It's Caitlin Clark's World
And The Rest of Us are Just Living in It
If you have a pulse, you may have heard of this young woman named Caitlin Clark: a six-foot, senior guard for the Iowa Hawkeyes. You may even be sick of hearing about her. If you, like I do, live in Indianapolis, you may also be bracing for the fact that The Caitlin Clark Show is almost surely coming for an indefinite stop in the Circle City, due to the fact that the Indiana Fever possess the first pick for the 2024 WNBA draft. A prominent local artist has already put a mural up of her on the city’s west side, and future ticket prices have doubled.
The suspicion—backed up all season by ticket prices to Clark’s games and by this year’s women’s NCAA Tournament television ratings—is that women’s basketball is having a moment, something that the sport’s next level up has needed for years. People in the seats, advertisements on buildings, dollars flowing. Notice now that it has not been an affirmative action program or one more subsidy or lecture about sexism that’s finally producing this, but rather something more like, well, capitalism. I’m not morally invested in purist capitalism as the only possible economic system so much as I am invested in the truth, which notices what works and what usually doesn’t. And I’m perpetually surprised at how quickly people pretend to hate markets where they get to have some choice. It turns out that when you give people a thrill, they’ll pay money to be in the seats and/or catch the game from their living room. This is good news, but yes, it allows for the opposite to be true as well. Things die in capitalism, which can be painful for any number of good-faith participants in a venture. To play the logic out, there are too many potential involvements and distractions in this life to prop up a moral obligation to support women’s (or men’s!) basketball. But as someone who loves basketball, it’s great that people are, at least for now. I know there have been some questions about Gen Z’s interest in sports at all; well, I have to imagine that they’re paying attention to Caitlin Clark, just like Taylor Swift fans began paying attention to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Of course this is not only about Clark, and one evidence of this might be the number of teams fighting for the top each season, which seems to annually increase, as opposed to the old status quo, which was basically UConn then everyone else. The competitor and peer of hers that Clark’s name seems to get associated with the most is that of Angel Reese, a 6’3’’ junior who plays for Louisiana State University. The two players have collided in each other last two NCAA tournaments, last year in the championship and this in the Elite 8. Clark got the best of the match-up this year, but it was Reese who has claims to last year’s crown (Clark will get another shot at hers tomorrow night against an undefeated South Carolina team), and of course fans of the game will recall Reese taunting Clark and Iowa as last year’s game outcome became clear at the end.
Though both players have tried to make it publicly clear that there is no bad blood between the two of them—and the way these work is that they were almost surely competing against each other at high levels long before most of us knew who either of them are—there are others who have pointed out another obvious difference between the two, namely that Clark is white, and Reese black. In talking with the media, Reese has pointed out—I think with some credibility, at times, though she has probably milked some of this as well—that the way the story has often been told has to make her into some sort of “villain,” which she is certainly not. There’s something to be said for sportsmanship, yes, and for letting journalists do their jobs, but readers of this blog know how I feel about our cultural tendency to over-moralize, and of course it is only a fact that Clark is cocky and vocal at times on the court as well. And Reese certainly benefitted from her coach’s vagueness regarding her suspension earlier in the 2023-24 season, whereas when this happens with most athletes of her caliber we tend to find out why. I think Reese wants to live outwardly, heart on her sleeve, and as a 21-year-old is only at the beginning of understanding the nuances and challenge of that. Watching her teammates defend her after LSU’s loss to Iowa in this season’s tournaments is also worth the watch. All of these things can be true at the same time.
But what we should not do and say about Clark and Reese is that, well, we’ve got Reese who is a star and Clark who is a star, and Clark gets treated great and Reese terribly. No no no. It’s okay that they’re not because Reese is almost certainly a long-time WNBA talent, but the show that Caitlin Clark is is not some sort of accident or (merely) racial privilege. Like Stephen Curry, she pulls up from the parking lot sometimes and makes it; she averages on the other sides thirty points a game (those are Michael-Jordan-in-the-NBA-numbers); she broke the Pete Maravich number for most points scored as a collegiate basketball player. And perhaps the most-under-appreciated part of her game that an amateur may miss is that she is an elite passer. She’s astonishingly good at finding her teammates through tight spaces for open looks.
I watched a Dan Patrick clip this week in which he was interviewing former Syracuse men’s coach (and legend) Jim Boeheim, and he asked him if he would, as a coach, let Clark shoot from the distances from which she shoots. His response: “And further back if she wants to.” He went on to say that she is one of two players, male and female, that he has ever traveled significant distances to watch play (as a fan) with the other being Maravich several decades ago.
There was even a time in last night’s Final Four win against Connecticut—Iowa had the ball, up one, with less than a minute to go—where I felt like Clark may have some Lebron in her, too, meaning: she can be too unselfish at times! In that moment, short of a wide-open layup for someone, she needed to take the shot. But she passed it, and Iowa squandered the possession.
What happened next may very well speak to Clark’s “privilege,” but it is more “star player” privilege than anything else, and there are other players across gender and race who also may benefit from this kind of thing. So basically before UConn could even get a shot up that might win the game, the sideline official very extravagantly called a moving screen, which gave the ball back to Iowa, and allowed them to run out the clock. Replays, in my opinion, showed it to be a borderline-at-best call for any time in the game, much less with so much at stake in that moment. It seemed to me (I’m not saying this is what happened and nor do I think it is) like someone was in the guy’s headset saying “We need Clark in the ‘ship,’” and he responded accordingly. I know from some of my own reffing that in moments that important, refs tend to get together during team huddles and say things to each other like, ‘If you’re going to get something, make sure it’s really something.’ Whether this guy botched this moment because of bad judgement or because he felt pressured to get Clark in the championship, I think it’s a failure either way, though of course we cannot assume Connecticut would have scored if the possession had played out.
If we’re really looking for a fair comparison point to Clark, by the way, and if we want to see, again, why Clark is so unique, maybe the name should be Connecticut’s Paige “Buckets” Bueckers. She is the same height as Clark, they are both white, and they are both guards. Bueckers has had some injury problems that perhaps Clark hasn’t had, and she has sniffed a national championship (during her sophomore year, they lost to South Carolina in the final game of the tournament) but hasn’t fully gotten there. When asked after the game to talk about the play I mention above—she would have been the shooter—her response was pure class. She’s an excellent player to build a team around, will almost surely have a fine WNBA career. Talented, a leader, driven and tough. She just hasn’t changed the game, because the fact of the matter is that there have been many players before Beuckers who were, well, a lot like Bueckers.
The same isn’t true of Clark.