No Top 10 list, just a top-notch interview

Caitlin Clark sits down with David Letterman to talk about life and basketball

One of the saddest days to me is always the Tuesday after March Madness ends, even if, yes, that is usually in April.

It has nothing to do with the fate of any team I follow. It has everything to do with no team playing at all. The tears that might well during “One Shining Moment” aren’t for the emotion of what has happened but the fact that it’s all over.

No more college basketball.

Sigh.

But in much the same way he did when I was a young night owl with a crazy work schedule, David Letterman has come to the rescue.

On Tuesday, the latest episode of Letterman’s “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” dropped on Netflix, featuring former Iowa and current WNBA star Caitlin Clark. There’s not a ton of basketball to be seen (unless you count tossing grapes) but it’s entertaining TV nonetheless.

It says a ton about Clark’s celebrity that she’s on this series. Previous guests in this season of the show were Miley Cyrus and Charles Barkley, while past seasons featured Barack Obama and Volodymr Zelenskyy. Not sure any of them went duckpin bowling, though, like Clark and Letterman do.

Even so, it never ceases to amaze me the ease with which Clark, 22 when this was filmed in December, handles her celebrity. While being an uncomfortable dork is part of Letterman’s shtick, it’s Clark who seems more at ease with the cameras and the audience. And sometimes more at ease with questions; when time winds down and Dave wants to ask her a final question, she turns it around and asks him to talk about the dumbest thing he ever did in college. And then time was up. Excellent clock management, Caitlin.

It also says a ton about Clark’s – and Iowa’s – cultural cachet that when Letterman went to his first Clark-era Fever game last summer, it was now-former Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder who got him the ticket. For his show, Letterman hangs with Bluder at the Hilltop Tavern in Iowa City for some conversation and also admits to Clark that he kind of fell in love with her coach as he dawdled while walking into the game.

“She called me out for being a bonehead and I just loved that,” Letterman said.

Clark understood.

“She did that to me quite often as well,” she said.

Goofiness aside – donuts, bowling, grapes – it’s an insightful interview that shows that despite his bonehead persona, Letterman does his homework and knows his stuff. Clark readily chats about her competitive nature, her work with a sports psychologist and, most charmingly, how Diana Taurasi was the only player she says gave her any trash talk but then followed it up with “I just love ya” while the two of them stood waiting during a free throw.

Caitlin Clark in conversation with David Letterman. (Image: X screenshot)

Letterman doesn’t get too much into the nuts and bolts of basketball and that’s part of the appeal here. We can save strategy and details for ESPN, this is a conversation custom-made for new fans of Clark and her sport. And that’s what makes it so entertaining.

Oh those rumors

Another measure of Clark’s success is the way crazy rumors swirl around about her like she’s the second coming of Princess Diana. One of the latest is a doozy.

While Clark’s good works, such as a backpack giveaway to Des Moines kids, are legit and have made news, it’s still pretty far-fetched that she bought the Salisbury House in Des Moines to turn it into a place for homeless youth.

Yet there it was, all over the interweb this week with people falling for it hook, line and sinker. (And we wonder why the world is in the mess it’s in?)

The Salisbury House is a Tudor Revival mansion built 100 years ago in a residential Des Moines neighborhood that, along with its gardens, is open to visitors for tours of its art and furniture collections as well as events. The free summer concerts by the Belin Quartet on the mansion’s lawn are lovely.

And no, it has not been acquired by Caitlin Clark. (And yes, I realize the irony of writing another piece about Clark but I’m not aiming for clickbait and what I write is actually true.)

The Salisbury House and Gardens chiming in on the Facebook post about the mansion Caitlin Clark supposedly bought. (Image: Facebook screenshot)

The problem with reading any story about Clark on your devices is that then you get fed absolute crap after that. That Caitlin Clark is unhappy and quitting basketball. That she and her boyfriend are fighting about something. That she is mad at Lisa Bluder. That she bought a big mansion that isn’t actually for sale.

I’m pretty sure we’re just one or two clicks away from seeing her standing on a porch holding a quilt with a poem about her amazing daughter.

Then again, that might be comfy to sit on while listening to the Belin Quartet on the lawn of the Salisbury House this summer.

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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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