This is why basketball is the best game in many ways. That’s why if you spend enough time on an asphalt playground or in a cramped gymnasium, you’ll get hooked on it early on and never leave it. This is why it remains an endless source of fascination and inspiration for those who have spent countless lonely hours aiming for driveway hoops.
Because basketball, unlike any other sport, allows for The One.
Other sports have stars that transcend generations. Basketball breeds revolutionaries. And you can participate from anywhere: urban or rural, Prague, Paris or Provo. He can be over 7 feet tall or less than 6 feet tall. If you’re talented enough, imaginative enough, skilled enough, and willing to put in the hours of sweat and rack up equity, you can become The One.
Caitlin Clark is the latest. For now, she’s The One and it’s great to see that.
The truth is, the basketball world hasn’t always known how to treat its rarest gems with respect. Back in the day, NBA teams got tired of George Mikan destroying teams game after game with setups so close to the basket that they doubled the width of the 3-second key from 6 feet to 12 feet. It was large enough to prevent Wilt Chamberlain from dominating every game he played, but it was expanded again to 16 feet.
On December 3, 1966, Lou Alcindor made his debut for UCLA against USC at Pauley Pavilion. He scored 56 points. This year he averaged 29 points and shot 66.7% from the field. Not all of them dunked, but they were good enough. On March 25, 1967, UCLA defeated Dayton 79-64 in the NCAA Tournament, ending the season with a 30-0 record. Two days later, the dunk was banned by the United States Basketball Commission, which oversees all rules for high school and college basketball.
(Thankfully, the joyless USBC never targeted Kareem’s skyhook, but it was an even more deadly weapon for him).
“It’s crazy,” Mikan’s college coach Ray Meyer said when the lane was widened to neutralize Mikan’s star student. “It’s like taking the brush out of Michelangelo’s hand and replacing it with a pencil. Why would you do that to your best player?”
But basketball has learned to embrace successive generations of geniuses, and not only has it learned, it has allowed itself to be forever changed by them.
Julius Erving showed that dunks can not only be effective, they can also be beautiful. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson taught countless future generations that passing a basketball is just as important a skill as shooting. Nikola Jokic was born on February 19, 1995, three years after Bird played his last game and 15 months after the Magic finished their last comeback, but his game was born by them. It is impossible to claim that it is not.
And, of course, there’s Stephen Curry, who proved himself that even a small player can dominate a big game. Although it could be argued that his influence may not have been as great since 3-pointers are proliferating now and are often used by players less gifted than himself. There is little debate that he changed the game forever.
Caitlin Clark changed the game.
Before Clark, even the most progressive basketball voices tended to distinguish the best women’s basketball players that way. Sue Bird was a dynamic female athlete. Dawn Staley was a great female athlete. Diana Taurasi may have been the best female player. Clark eliminated the need for adjectives.
She’s a great basketball player.
She drew a raucous venue to Albany’s MVP Arena on Monday night. If she can’t watch the game live, she’s a basketball fan of all kinds, and her DVR brought her to the Iowa and her LSU games. She took people on road trips to the Capital District. This is how the most faithful believers often searched for prophets. she is very good she is very unique. She can shoot. she can pass. She makes her teammates better. She makes the sport better.
do not have she Sports.do not have Women’s basketball.
Sports. basketball. period.
Here’s everything you need to know about Caitlin Clark’s March Madness run
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If there’s a real comparison, you’d probably have to leave basketball and go back half a century to shake hands with 29-year-old Billie Jean King. When King faced Bobby Riggs in Houston on September 20, 1973, he had already won 10 Grand Slam singles titles and 33 Grand Slam titles overall. Her straight-set victory at that night’s carnival show made her an international star, but it was also early. She tracked tennis becoming a sport with equal prize money for men and women.
Basketball, unlike tennis, is not completely defined by prize money, so it may be a while before a woman earns the $53 million that Curry, the NBA’s richest player, is making this year. . No player, even someone like Clark, who became The One, can accomplish it all without enduring the Astrodome sideshow that the King did.
But she accomplished more than her role. Only five, 10, 15 years from now will he know how deep Clark’s influence was on the millions of girls for whom he unlocked the mysteries and beauty of basketball. In her afterglow of what she has done, perhaps reflexively, she may say, “She will never meet anyone like her again.”
But we do. She vouches for it.
