This may sound bizarre for a lesbian to say (we famously like sports activities, proper?), however I’ve been avoiding ladies’s basketball for many of my life. I grew up visiting my dad’s mother and father in West Hartford, Connecticut, not removed from the place the legendary UConn ladies’s basketball group practiced, and my grandfather was a giant fan of the Huskies. However as a substitute of pulling up a seat subsequent to him on the sofa to look at their video games, I might steal away into my grandmother’s toilet and apply coral lipstick and matronly fragrance with abandon, safe within the data that my household was too busy watching basketball to yell at me for my secret baby-femme exploits.
My antipathy towards group sports activities has continued into maturity. Whereas I’m not fairly the sofa potato that I used to be in my youth—I now benefit from the occasional foray into swimming, climbing, and Pilates—I nonetheless really feel a frisson of boredom and anxiousness each time I sense a social occasion will devolve into sports activities discuss. (I dwell in Los Angeles, fairly famously the house of the Lakers, so this occurs much more than you’d suppose.) All that modified, although—or began to alter, anyway—after I first noticed Caitlin Clark play.
There are lots of extraordinarily cool and shockingly gifted ladies’s-basketball stars to comply with proper now, from Angel Reese to JuJu Watkins to Paige Bueckers, and no much less an authority than LeBron James has credited these “icons” with revitalizing curiosity within the sport. However generally you simply must see the correct athlete on the proper time, as I did after I watched Clark and Iowa face off towards UConn (sorry, Grandpa!), to shift from “sports-hater” to “one that may really type of take into account going to an WNBA recreation someday.” If I nonetheless can’t bear the considered enjoying group sports activities myself, it seems that I genuinely take pleasure in watching a terrifyingly gifted younger girl deal with herself on the courtroom, whether or not she’s profitable or dropping.
In fact, freaking out about Clark’s expertise hardly units me other than the wave of dyed-in-the-wool ladies’s basketball followers who’ve adopted the 22-year-old Iowa native as a sort of excessive priestess of the game: Clark is at present the highest-scoring athlete within the historical past of faculty basketball, and Lisa Bluder, her coach on the College of Iowa, has referred to her as “the most effective participant in America.” And, if Clark’s on-court prowess weren’t sufficient, she’s dripping in endorsements from main manufacturers like Nike and Gatorade—an honor often reserved for male basketball gamers, whose achievements too usually crowd out ladies and nonbinary gamers within the sport.
