‘Caitlin can’t do it without what came before’
New book puts basketball star’s success in the context of the sport’s history in Iowa
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Like many people, Howard Megdal knows that Caitlin Clark’s rise to stardom is a great story. Like far fewer people, though, Megdal knows it’s not the whole story.
Megdal is the author of a new book, “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar.” Beyond offering just a biography of the former Dowling Catholic Maroon/former Iowa Hawkeye and current Indiana Fever star, Megdal looks at Clark in the context of girls’ and women’s basketball in Iowa in the past century. He’s as deft as Betsy Ross at stitching it all together, which is pretty appropriate for a guy who lives 15 minutes from Philadelphia.
Like many books about basketball in Iowa, Megdal’s starts with the 1920s and one of the state’s first high school stars – Dorcas Andersen of Audubon, who happened to be the grandmother of current Iowa coach Jan Jensen. Both are in the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union Hall of Fame.
But the story doesn’t end there. Megdal also folds in the story of the Van Horne Hornettes, state champs in 1962 whose faster, higher-scoring game ushered in a new era for Iowa girls’ basketball. Another chapter, “Caitlin Clark’s Fairy Godmother,” tells the story of Molly Bolin Kazmer, the high-scoring and charismatic star of the Iowa Cornets of the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League who constantly fought to create a career in basketball for herself and others. And Megdal looks into how the advocacy of Iowa Women’s Athletic Director Christine Grant and the success established by former Iowa Coach Vivian Stringer, including a 1993 Final Four appearance, helped build the foundation for what Iowa women’s basketball has experienced in recent years.
Folded in with that are Iowa’s runs to the Final Four in 2023 and 2024, and Clark’s Rookie of the Year WNBA season with the Indiana Fever.
Megdal has spent his career writing about women’s basketball, as well as other sports. He’s the founder and editor-in-chief of The IX Newsletter, a women’s sports outlet that thoroughly covers six sports, and The Next, a women’s basketball newsroom with a cadre of correspondents throughout the country. Among his books are two others that tie the past to current success: “Rare Gems,” about women’s basketball in Minnesota, and “The Cardinals Way,” about the St. Louis Cardinals.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Note: I was among the people Megdal interviewed while researching his book.
Might as well just start with the concept of the book, as you make a bold statement in it that Caitlin Clark broke women's basketball.
I mean broke in a very positive way, not broke as in there's a problem. There were things that needed to be broken that have changed fundamentally, though, right?
There is the fact that there was a slot that women's basketball was placed in, which was inherently niche, that assumed there was a large portion of the country that was never going to pay attention or care. And that affected decisions on everything from who televised to how often they televised to the way in which the league sold itself to sponsors and created the economic framework. Caitlin Clark has redefined our assumptions about these things.
It's even redefined the way in which women's basketball exists next to other sports, men's sports. The thing I can't stop thinking about is when Caitlin decided to play in a pro-am on the men's PGA side and everyone wanted to meet her and the Golf Channel changed its daily programming so it could broadcast Caitlin from 18.
When did you land on the way you were going to tell this story through weaving together the history by connecting the dots, so to speak?
It's really hard, once you start to see it, to not see those connections.
When you cover Iowa basketball, and it feels like an absurd statement for me to be saying to you, it is just impossible to ignore the way in which the past directly informs the present. And not in a six-degrees-of-separation kind of way. It’s Jan Jensen's grandmother, who is simultaneously this vital star in the early 1920s at a time that the state tournament is establishing itself, and she is the star for M.M. McIntyre, who is one of the critical voices that keeps high school girls' basketball in Iowa going in a way it wasn't anywhere else in the country.
And her granddaughter is the associate head coach in Caitlin's tenure in Iowa. Everyone talks about Carver-Hawkeye Arena being filled up (in recent years). Well, that was Vivian Stringer's idea. And Vivian gets that idea by going to the state high school tournament.
People who are new to the dance are convinced that what's happened is like a Big Bang Theory, that we've never seen it before, and it’s Caitlin out of nowhere. Caitlin maximized this, she did all these things to make it as big a moment as it possibly could be. But at the same time, Caitlin can't do it without what came before.
The story of high school girls' basketball has been told so many times it's kind of a cliche. Your book uses it as a foundation, then also includes the colleges. People forget that that's part of the story, too. And then somewhere in the middle you've got Molly Bolin, who is really neither but still so important.
These are all the biggest moving parts, and one of them is that, to me, Molly came up at the exact wrong time. At almost any other moment, there would have been a clear path for her.
If she played today, she would be this massive star. She was doing it at this moment where (pro basketball) appeared, and it was unfortunately a mirage. She had to chase after these things in ways that she doesn't view as tragic, but I sit here as a basketball fan above all else and think that 26-year-old Molly Bolin is painting houses because she can't play basketball professionally when she's the best scorer in the world is a tragedy.
There's nothing wrong with painting houses. It should not be what the 26-year-old best scorer in America is doing with their time.
But about the colleges, if Iowa doesn't get this right with Vivian, who knows where we're at today? Would Drake have been able to compete with Notre Dame for Caitlin Clark if the University of Iowa had not invested properly in women's basketball? Who knows?
It's all these remarkable what-ifs again and again.
What was the trigger to learn about the Van Horne team? That story and their influence were new to me.
It was astonishing and mind-blowing, and that is purely good fortune. I was deep in the stacks in the Iowa Women's Archives (at the University of Iowa Libraries), and I'm reading all the yearbooks, all the IGHSAU yearbooks, and I get to 1962, and people are talking about this (tournament) like it's a revolution.
That led me to YouTube and being able to see it in real time. I'm watching them, and they're playing like the Iowa teams play today. They’re playing like Caitlin and (former Hawkeyes) Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall, and you could see it when you watched the video.
You're talking about your book right now a lot on the East Coast. What are people most curious about and finding interesting?
There is a one-dimensional conversation around a lot of what's happening right now in women's basketball and Caitlin Clark. And the fact that you can simultaneously believe that what Caitlin Clark is doing no one else has done and that does not force you to refuse to acknowledge or understand that she is fundamentally a product of her time and place in ways that go back 100 years.
It is not coincidental. And so when I talk to people about this, a light kind of goes off.
But at the same time, I tell people you're reacting to it in part because ESPN didn't get around to televising all the NCAA women's tournament games until 2021. You're reacting to it because ESPN got around to putting a game on ABC for the first time in NCAA women's tournament history in 2021. It happened to be Paige (Bueckers) versus Caitlin in the Sweet 16, Iowa versus UConn.
These are not coincidences. If the same exact set of circumstances is pushed at this time in 2016, we're probably talking about Breanna Stewart (of UConn). If it happened in 2010, we're probably talking about Maya Moore (of UConn). If it's 1978, we're probably talking about Molly Bolin.
It was just such a confluence of so many things. You almost need a couple pair of hands to count them on.
You need a book to be able to put it all together.
Ha. Yes. To expand beyond the book, I’d like to talk some about The Next and The IX. What were you seeing in the media landscape, and why did you want to leap into this in an entrepreneurial way?
I've been doing this about 20 years, since I got out of school. And it quickly becomes apparent when you are covering sports in this country, that there is this chasm between how men's sports and women's sports are covered.
I became convinced that I needed to build our own infrastructure. And so that led to, in 2019, the creation of The IX, which started out as three women's sports: soccer, basketball and hockey. We wanted to provide insight on a regular basis across these sports. We wanted people to have access to the multiple sports and an amplifier effect that men's sports can take for granted.
We're now up to six days per week. We have six different sports (The IX has added golf, tennis and gymnastics). You need a women's sports newsroom, and there's no better model to do it than women's basketball. We cover over a hundred reported pieces every month about women's basketball
Is there anything relating to the book or anything that are key points that we haven't discussed that you would want to throw out there?
I just would urge people, whether it's through the book, whether it's through what we're doing at The Next or just in general – like new and old to the conversation alike – you really don't have to consume women's basketball through the loudest, dumbest arguments about it.
There is a joy. I walk into the arena at Barclays Center (in Brooklyn, home to the New York Liberty) and at these sold-out games on a Tuesday night in June that would have had 7,000, 8,000 people a few years ago, and nobody there is mad or like shaking their fists at each other in an argument artificially put together by some media outlets who just got to the party.
Everyone is there to enjoy women's basketball. There’s a beauty to that that is missing from the loudest, dumbest voices. So I promise you, you don't have to consume women's basketball that way. Don’t do it that way. Come with us.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. 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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Since I wrote this piece, Howard scheduled an appearance at Prairie Lights next Friday, July 25. Iowa coaches Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen will be there, too.