A moment for the ages
Caitlin Clark’s college career has given Iowans a front-row seat to history
“I didn’t grow up in a house that watched sports. Never. I just learned who Brock Purdy is. Iowa State guy, right? But my parents signed up for Peacock so they could watch Caitlin Clark play. I should watch it with them sometime. It’s not just sports, it’s history.”
— My doctor, after I mentioned being around big crowds at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
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Even in the sanest of times, historical perspective can be tough. In our digital-fueled world of frenzy, where words like “historic” and “iconic” have lost all meaning, it’s even harder to grasp. Then what can make it even tougher to notice is when it’s right in front of our faces.
But make no mistake, Iowans. We are witnessing history. A smack-dab-in-our-faces history unfolding before us.
Of course, I am talking about Caitlin Clark. And it’s hard to do so and throw out words like “history” without sounding like some fan girl or Hawkeye fan. And she’s about to make it by setting the NCAA Division I women’s basketball scoring record, most likely against Michigan on Feb. 15 but possibly at Nebraska on Feb. 11.
I’m a fan girl all right, but I’m a fan girl for history – sports history in particular. I’ve been that way my whole life. I had to be the one of the only kids at my elementary school, certainly the only girl, carting around biographies of Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Babe Didrikson.
This Caitlin Clark moment isn’t history because she is about to set a scoring record; that mark will be surpassed one day just like Clark has picked off the other top scorers one by one. No, this is history because of what is happening all around her.
It’s the moment itself.
Sold-out arenas. TV ratings. Little girls who want to see her. Little girls who want to be her. The fact that she is the most talked-about athlete in the U.S. right now (with the possible exception of Travis Kelce, but that’s because of his girlfriend). The way she has brought attention to her sport and her team from people who had never seen a second of women’s basketball in their life.
Being the history geek, I’ve been trying to think of comparable sports moments. People throw out Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and while his primacy was unquestionable and non-Bulls fans came out in droves to see him, the NBA and its popularity had long since been established.
I saw a reference that Clark is having her “Steph Curry moment.” Not sure exactly what that might mean but if we’re talking college … well, Davidson wasn’t exactly creating a ticket frenzy wherever they went though he was the reason they were a giant-slaying mid-major team.
The UConn women? Unprecedented, phenomenal success to be sure, more fans on the road likely but we aren’t talking sold-out arenas everywhere they went, even when they had a 111-game winning streak. UConn has long been a star-making machine with Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Maya Moore and so many others but none had a star that shone as brightly in college as Clark’s is now. I once saw a pack of little girls follow Rebecca Lobo around a Minneapolis hotel during the 1995 Final Four, but she didn’t require the security detail that Clark does.
As the Caitlin Clark juggernaut has picked up intensity, I’ve been trying to think of comparisons. None are perfect, but here are three that offer some similarities.
Babe Ruth, 1927
By 1927, Ruth was already the Sultan of Swat, famous all over America for smacking home runs like no one had before. Yet, like Clark is a leader in the seemingly incongruous categories of scoring and assists, so too was Ruth as a splendid pitcher and a beast at the plate.
But it’s the 1927 home run race that resonates. His quest for 60 dingers created a true FOMO (fear of missing out) moment. Des Moines native Bill Bryson spells it out in his book, One Summer: America 1927, weaving together the stories of that incredible year – Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone and flagpole sitting records. That summer the Yankees were the out-of-town draw that Clark and the Hawkeyes are now.
“Twenty thousand turned out on a Friday afternoon in Chicago to play the White Sox,” Bryson writes, “ten times the number that came to watch the Sox play the fourth-place Athletics three days later. The Yankees drew twenty-one thousand in Cleveland, twenty-two thousand in Detroit, even eight thousand in lowly, fanless St. Louis – all on weekdays. On Labor Day, in Boston as the Yankees long road trip finally drew to a close, an estimated seventy thousand people turned up at Fenway Park – far more than it could hold – even though the hometown Red Sox were a magnificent 49 games out of first place.”
Sound familiar?
Pelé in New York
Soccer was nothing in this country before the Brazilian megastar came to the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League in 1975. There were no soccer moms, and kids rarely traveled to their backyard to play, much less another state or town. Then along came Edson Arantes do Nascimento and America fell in love. A team that had drawn a few thousand fans now saw 22,500 for Pele’s debut match. People paid $100 for a $6 ticket. Eventually the team moved from Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island to Yankee Stadium to the then-new Meadowlands in New Jersey, where they drew 77,000 for matches.
I’m not saying Caitlin Clark is the Pelé of women’s basketball. But the moment is familiar – new fans, jacked-up ticket prices, a media circus. Clark has brought more fans to women’s basketball, but the sport was hardly moribund. Pelé and the other Cosmos stars had the spotlight, but after he was gone so was the league. The NASL shut down in 1984 (Major League Soccer debuted in 1996). Women’s basketball won’t suffer that same fate, but what will be the draw in Iowa’s future? Who else will draw crowds around the country? Time will tell.
The 99ers
The World Cup championship run of the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team most resembles Clark’s moment in how it resonates and with whom: kids, little girls in particular. The 99ers’ audience is her audience, a couple generations later.
Female athletes know this. It’s a burden they carry (or a privilege, depending on your point of view): Your success or failure means something. You don’t get the luxury of playing for yourself.
Brandi Chastain, she of the Most Famous Sports Bra in History, said as much in a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times noting the 20th anniversary of that World Cup title:
“There was a little bit in the back of your head how important it was to win not just for us but really as a kind of flag-bearer for women’s sports. We had a lot of responsibility.”
The approach to that World Cup was different than any in the past. Organizers targeted kids – the ones now playing the game after generations of interest spawned by the Pelé days – and of course their parents. Corporate tie-ins targeted kids. Mattel got in on the act with soccer Barbies. The dolls were sort of pitched as a Barbie Mia Hamm – if Mia Hamm had hair like Cher.
It worked. Crowds came. For the championship match, 90,015 packed the Rose Bowl. The players became rock stars. The U.S. women’s national team remains as popular or more than the men’s.
Again, the comparison to this Caitlin Clark moment isn’t perfect. The World Cup didn’t turn into immediate popularity for other women’s soccer in the U.S., but it helped build a foundation. Women’s pro leagues came and went until the National Women’s Soccer League launched in 2013 and has expanded to 12 teams.
That’s where I think we’ll see the real impact of the Caitlin Clark Effect once the dust settles on her college career: the future. Not next year, not the year after. But down the line when these little girls and boys grow up and see that women can take center stage in this realm. Maybe very soon another player will – Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo, USC’s JuJu Watkins or maybe one from some gym in Urbandale where every fourth-grader now wants to wear No. 22.
And there will be an audience ready, one that now knows more about women’s basketball than they did a year or so ago because a pony-tailed player in black and gold caught their eye.
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Lilly: Lori I’m watching women’s college basketball and it’s so entertaining hahaha. I’m watching old videos. I think from the time you were in Seattle. But I’m watching Iowa. Cuz Clark is so good. Clark is what originally got me into it.
Lori: I think she will draw a lot of people to this game I love.
Lilly: Yes, like me.
— Text exchange between my sister Lori, a Washington state-based director for Pac-12 women’s basketball, and a 20-something friend of her daughter. Lilly later joined Lori to attend her first-ever women’s basketball game.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese And Basketball: Stories From A Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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Nothing but net, Jane. Well done. A friend told me that basketball color commentator Gus Johnson compared Ms. Clark to NBA stars Steph Curry and the late Pete Maravich. I almost instinctively replied. "Gus Johnson is full of crap! (but I didn't say 'crap.') She's Babe Ruth!" She's elevating interest in all women's sports, becoming a role model for young girls and an affirmation for any grown women who ever participated in sports at any level. I wish my mom, who played girls basketball for the Garrison, Iowa High School Rockets before World War II, was still around to see this. This is exactly what Dr. Christine Grant was hoping for when she brought Coach C. Vivian Stringer to Iowa more than 40 years ago and made the Hawkeyes a national power in short order with stars like Michelle "Ice" Edwards and Toni Foster.
That said, we're starting to see the boo birds who are calling Ms. Clark a gunner, that she's not as good as the great players who came before her, etc. etc. I would submit her assist numbers belie the first assertion (case in point: Hannah Stuelke's 48 points for Iowa vs. Penn State) and that Ms. Clark's success will only draw greater attention to the history of women's basketball.
Of course, the Hawkeyes had a setback at Nebraska Sunday, which will probably draw out fresh criticism. We'll see how Ms. Clark and the Hawks weather that. They've done admirably so far. Hemingway called courage "grace under pressure" and Ms. Clark and the Hawks have demonstrated it in abundance. I would implore folks to "not hate, appreciate." I as an Iowa State alum am VERY excited about freshman sensation Audie Crooks and am hoping maybe we'll see a CyHawk postseason tournament game. Our whole state will be a winner, no matter what the final score of such a contest might be.
I find myself recording the games that I can't watch live. I don't do that for any other basketball, men or womens.