FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Magic of Watching Caitlin Clark
I know almost nothing about basketball. But when Iowa's electric point guard takes the court, like millions around the country, I make sure to tune in.
By now, most of the world has joined me in admiration of the basketball stylings of Caitlin Clark, a 22-year-old from the suburbs of Des Moines who has taken college basketball by storm these last four years, demolishing single-season and all-time scoring and assist records on her way to becoming the most talked-about athlete in sports. This season, every game she’s played in has been a sell-out, home and away, and tickets have never more expensive, nor viewing numbers higher, than when she’s on the court.
The first time I saw Clark play was in Iowa’s 2021 Sweet 16 match-up against UConn. Iowa lost that game, and it seemed likelier that the Huskies star point guard, Paige Bueckers, would live up to the hype than her Midwestern rival. But fast forward three years, and while they’ve both stayed at the top of their game this season, Clark’s achievements have towered above what any other female basketball player has done since. Now it seems fitting that after achieving redemption against LSU in the Elite Eight, Clark and the Hawkeyes meet Bueckers and the Huskies for a place in the last NCAA Final of her career against either NC State or South Carolina.
Clark’s highlight reel is mesmerizing. You’ve surely seen it by now: logo three-pointers and fifty-foot passes in transition, a style ideally suited for SportsCenter reels and YouTube compilations. I was not surprised when I learned two weeks ago that Wright Thompson, America’s greatest working sportswriter, had been meeting with Clark and her family these last months to deliver this ESPN profile, which is very good.
But even after learning more about her personal and interior life—things I’m usually interested in as both a writer and someone fascinated by what makes exceptional people tick—I still prefer the footage. Much like Messi and Roger Federer, what Clark says is far less interesting to me than what she’s able to do on the court. I don’t mean that out of disrespect; I’m proud that Haley and I have Alba, at four years old, asking to stay up late to see Clark play. She is already a role model for millions. But let’s be real: Clark is still a kid, the same age as the ones I teach at UT who cannot turn assignments in on time despite asking for extensions and who I wouldn’t trust to teach my daughter a damn thing about growing up to achieve greatness. It’s good enough for me to know that Clark is self-aware of her fame and its potential consequences. And that she understands that, for now, her speaking is best done with a ball in her hands.
Leading into Friday night’s game, I touched up my original essay, “The Magic of Watching Caitlin Clark,” which I published just before last year’s Final Four match-up against South Carolina. It is a relic from that moment in time, but I think it speaks to who Clark is and what she’s still becoming ahead of her final run with Iowa before turning pro and going to the Olympics with Team USA this summer. I have no predictions for tonight’s game, even with the storylines floating around my head and the Hawkeyes written down in black ink as the eventual champions in my ESPN bracket. All you or I can expect is what we’ve gotten all year long: more magic.
Now, without further ado…
I typed out the first draft of this essay in March 2022. But I didn’t finish it because Lauren Jensen, a Creighton guard who’d transferred from Iowa after riding the bench her freshman season, hit a three-point shot with 13 seconds left to send Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes home early from the NCAA Tournament.
March’s Madness faded, and life’s regularly scheduled programming returned through spring and summer. But winter eventually came. And with it, basketball. And with that, a lanky 21-year-old who, after a mythological junior season, was just named the Naismith Player of the Year—the award given to the best player in college hoops.
In less than 24 hours, in Iowa’s first Final Four in 30 years, Clark will face off against South Carolina and its star Aaliyah Boston, last year’s Naismith winner and the woman who Clark’s detractors are most likely to say should’ve won instead.
Since she and her Iowa teammates were bounced in the second round of the tournament last March, a lot has happened in my life. I’ve had a metal inserted into the bones of my left foot, changed jobs, sold a house, bought another, watched my babies grow one year older, and consumed hundreds of hours of competitive sports. But beyond watching Lionel Messi at the Qatari World Cup, I’ve felt no sensation comparable to the electricity of watching Caitlin Clark dribble up a polished court with a basketball in her hands.
It makes little sense that her game would affect me so much. For one, I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. Lady Vol country, where besides March, Iowa games are rarely broadcast, and no one gives a hoot about a team that plays outside the Southeastern Conference. Another reason is that I’m not a hooper, like, at all. The only basketball game I watched live between eighth grade and 25 was a New Jersey Nets game my church youth group went to my senior year of high school.
Then I met Haley and during our first March together, I watched her sink into the couch, covered in thick blankets, with one game playing on the TV and another streaming on her laptop. That month, she lost the ability to speak English. Instead, she communicated in a foreign tongue that included words like bracket, bubbles, seedings, and Cinderellas. For days, she wore the same baggy pair of boy’s basketball shorts whenever I came over to ensure we remained celibate until marriage. For sustenance, she ate goldfish crackers and Life cereal from the box.1
I learned, eventually, to accept this. And, by 2019, I joined my wife in hibernation.
When she left for a spring break girls' trip to Florida on March 17—the day Tennessee’s men played Kentucky in the SEC Tournament semifinal—I drove her to the airport then returned to Fieldhouse Social to watch the game with my in-laws and their friends. It surprised her, I’m sure: it was the first time I chose to watch basketball without her prompting. She must’ve felt proud, like a mom whose child just said they’re no longer playing a sport because she wants them to, but because they’ve learned to also love the thing their parent loves.
Since then, we’ve watched a lot of basketball together2.
In 2021, Clark showed up on our TV for the first time. Her Iowa team faced UConn in the Sweet 16, and I listened as reporters hyped the game by comparing the one teenage sensation I did know about, Paige Bueckers, with this kid from Iowa I didn’t. The game was unremarkable; the Huskies won by 20. But I must’ve experienced some internal forcefield disturbance watching Clark, who scored 21 points and had five assists that night. Because the next season I followed along intently as she broke records. I watched YouTube videos of her hitting three-point shots from half-court logos and launching supersonic passes to teammates, more like a South American teenager on a dirt soccer field than an American basketball player from the suburbs.
Early on, as girl parents, Haley and I agreed that it was our moral obligation to identify the athletes we’d one day take Alba to watch in order to sow in her a love for sports. On the soccer side of things, we were in the clear; a painting of Alex Morgan hung in Alba’s room before she left Haley’s body. I pushed Adeline Gray, the world champion wrestler, as another role model, imagining that, based on my genetic history, my progeny were likelier to resemble bulldogs than greyhounds. She disagreed; they were going to play basketball. And when Clark’s game entered my life I started to think, for the first time, not about how to prevent cauliflower ear but about the shortest distance to a WNBA arena3.
What I love about Clark is what I loved about Manu Ginobili, who I’d seen lead Argentina to a gold medal in the 2004 Olympics and on the Spurs’ last NBA championship run in 2014. He was a contortionist who played basketball as if unaware that it had rules. That you throw passes from here, and move into space here, and shoot from here. In a 2005 New York Times piece, a former coach compared Ginobili to a snake, able to “bend, move, and do the strangest things.” Kobe Bryant and Charles Barkley called him their favorite player, just as Kevin Durant and Steph Curry now call Clark the woman who will change basketball. “With his controlled chaos, he changes the game for us,” Duncan said. Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich would shake his head in disbelief or anger—Ginobili criticizers, like Clark’s, often point out his high turnover rate over his circus passing—but told reporter Liz Robbins: “You have to let Manu be Manu.”
Even Clark’s dad, who coached her on boy’s teams when she was younger, says he’s skeptical when she pulls up from the logo. When she inevitably scores, she turns to him and shrugs, as if all three-pointers were supposed to be shot from that range. “Isn’t that what the logo’s there for?” she seems to ask her father, who is always in the stands with her mom and brothers biting his fingernails and cheering on his little girl.
When she receives an inbound pass and hits an off-balance three with .8 seconds left on the clock, Iowa down 85-83 against Indiana at home, she sprints into an adoring crowd and later tells ESPN reporter Holly Rowe, “We work on that play every day in practice.” When Rowe asks Clark about what went through her head as the shot left her hand: “Honestly, I thought it was money.”
People call this out as hubris. Keyboard warriors race to YouTube and Instagram, seeking out videos praising Clark’s shooting just so they can comment about her flopping or trash talk. But I, for one, think she’s being stone-cold serious when she describes her on-court vision.
Caitlin Clark exists on a plane of supernatural athleticism mortals like you and I cannot fathom. Somehow, the play really does slow down for her. The ball is smaller and the basket is bigger, as if she were hooping in an alternate universe, Space Jam meets Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The writer David Foster Wallace, in his famous profile “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” described the Swiss tennis player this way:
“The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces.”
My only formal experience playing basketball was in sixth grade when I tried out for the middle school team and got cut in the first practice. Because of that, I can’t tell you precisely what Clark does that makes her so special (just like, last year, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made St. Peter’s March run so special).
But do you need to understand the mechanics of a shooting star to lay in the grass past midnight looking up and wishing for it to pass by your house?
Last season, Haley and I would sit on the couch during commercial breaks talking through the hypothetical South Carolina matchup that awaited Iowa in the Elite Eight. Haley explained to me what a quick, defensive point guard like Destanni Henderson would try to do when up against an elastic shooter like Clark. In this Final Four, Dawn Staley—the namesake of an award given each year to the best point guard in college ball that Clark has won twice and is favorite to win again this year—will put Brea Beal and Zia Cooke on Clark like mosquitoes in July.
But one of the beauties of sports is that you aren’t obliged to enjoy only one element of the game.
In soccer, the sport I know best, some salivate over formations: their evolutions, the preferences of elite coaches, what happens when different styles meet. Some are drawn to bone-bruising defensive play, like crunching Genarro Gattuso tackles from the early 2000s. Some people daydream about energetic presses and see imaginary goalies swatting paper balls at work before they hit the back of the garbage can. But these were never my visions. When I go to YouTube, I watch videos of nutmegs. Being Argentinian has inclined me toward the beautiful assist more than the beautiful goal. One of my favorite players, Juan Roman Riquelme, recognized worldwide as one of the last great No. 10s, was a magician prone to run off to one corner flag to celebrate his assists while the scorer ran to the opposite to celebrate his goal.
What I see when I watch Clark on the basketball is a canvas that’s about to explode with color. She’s lighter fluid. Who cares if Clark turns the ball over a dozen times if she can score or assist on 70 of your team’s points, as she did against Louisville? Risk, reward.
Iowa isn’t favored against South Carolina, which boasts gargantuan size and suffocating defensive ability. But we don’t choose to watch sports because the results are predictable. This is the kind of offensive vs. defensive matchup journalists write up at the beginning of a season for a dream finale (and it comes one game short of that pedestal). Like in the St. Peter’s essay I wrote last March, I don’t imagine Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder and her players are setting up to fight mammoth post players like Boston, Cardoso, Saxten, and Amihere in the paint. This leaves the obvious alternative: rain down threes like Midwestern hailstones, daring the bigs to chase you into the outer edges of the storm, where their bludgeoning force is less bruising.
I respect the soldiers who defend the fortress and fight their battles hand-to-hand on the hilltop. But I can’t help myself: in these contests between the strong and the feisty, I choose the outlaw, Robin Hood, sneaking over and behind hedges into crevices to steal riches from the castle. I see Goliath beckoning for David to meet him on the battlefield and the shepherd boy hitting him from thirty yards with a stone he’s fired from a slingshot.
Many years ago, the Argentine writer Hernan Casciari wrote a famous essay comparing Messi to his childhood dog. I translated it into English. The thesis of that essay was twofold. The first is that, as Clark does on a basketball court, Messi can do inhuman things on a soccer field. In 2012, after scoring five goals for Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League, his head coach, Pep Guardiola, said, "The day he wants to, he'll score six." Clark’s coach at Iowa, Lisa Bluder, has 40 years in the game and a strict three-pillar definition of the kinds of shots her players should be taking; Clark breaks every single one. But Bluder has called her a special player who gets exemptions from the rules written to bring sport down to a comprehensible level for the rest of us. “I will defend Caitlin until the day I die,” Bluder said in response to a question about the technical fouls Clark gets for her short fuse.
The second point of Casciari’s essay was that Messi not only experiences but effuses unparalleled joy on the field (Casciari wasn’t the first, and will not be the last, to point this out). In 2016, when Messi briefly retired from the national team after Argentina fell in three consecutive tournament finals, a 15-year-old boy—his now teammate, Enzo Fernandez—begged him on Facebook to return, and to return so that he could enjoy himself again. After Argentina won the World Cup in December, the Argentine press asked Riquelme for his thoughts on what makes his former teammate exceptional. He said: “Messi doesn’t play soccer. He plays ball. He plays like the old men from before. He plays like he’s back in the neighborhood.”
In Lindsay Schnell’s USA Today article after Clark’s triple-double last round, she wrote about how the West Des Moines native thrives in the open floor, zips passes through traffic, buries jumpers from unimaginable distances—and yet all the swagger is unmatched by the joy Clark feels just being there. “That’s when I play my best basketball: when I’m having the most fun of anyone on the court,” Clark said. “I play this game because I love it and because it brings joy to other people, I don’t play to hoist a trophy.”
A few months ago, before this college basketball season started, I relinquished my CrossFit membership and joined the YMCA. Early in the morning, I watch dads run their sons through drills and shoot hoops before they take them to school. When they leave, I walk onto the court, grab a ball, and work through my own simple routine. Like millions of ballers, young and old, it isn’t long before I’m writing myself into game-like scenarios. I envision imaginary defenders with a hand in my face, trying to stop a long three while the clock ticks down to zero.
Once upon a time, as a kid in Bayonne, I shouted the name every kid raised in the ‘90s shouted after launching a Hail Mary shot they knew wasn’t going in. Now, at 34, with no one else on the court, I shout another name. And occasionally, the ball finds its way to the hoop, sliding through the raggedy net, and I raise my hands and nod my head to the imaginary spectators in black and yellow.
Money.
I couldn’t find a way to naturally fit this anecdote into the story. But, when we were dating, I occasionally played in a weekend pick-up game with some guys from church. I was terrible at basketball but had fun playing rabid defense and throwing ridiculously inaccurate long-distance passes out of bounds. Since I knew Haley was a hooper, I asked one of the organizers if she could join. He said fine, but that girls didn’t usually come. In fact, they never came. And it did get physical out there: Charlie once had a tooth knocked out from a stray elbow. One thing Haley taught me watching games on television was that you always had to watch out for the skinny white girls with the ponytails. They’re the shooters. Unfortunately, no one had taught my dude that lesson; she drained a corner three on him, and I knew at that moment that she would bear my children.
In fact, 11 days before she gave birth to Alba, we took advantage of free tickets and my prime parking spot a Ginobili toss from Thompson-Boling Arena to watch the Vols down Arkansas, 82-61.
Answer: 3 hours, 31 minutes to College Park, Georgia, home of the Atlanta Dream.