday’s episode of his “The Pivot” podcast, Clark apologized for bringing Griffin’s family into his response to Griffin’s recent comments about Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. While Clark did not necessarily back off his comments about Griffin’s take, he did say he regretted invoking Grete by saying Griffin could not identify with what black women like Reese dealt with because he had only “been married to white women.”
“Because of the personal feelings I have about RGIII, I took a take that was personal to another person and make it personal to myself, and I shouldn’t have done that,” Clark said. “I shouldn’t have brought his wife into an equation, even though in my mind, before speaking about her, I processed as much as I possibly could to speak of her in a way that was positive, trying to make sure it only illustrated a point about the way that he approached Angel Reese. And in that, in some ways, and to some people, I probably missed the mark.”
Clark added that he let some of his negative feelings toward Griffin influence his comments, and that his efforts to defend Reese turned into an unintentional attack on Griffin.
“To Grete, I was out of line. I was out of bounds. I apologize. To all of the people that 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 said. “Families should be off-limits. I started that by bringing her into it. I see that now. No matter what my intent was, the impact was different. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it a different way.”
Clark and Griffin played together with Washington in 2014, and worked together on ESPN’s “Monday Night Countdown.” There are evidently some negative feelings between the two on a personal level, which Clark admits he let impact his take.
As of Saturday, Griffin had yet to issue a public response to Clark’s apology. He did make one cryptic post on X Saturday morning, writing that “God removes people from your life for a reason.”
Some of Clark’s fellow ESPN employees reportedly wanted to see him suspended over his response to Griffin. It was also pointed out that, despite his comments about Grete Griffin’s race, Clark has a child with a white woman himself.
The entire back-and-forth stemmed from Griffin’s take on last Saturday’s confrontation between Caitlin Clark and Reese, which both of them downplayed. The Griffin-Ryan Clark dispute wound up becoming the bigger story.
