I'm just going to say it... Caitlin Clark is good
And she should maybe fight in the UFC. Not really but sort of.
There’s something about that one second the ball is in the air after an impossible shot is attempted.
Your brain is trying to process can that go in? It’s not going in. Wait, it’s on line. Or is it? Wait it’s offline. No, that’s just a misleading angle, it’s online. Crap, I should’ve answered that Pearle Vision email.
It doesn’t take a genius to jump to the fact that this process is ramped up 1000s of neurons when No. 22 on the University of Iowa’s women’s basketball team shoots. It’s a swirl in your head of impossibility and inevitability.
The natural comparison that comes about all the time is Steph Curry, and while it’s right to a degree, I think that frankly diminishes what’s happening.
Steph changed the sport. Caitlin Clark is changing sports. The comparison isn’t the NIMBY Warrior, at least to me. It’s Ronda Rousey.
I’ve always found it fascinating how for as regressive politically MMA largely is, it’s been probably the most democratically equal sport in terms of elevating its female athletes to the same level as the males—sharing cards, headlining PPVs, gracing covers of video games, pay being relatively equal (still relatively shitty, but also relatively equal).
That’s all, almost entirely, because of Ronda Rousey and the force of magnetism she was in the early 2010s. UFC President Dana White famously said women would never fight in his promotion. Then the Rousey Big Bang occurred.
After Ronda fought Liz Carmouche in 2013 in the UFC’s first women’s bout ever, the cage doors opened to hundreds of women grinding in regional scenes to fight before Georges St. Pierre, Conor McGregor and Jon Jones. Even the most toxically masculine fans could acknowledge that Ronda could probably beat their ass.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’ve given the WNBA the same weight as the NBA in the past or the women’s college tournament the same weight as the men’s. I probably made the hack jokes every teenager did.
So I’m not about to stand on a hill and say that Clark, even with her Magic-esque passing and Harlem Globetrotters-esque shooting, is the first woman to prove an aesthetically skilled equal to the men. Plenty have, both her contemporaries like Paige Bueckers and JuJu Watkins all the way back to Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, etc.
But she’s definitely the first one to do it to this grand of scale, much like Rousey did armbaring her way to becoming the biggest combat sports star in the world for half a decade. And I, like 12.6 million others, have been completely sucked into the Clarkmania, and plan on lingering around to see the next Caitlins come about.
And to the Rousey point, it matters way less, at least to me, whether Clark maintains her stardom as she approaches her future career in the WNBA with the Indiana Fever, where the ironic truth of the landscape of women’s hoops tells us she’ll play on a smaller stage—at least in terms of TV ratings and general attention—than she has stood on at Iowa.
Instead, for as much of a layup a point as it is, it’s the gate that she opened that matters, and whether or not public fan convention storms through those gates and lingers like it did in the octagon.
All this said, I think UConn at underdog money tonight is pretty good value.
Here’s some other stuff I’ve thought about this past month.
Anatomy of a Fall — I finally watched it. What a picture. I love legal dramas. Hüller is so fantastic and I desperately want the American legal system to adopt those robes.
Avril Lavigne — I started thinking a lot about Avril, the pop music iconography space that she occupied that (I think) had been unoccupied until Billie Eilish took hold of it, the fact that Let Go was the first album I ever bought, the fact that she married Chad Kroeger, the fact that Taylor Swift low-key has kind of ripped her sound off, the fact that so many of her songs bang and the fact that Christian Holden covered her.
Baseball — I’m just very happy I have my white noise machine back.
Blue Valentine — Had never caught this movie and always mixed it up with Winter’s Bone for some reason. But just astoundingly moving even though I did not appreciate the coded signal it was sending about people with receding hairlines.
Dune 2 — Zendaya kicks ass in this, and was the best theater experience I had in a while, despite my friend (and I’m using that term loosely after this occurred) Timmy a) made us sit in the third row and kept laughing at the movie.
Juice WRLD — I never thought I’d be a Juice guy, but I have to admit Death Race For Love rules and has one of the best album covers of the 2010s.
Neil Young back on Spotify — I had worn out the Last Waltz Helpless performance. I needed this back.
Rain by Creed, a great hidden gem with one of the worst live performances I’ve ever seen — First listen to the actual song, then please watch this insane Regis and Kelly appearance