This may occasionally well sound bizarre for a lesbian to divulge (we famously like sports, upright?), nonetheless I’ve been warding off ladies’s basketball for most of my lifestyles. I grew up visiting my dad’s fogeys in West Hartford, Connecticut, no longer a long way from where the legendary UConn ladies’s basketball crew practiced, and my grandfather used to be a gigantic fan of the Huskies. But comparatively than pulling up a seat next to him on the couch to search for their games, I’d take away into my grandmother’s bathroom and practice coral lipstick and matronly physique spray with abandon, stable in the information that my household used to be too busy searching at basketball to bawl at me for my secret toddler-femme exploits.
My antipathy in opposition to crew sports has persisted into adulthood. Whereas I’m no longer fairly the couch potato that I was in my early life—I now come by pleasure from the occasional foray into swimming, mountain climbing, and Pilates—I soundless feel a frisson of boredom and fear every time I sense a social event will devolve into sports discuss. (I are residing in Los Angeles, fairly famously the home of the Lakers, so this occurs plenty bigger than you’d deem.) All that modified, although—or started to alternate, anyway—when I first saw Caitlin Clark play.
There are hundreds extremely frigid and shockingly talented ladies’s-basketball stars to practice upright now, from Angel Reese to JuJu Watkins to Paige Bueckers, and no less an authority than LeBron James has credited these “icons” with revitalizing pastime in the game. But typically you gorgeous must peek the upright athlete on the upright time, as I did when I first watched Clark play for Iowa, to shift from “sports-hater” to “one who would possibly well if truth be told manufacture of attach in mind going to an WNBA sport at some point.” If I soundless can’t contain the considered taking part in crew sports myself, evidently I genuinely come by pleasure from searching at a terrifyingly talented young lady tackle herself on the court, whether or no longer she’s a hit or shedding.
After all, freaking out about Clark’s talent typically models me other than the wave of dyed-in-the-wool ladies’s basketball followers who enjoy adopted the 22-year-outmoded Iowa native as a roughly high priestess of the game: Clark is currently the ideal-scoring athlete in the history of school basketball, and Lisa Bluder, her coach on the University of Iowa, has referred to her as “the ideal player in The US.” And, if Clark’s on-court prowess weren’t sufficient, she’s dripping in endorsements from main manufacturers like Nike and Gatorade—an honor in most cases reserved for male basketball gamers, whose achievements too generally crowd out ladies and nonbinary gamers in the game.