THE WOMEN’S GAME HAS FOUND ITS BOOM TIME — HOW LONG WILL THE RUN LAST?
Are folks in a fad, where we’re locked into Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers and why Geno Auriemma didn’t call Clark in high school, or is this the beginning of a lengthy charge in American sports?
The issue is whether an American growth curve — women’s basketball, Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Kim Mulkey’s remarks on media waste, Angel Reese’s self-commentary on being “too hood … too ghetto” — can sustain a massive boom in popular culture. Or maybe we’ll wake up in three years and simply mumble.
Oh, where did that burst go?
We watch sports to monitor players. Right now, we are hooked. The thrill entering the national semifinals is why the regal coach at Connecticut, Geno Auriemma, did not recruit Clark out of high school. In his mind, she should have called him from Iowa and explained why she wanted to play for him. Considering she walks around Cleveland as the biggest athlete in our realm, with Patrick Mahomes off and Shohei Ohtani spooked and no NBA player on her popularity level, Geno refuses to reassess his viewpoint. In 2019, he committed to Bueckers as a point guard. Clark never bothered to call him. And so, on Friday night, the two face each other on a monumental stage and try to reach the national championship game.
This is the essence of why we tune in, right? This is why the 12.3 rating for Clark’s last game might jump into the mid-teens. This is why the women’s Final Four is bigger than the men’s tournament and any other event in which males wear jock straps or compression shorts. “We have the best player in America,” said Auriemma, who somehow doesn’t mind blowing off Clark to this day.
He will explain, if anyone is listening. “Well, there’s a lot of kids we didn’t recruit and a lot of kids who don’t want to go to UConn. I committed to Paige Bueckers very, very early and it would have been silly for me to say to Paige, ‘Hey listen, we’re going to put you in the backcourt and then I’m going to try really hard to recruit Caitlin Clark.’ I don’t do it that way,” Auriemma said. “Caitlin is obviously a tremendous player, a generational player. But if Caitlin really wanted to come to UConn, she would have called me and said, ‘Coach I really want to come to UConn.’ Neither of us lost out. She made the best decision for her and it’s worked out great. We made the decision we thought we needed to make.”
All Clark wanted was a call to come from Auriemma. That’s how it works for most people — the coach recruits the athlete, not vice versa. “I loved UConn. I think they’re the coolest place on Earth, and I wanted to say that I got recruited by them,” she said. “They called my AAU coach a few times, but they never talked to my family and never talked to me.”
Is this real? The most prominent female athlete of our time has to shove it up his tail? It’s madness and explains why folks are choosing between Clark, who gathers vast attention as the all-time scorer in Division I history, and Bueckers, who was named national Player of the Year before tearing her ACL. It has reached the point where Stephen A. Smith’s studio partner, Molly Qerim, had social media flaring when she said, “If Paige Bueckers didn't basically miss two seasons, I don't know if we'd be talking about Caitlin Clark the way we are right now.”
“I said that the other day,” Smith said.
“Well,” said Qerim, “I was out of the country.”
If we’re locked in a period of rising trajectory, a jolting story line only helps the grand cause. The sport always has empowered great coaches, such as Pat Summitt, Tara VanDerveer, Dawn Staley and Auriemma. Dynamic players, too, such as Cheryl Miller, Diana Taurasi, Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, Sheryl Swoopes, Candace Parker and Sabrina Ionescu. Can all of us sprout from 2024? As Clark said Thursday, when she was named Player of the Year, “I think that’s the best part about what I get to do. I grew up having those role models and aspiring to be where I am today. We have the platforms that should have been there for a really long time. We’ve had some amazing talents come through our game the last 10, 20 years.”
“Those players were everything I wanted to be. And they won,” Bueckers said.
Life is swirling in change. Taylor Swift rules the entertainment sphere, regardless of gender. The country’s richest woman, Alice Walton, is worth $72.3 billion, not much more than Kylie Jenner makes. So why can’t we continue to watch Clark, Bueckers and Reese as they move onto the WNBA, where season tickets are harder to find? Their staying power largely depends on this weekend, including a Sunday final that will have a higher viewership rating than the men on Saturday and Monday. Remember how we jumped when Clark and Iowa advanced? Watch what happens when we see the result and turn to the UConn coach.
“It’s a star-driven society that we live in,” Auriemma said. “It’s a celebrity-driven, star-driven, influencer-driven world that’s been created. All of a sudden, those two particular players came on and just lit everything up, and it just took off from there. It needs stars. It needs people that have the right personality, the right game. And we have that now. There wasn’t like a national consciousness of, ‘Hey, we need to watch this.’ It’s gone beyond that now, because of what these kids have done. They created a fan base of women’s basketball where they’ll watch a great women’s game, regardless of whether they have a rooting interest or not in the game. Past (women’s) players, they didn’t have the following. They didn’t have the hysteria that these kids have.”
Sorry, Cheryl and Diana. That’s what he said. He’s right.
Said Staley, who takes undefeated South Carolina into the other semifinal against North Carolina State: “When you treat us like a sport, you will get a return on your investment. Women’s basketball is in high demand. People want to see it. People want to see it live, and people want to see it across the airways.”
In Clark’s world, she understands any romance directed toward Bueckers. She was first on Auriemma’s list, and nothing she has done this season suggests he was nuts. He has won 11 national titles, six with undefeated teams. “It’s not Paige verse Caitlin,” Clark said. “It takes an entire team to win a basketball game, and both of us are gonna do everything we can, but I think the coolest thing about Paige is how resilient she is, obviously she’s kinda been dealt a tough hand. The way she carries herself on and off the court, the way she works hard, none of that has changed. Since I’ve known her in middle school, she’s always had that fire, she’s always been a great leader. I honestly couldn’t be happier for her the year that she’s had. She never made excuses, and to me, that’s something you really admire as a competitor more than anything, so I think it’s really cool.”
But quickly, Clark also pointed out: “This is a business. We’re here to win another basketball game and hopefully win two.”
And Auriemma? He tried to joke. “I don't need to see her drop 50. I love her. I think she's the best player — forget that I ever said Paige was the best player in the country,” he said, smiling. “I think she's the best player of all time.”
She may score 50 points and prove it. But she knows the bigger collegiate game is about developing future brands, knowing JuJu Watkins is returning at USC and that coach Lindsay Gottlieb is saying, “We’re not trying to be a one-hit wonder.” The WNBA, for now, requires players to turn 22 in a calendar year to enter the draft. The NBA only needs players to be 19 or to have completed one college season. One keen observer understands the difference.
“You're able to build a real iconic legacy at a program,” LeBron James said. “And that's what we all love about it. We love the girl's game because of that moment you actually get to see those girls (build it). That's what makes the girl's Final Four and the Elite Eight so great. Yeah, Iowa was a great team. Caitlin Clark is the reason we tuned in. The popularity comes in with the icons. You look at Angel Reese, you look at JuJu, you look at Caitlin Clark, you look at Paige. You look at the young girl that's at Iowa State (Audi Crooks). You look at (Cameron) Brink at Stanford. And that's just to name a few. Because they're not allowed to go to the NBA after their freshman year.’’
On the eve of her biggest game, Clark agrees she’s part of a chain. “It doesn’t need to be one end-all, be-all (star),” she said, “just like I think there doesn’t need to be one end-all, be-all team.” But inside an arena in northeast Ohio, in a masterpiece rated higher than any NBA game or Major League Baseball game or what those men will do in Arizona, three people are involved. Two are Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers.
The other is Geno.
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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.