This might sound weird for a lesbian to say (we famously like sports, right?), but I’ve been avoiding women’s basketball for most of my life. I grew up visiting my dad’s parents in West Hartford, Connecticut, not far from where the legendary UConn women’s basketball team practiced, and my grandfather was a big fan of the Huskies. But instead of pulling up a seat next to him on the couch to watch their games, I would steal away into my grandmother’s bathroom and apply coral lipstick and matronly perfume with abandon, secure in the knowledge that my family was too busy watching basketball to yell at me for my secret baby-femme exploits.
My antipathy toward team sports has continued into adulthood. While I’m not quite the couch potato that I was in my youth—I now enjoy the occasional foray into swimming, hiking, and Pilates—I still feel a frisson of boredom and anxiety whenever I sense a social event will devolve into sports talk. (I live in Los Angeles, quite famously the home of the Lakers, so this happens a lot more than you’d think.) All that changed, though—or started to change, anyway—when I first saw Caitlin Clark play.
There are many extremely cool and shockingly talented women’s-basketball stars to follow right now, from Angel Reese to JuJu Watkins to Paige Bueckers, and no less an authority than LeBron James has credited these “icons” with revitalizing interest in the sport. But sometimes you just need to see the right athlete at the right time, as I did when I watched Clark and Iowa face off against UConn (sorry, Grandpa!), to shift from “sports-hater” to “person who might actually sort of consider going to an WNBA game sometime.” If I still can’t bear the thought of playing team sports myself, it turns out that I genuinely enjoy watching a terrifyingly talented young woman handle herself on the court, whether she’s winning or losing.
Of course, freaking out about Clark’s talent hardly sets me apart from the wave of dyed-in-the-wool women’s basketball fans who have adopted the 22-year-old Iowa native as a kind of high priestess of the sport: Clark is currently the highest-scoring athlete in the history of college basketball, and Lisa Bluder, her coach at the University of Iowa, has referred to her as “the best player in America.” And, if Clark’s on-court prowess weren’t enough, she’s dripping in endorsements from major brands like Nike and Gatorade—an honor usually reserved for male basketball players, whose achievements too often crowd out women and nonbinary players in the sport.
Along with Reese, Watkins, Buecker, and a host of other players, Clark is making women’s basketball a must-see event again; ticket sales are up, up, up, and viewership is on a par with NBA games (finally). Honestly, though, as cool as Clark is, maybe what I’m responding to isn’t just her skill: It could be that I’m also dealing with a little bit of FOMO, given that half my friends are constantly looking for discount Sparks tickets. I want to go to the Crypto.com Arena, too! I want to see the sights and eat the hot dogs and put together a little purple-and-yellow ensemble! But, most of all, I want to go to Iowa and see Caitlin Clark play. If I were ever to achieve that dream, I truly believe that the last vestiges of my un-athletic-child-loser identity would melt away.
Then again, that sounds like a lot of weird pressure to put on a basketball game, so maybe I’ll just content myself with watching Clark on TV.
