It was impossible to over-cover Michael Jordan.
Wait — that’s going way too far as a comparison to what’s happening now. Right? Let’s get our bearings here and stop invoking the gods.
After all, Jordan was a phenomenon. He was not only compulsively watchable as a player, but his presence in basketball actually served to elevate the entire industry around him and even created new markets. Neophyte fans flooded into the sport because Jordan was playing it.
Jordan was good for all of that, so it was only reasonable that the media would have gone to virtually any length to tell and re-tell his story, even as that story was reconstituted, repackaged and sent out there again and again. The thing was, Jordan just kept adding chapters to the book.
Greatness: You know it when you see it.
So anyway, about Caitlin Clark.
There are moments in sports about which you don’t have to guess. They either explode on you in a flash of brilliance, or they get built brick by brick in a series of great matchups or performances until you realize the sort of excellence you’re seeing. Either way, people understand they’re at an inflection point in sports — a sea change.
When? Your own memory can probably answer that question best, since it mostly depends upon how long you’ve been watching. For a certain generation, it might be Nicklaus and Palmer, but for others Tiger Woods, period. For some, it was Chamberlain and Russell, but for others Magic and Larry, and of course Michael and maybe Kobe and Shaq, or LeBron, or Steph.
Serena Williams, with her consistency of greatness, still maybe crept up on people over time rather than forced their decisions about her all at once. Jordan himself was a wonderful college player, but his legacy was forged as a pro, when he and Nike sort of remade the idea of athletic stardom.
And I’m just scattershooting. You’ll have your own definition of greatness as a fan, be it Usain Bolt or Wayne Gretzky or Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky, or Pele, or Ali, or — hey, this is a game we could play all day.
The commonality, besides the excellence, is really that these athletes weren’t just athletes. They were moments. And it’s incredibly cool for a sports fan to realize that a moment is happening. It never gets old.
The media’s job isn’t usually to determine greatness, though you’ll have little trouble finding self-appointed blowholes trying to do just that. Normally, the media’s job is to recognize the moment of greatness when it’s happening, then reflect and amplify that moment. (They also want to turn a profit in the process.)
That is the Caitlin Clark story in a nutshell — and yes, you’re likely to hear the story again and again. But look, it’s only happening because she’s worth the retelling.
Clark is hardly the first great women’s player to come along. Again, depending upon your demographic, you can name-check some stars of the women’s game down through the years even if you tell yourself that you don’t follow it. Could be Sheryl Swoopes, or Sue Bird, or Maya Moore, or Diana Taurasi, Lisa Leslie, Cheryl Miller — it’s not a short list.
But Clark is a moment. She is genuinely and truly great, here and now. She authors new chapters just as people think the book is written.
And it isn’t only her performances, like Iowa’s Elite Eight victory over defending national champ LSU on Monday, in which Clark racked up 41 points, 12 assists and seven rebounds — a true star turn in a huge game.
It isn’t just those. It’s what her performances are doing for the women’s game and the sport in general.
The Iowa women’s basketball program had sold out two home games in its history prior to Clark’s arrival; this season, Carver-Hawkeye Arena was a sellout from first game to last. The Associated Press reported earlier this year that more than 30 schools either broke attendance records or sold out completely on the day Clark played in their buildings. The average bump was 150% of normal ticket sales.
Last year’s national title game between Iowa and LSU drew an average of nearly 10 million viewers and peaked at 12.6 million, both all-time records for the women’s game. LSU is a spectacle unto itself, of course, but this was also about watching Clark, now the top scorer in NCAA history.
Fans lined up outside arenas this season hoping for a ticket to watch her play; they dubbed themselves Clarkies, and their numbers never dwindled. Clark responded by shattering every women’s and men’s college scoring record on the books.
Now the Iowa native pursues one thing she hasn’t got: a national championship for the Hawkeyes. And just when you thought it was a pity that the Iowa-LSU rematch occurred outside the Final Four, you look at the bracket and see that Iowa’s semifinal opponent is UConn, with powerful South Carolina and North Carolina State lurking on the other side.
In other words, no matter how many times you think you’ve heard it, this story is nowhere near fully told. That is amazing news, because this is an actual moment that’s happening. The No. 1 job right now — for fans, but especially the media — is not to miss it.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
