CAITLIN CLARK SHOOTS A BALL INTO OUR HEARTS, WITHOUT RACISM OR SEXISM
Women’s basketball deals with thickets of problems as it grows, but each time, Clark reminds us what the sport is about — making shots, or long shots — and tries to become the best ever this weekend
This was a night of no racism, no sexism, no misogyny, no hatred. What we saw was a woman whose shooting form might be the greatest of all time — she has made 55 percent of her three-pointers from beyond 25 feet, better than Steph Curry, Damian Lillard or Ray Allen — and how she quieted LSU’s rampant mania by firing away.
If you wanted a close-up of Caitlin Clark, Monday flashed the moment. She hit her first shot, then another, and made nine to tie another record. Through it all, her rival, Angel Reese, twisted her right ankle and began to limp. With no facial expression, just a stare and sometimes a growl, Clark proceeded to finish the game. There would be no shouting from enemy coach Kim Mulkey, no “you can’t see me” gesture from Reese, nothing but Clark appropriating teammates when necessary in a 94-87 victory that placed Iowa in the Final Four.
“You enjoy this. This is the be-all, end-all for us,” Clark said. “We have to win two more. We have to find ways to survive. The job is not done. I don’t want it to end. I love this university and love the state of Iowa. I love the way our country has supported us. We want to go out on the right note.”
How many watched? More than 9.9 million, benchmarked at 12.6 million last year, and plenty more if Disney viewed the Elite Eight matchup as an ABC event and not an ESPN special. It was yet another example of why the women’s version of the NCAA tournament is more palatable than the men’s bore because Clark, with her 41 points and 12 assists, continued to attract Kate Martin and Sydney Affolter to the mix before heaving the ball to her younger brother in the stands. Clark is two victories from the national championship that will stamp her as the best women’s player ever, regardless of what certain racists claim.
Oh, they’re still out there. You just don’t hear them now.
“Iowa deserved to win. They made the plays, and they have Caitlin Clark,” said Mulkey, in a reduction of her blaring words, after stopping Clark after the game and telling her, “I’m sure glad you’re leaving. Girl, you are something else. Never seen anything like it.”
Nor have we. Clark asked us to be “glued to the TV.” Who wasn’t?
“My shot felt good. Helps when you make your first three as a shooter. Nice to have a game where I got some good looks from three,” she said, almost sounding like an automaton. “We told ourselves we are the one seed for a reason. It’s amazing to be back in the Final Four. It’s so hard to get back there. I’m so proud of this group.”
Even when Iowa led by double digits with less than a minute left, Clark refused to celebrate. Her intensity oozed through the telecast and will continue when she is met Friday night in Cleveland by Geno Auriemma, who has 11 national titles and six undefeated seasons. She will have to beat Connecticut and likely South Carolina. No one doubts her now, as her profile continues to surge massively in a sports nation not nearly as interested in Dan Hurley and Zach Edey and the baseball openers. Every time Clark shoots the ball, we thought to her childhood in West Des Moines, when she sent fears through young men who knew she’d beat them.
Just watch the shot, the mechanics, the gaze. It makes our day. She makes about $3 million in NIL money. Can that escalate before the weekend?
“I got hyped for a second. When you are playing a team like LSU, they are never out of the game, no matter what the time or score is,” Clark said. “Do not start celebrating or get too emotional. They will fight to the end.”
“You’ve got to guard her,” Mulkey said. “Nobody seems to be able to guard her. She’s just a generational player and makes everybody around her better.”
A powerhouse game prevailed, though ill will remains in thickets in the growth of women’s basketball. Afterward, a tearful Reese spoke of receiving “death threats” in recent months as a national champion. The storms mostly came beforehand, when Mulkey made her point about fairness in high-level media examinations. Her comments about the Los Angeles Times forced editors to remove writer Ben Bolch’s stereotypical jabber referring to LSU as “dirty debutantes” against UCLA’s “milk and cookies” approach. Mulkey was right in blasting it and said, “I had someone say the LA Times updated, rewrote, did something, and they did it at 10:20 last night, and I said, OK. That was the extent of it.” Was the story “sexist” and “awful,” as she said? Yes, said an official note atop the column, which still refers to the Tigers as “villains” in a headline.
“The original version of this commentary did not meet Times editorial standards. It has been edited to remove language that was inappropriate and offensive,” the note said. “We apologize to the LSU basketball program and to our readers.” Bolch turned to social media to apologize, writing Monday, “It has taken me two days to write this apology because I wanted to be as thoughtful as possible in my response to the situation I have created. These are words I have not been asked to write by anyone at my paper, but they need to be expressed so that I can own up to my mistake. Words matter. As a journalist, no one should know this more than me. Yet I have failed miserably in my choice of words. In my column previewing the LSU-UCLA women's basketball game, I tried to be clever in my phrasing about one team's attitude, using alliteration while not understanding the deeply offensive connotation or associations. I also used metaphors that were not appropriate.”
So Mulkey wins in a way, though she loses 12 months after winning a title. Other coaches also deal with media pain, such as South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, who asked why CBS Sports Radio referred to center Kamilla Cardoso as “the giant Brazilian woman that knocks people over.” The Washington Post article delved rationally into Mulkey’s anti-gay incidents with her players, including Brittney Griner, and while it made more people loathe her, her many followers will remain. “The lawyers will review it, and when this season is over, they’ll give me a call and say, this is our next step,” said Mulkey, who didn’t appreciate writer Kent Babb’s chats with family members, including a father and sister she hasn’t spoken with in years.
For now, she says, “I’m not reading that stuff.”
The Clark clash was billed, quirkily, as a 45-years-later version of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Seems odd, doesn’t it, as society has progressed since a Black-versus-White college matchup from 1979? Clark is a shooter and passer. Reese, three inches taller at 6-3, can rule inside. Can we let them be themselves? “I think the women had their incredible moment last season, they had their Larry Bird-Magic moment,” Johnson told the Wall Street Journal. “And there’s so much more to come, right?”
I saw two rabid competitors, needing to one-up the other to win a title, regardless of race. Clark is so fueled during practice that it occasionally erodes relationships with teammates, so how wired would she be against Reese? Remember, Reese left the LSU program early this season as Mulkey said little publicly. “My mental health is the most important thing before anything, and I'm going to make sure I'm OK before anything because I don't want to cause anything, harm, or any cancer in the locker room,” Reese said. With the charge of social media, they are scrutinized daily like no female athletes before them. So forget about either watching old-school replays of Johnson-Bird, though both are on YouTube.
“Honestly, I have not,” Clark said. “No, sorry.”
“I’m a woman’s basketball player. I don’t really watch the NBA,’’ Reese said. “People do compare the matchup, but I’ve never seen it, so I’m not really familiar with it.”
Each has spent significant time emphasizing they don’t hate each other, in spite of the “can’t see me gestures” both flashed last season. They respect each other and their backgrounds. They have played in magnificent college games and will do the same in the WNBA, which will be enriched by their presence.
“I don’t think people realize it’s not personal,” Reese said. “Once we get out from between those lines, if I see you walking down the street, it’s like, ‘Hey, girl, what’s up? let’s hang out.’ I think people just take it like we hate each other. Me and Caitlin Clark don’t hate each other. I want everybody to understand that. It’s just a super competitive game. I would just wish people realize that once I get between those lines, it’s no friends. I have plenty of friends on the court that I talk to outside of the game, but like when I get between those lines, like we’re not friends. We’re not buddies. I’m going to talk trash to you. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get in your head the whole entire game, but after the game we can kick it. Like, I don’t think people really realize that and that’s fine.”
From her days playing against young boys and dominating them, Clark eyes how both have elevated the sport. “What we have done for women’s basketball has been tremendous, and being able to bring as many eyeballs as we have onto this sport has been really the coolest part of this whole journey for me,” she said. “Being able to inspire so many young girls — she’s done it, I’ve done it, but at the same time, there’s been so many other young women in our game that do the same thing.”
At least this time, the First Lady knows how to handle post-game invites. Last year, Jill Biden said after LSU’s victory, “I know we’ll have the champions come to the White House, we always do. So we hope LSU will come. But, you know, I’m going to tell Joe I think Iowa should come, too, because they played such a good game.”
“A JOKE,” Reese said on social media.
This time, maybe Iowa gets first dibs only.
We watch a gradual transformation with distress. Utah’s team had to stay in Idaho for a tournament event in Spokane, Wash., and dealt with racial episodes in Coeur d’Alene. In Portland, North Carolina State beat Texas for a Final Four excursion with mismatched three-point lines. In the Sweet 16, Notre Dame freshman Hannah Hidalgo was forced to remove her nose ring because the NCAA has a rule prohibiting jewelry. Why didn’t officials check referee Tommi Paris before a game, instead of yanking her at halftime for a background conflict?
For now, we emphasize the joy of what we see. A phenom whose trail is blazed, by media who love her, fights on to another trial. The hatred is elsewhere.
She simply shoots, from the logo, from anywhere.
And it goes in.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.