The Daily - The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

This year, the star of college basketball is Caitlin Clark, a woman who is changing everything about the game — from the way it’s played, to its economics, to who is watching.Matt Flegenheimer, a profile writer for The Times, discusses Clark’s extraordinary impact.Guest: Matt Flegenheimer, who writes in-depth profiles for The New York Times.Background reading: Her fiery competitiveness, no-look passes and 3-point bombs have made for must-see basketball in Iowa. What happens when she leaves?For women’s basketball, Caitlin Clark’s lasting impact may be economic.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. The tournament games for college basketball begin this week, and the star this year is a woman who is changing everything about the game, from the way it's played to its economics and who is watching. played to its economics and who is watching. Today, my colleague Matt Fliegenheimer on the extraordinary phenomenon of Caitlin Clark, the trail she is blazing in women's sports, and whether it will last. It's Thursday, March 21st. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. And welcome to March Madness.

Welcome to March Madness, America. Here we go. So, Matt, the NCAA basketball tournament starts this week, and the biggest star this year is a woman, Caitlin Clark. She's someone who even a year ago was not a household name. But here we are, devoting an entire daily episode to her. So, for the uninitiated, tell me why. Well, Caitlin Clark is the most famous college basketball player in America. She's a senior at the University of Iowa.

She is 22 years old, and she has become this sort of electric phenomenon. She's selling out arenas and really being this sort of master of ceremonies at every game that she's in. There is a quality to her. When you walk into the arena, you know that she is the person that everyone has come to see. Every camera is pointed at her. Every cell phone is pointed at her. Every fan is watching her warm up. If any sort of mundane activity happens on the court, She grabs a rebound. She's getting a pass.

There's this sort of anxious hush. Like there's just this quality of you don't know what's going to happen next. And beyond being a sports story, the story of Caitlin Clark is really about this kind of broader cultural phenomenon and really speaks to a sea change in the way that women's sports are being consumed. So this really reminds me of when I was in high school in the 1980s in Massachusetts, and there was this player, Larry Bird,

who played for the Boston Celtics, and he was just electric, and everybody wanted to watch this guy play. I mean, he drew me into a game I ordinarily probably would not have been interested in because he was such a good player and he was Massachusetts, you know, it was my team. And it sounds like this is something

that Caitlin Clark is now doing for women's basketball. So tell me about her. How did she begin? What's her story? Caitlin Clark has this kind of sports movie origin story. And her story is something she's talked about quite a bit in interviews and her post-game press conferences.

So I'm an Iowa kid. I grew up here. I grew up rooting for the Hawkeyes. Her story begins in Iowa, in West Des Moines, about two hours from the university campus. We're definitely a sports family, more than anything. She's from a family of athletes. She has two brothers. I was super competitive. So I think that kind of like fueled me and wanted

to play sports, especially basketball. She has this hyper competitive streak that her family has talked about from an early age. Her brother needs staples in his head after a Nerf game goes sideways. There's this sense that she's really wired a certain way. I honestly started playing sports with boys before girls. And she really starts to play with the boys, both in her family and otherwise. I won, like, league MVP one year, and, like, parents were mad.

They're like, this is a boys league. How can a girl be the MVP? And she's, you know, shooting hoops in the driveway. Eventually her range becomes so extensive that her dad has to take some grass out of the lawn to make more driveways so she can shoot from further away. Amazing. She also has role models. Maya Moore. She's like my first ever WNBA game.

I actually met her. And Maya Moore, she has this story she likes to tell of seeing her play. All I ever wanted to do was meet her. I didn't have a phone, so I just ran over, gave her a hug, ran away. It's like the most vivid memory I have of, like, women's basketball growing up. And sort of sees herself following that tradition. And then, as a teenager, she becomes enough of a sort of buzzed-about basketball player that even some really prominent national figures like Kevin Durant, the men's basketball player, start to notice her.

And she winds up committing to the University of Iowa, staying in her home state. And it was immediately clear that the program, which, you know, I think was seen as like a solid program, not necessarily a perennial powerhouse, was going to be seen in a different way with somebody like Caitlyn on the roster. So the team was okay, and suddenly it was getting this incredible player. This incredible player, this sort of generational talent, and somebody who coaches have talked about really having to bridle, is a word that they use, as if she were a racehorse,

something that they had to sort of figure out how to make exist in a team context. Okay, bridal is an interesting word. What about her specifically was different than other players on the team? She just had talents that not a lot of players had. And her coaches and teammates have talked about her own expectations of herself being so high that sometimes her expectations of her teammates were such that she could be disappointed if they bobbled a pass that she threw that they didn't expect,

if they missed a shot off of some pass of hers, if the coaches did something that she didn't necessarily think was wise. So there was this sort of a learning curve for her and for the team and her coaches for how to best channel all of that in a team setting. Here's Clark. She fires! And it goes! She hit it! But certainly the talent was clear. Wow! She was, you know, a leading scorer as a freshman.

Holy smokes! Another deep three from Kaitlyn Clark. She was taking these long three-pointers from all over the court. There's a logo at midcourt in Iowa that's a sort of Hawkeye beak. And she's taking shots from the edge of the beak. In other words, from very far out, right? From very far out. With this just boundless shooting range, you know, pulling up from places on the court that most players wouldn't conceive of shooting from and consistently making shots. And having a defense need to sort of account for her so far away from the basket creates room for other players to operate.

Okay, so when does she go to stratospheric fame with that? So in last year's NCAA tournament, March Madness, round after round, she's just carrying Iowa with these spectacular viral moments, these incredible passes with a roster that's not necessarily considered a real powerhouse in the tournament. And it's compelling to watch, obviously, seeing somebody shoot from that far, seeing somebody carry a team like that, beating teams that maybe seemed more formidable than Iowa. And the attention grows. She acquires a nickname at the time, Ponytail Pete, after Pete Maravich, who was an incredible college basketball player

and professional in the 60s and 70s. He did not have a ponytail. He did not have a ponytail. He had pretty shaggy hair. He maybe could have had a ponytail if he wanted to. And has this really spectacular run all the way to the Final Four, where they face off against South Carolina, seen as the best team in the country, undefeated to that point. I was a big underdog. And on the strength really largely of Caitlin's brilliance on the court, they win. They defeat the sort of Goliath. They go to the championship game. And really nobody saw them getting that far.

And the national championship game is underway. So what happens in that final game? So in that final game, it's Iowa against LSU. Louisiana State? Louisiana State, which is another really compelling cast of characters. The loaded roster headlined by Angel Reese, their star player. Angel Reese, gorgeous delivery inside. A really colorful coach, Kim Mulkey.

More awareness by LSU on these mismatches in the post. And it does sort of pit these two programs against each other. Two really compelling casts of players and supporting characters meeting in this epic final. It's a very competitive game back and forth. And it's viewed by almost 10 million people. Which is a far and away record for a women's final. Really not that far off from the men's final. And they see a good game.

It's not down to the wire, to the very end necessarily. A competitive game, but it's not quite enough. They lose. But the story doesn't necessarily end there. Lindsay with USA Today again. Caitlin, can you tell us at the end of the game what happened? There's a lot blown up on Twitter about Angel Reese following you around. In the days afterwards, there was this sort of controversy around Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark.

Essentially over a celebration that Caitlin Clark had done previously in the tournament that was sort of putting her hand in front of her face. It's called the you-can't-see-me kind of taunting that sort of amounts to trash talk on the court. So she's basically saying ha-ha. She's saying ha-ha with her hands. Yeah, okay. And with the scoreboard at the time.

And then in the final, when LSU is pulling away, Angel Reese does the same gesture at Clark and is very clearly kind of taunting Clark as I was about to lose and have their tournament run end. She was obnoxious. Yes. She was obnoxious. This was his comment on a young woman who is in college winning a championship. What an effing, but spelled out the word, idiot. The difference in the fallout is that Angel Reese, who is black, faced quite a bit of criticism for this taunting, the sense that it was unsportsmanlike.

I'm too hood, I'm too ghetto. Y'all told me that all year. But when other people do it, y'all don't say nothing. And Kaitlyn Clark, who was white, had not really faced any of that. So there was this sense of a double standard. In the coverage of this, there was this real momentum to kind of pit the two of them against each other as these two stars of the sport, one white, one black. And Kaitlyn Clark was not so interested in any of that. I don't think Angel should be criticized at all. And, you know, says she has nothing but respect for Angel Reese,

loves how she plays, loves her game, competition is good. I think everybody knew there was going to be a little trash talk in the entire tournament. It's not just me and Angel. Across any sport, that's how it should be. She says men trash talk all the time. And why should this be any different? You should be able to play with that emotion.

That's how I'm going to continue to play. That's how every girl should continue to play. And ultimately this becomes a sort of long tail of the final itself. You had this moment with these incredible ratings for the game, and then you had this kind of secondary moment of this pseudo-controversy, and all of it is drawing eyeballs to women's basketball in a way that hadn't really happened in the decades that had been around. And even for people who don't follow basketball, right?

I mean, I had heard about it around that time, probably precisely for that reason. Absolutely. You had people who had never watched Caitlin Clark play a minute of basketball, consuming the story in a new way so it really was this time last year taken together, the tournament experience and this sort of post-mortem that Caitlin Clark becomes more than a basketball player

she becomes a national figure on a very different scale We'll be right back. So Matt, you just told me that Caitlin Clark at the end of last season really went from being a basketball player in the state of Iowa to something much bigger, something really on the national stage. Tell me about that. So she emerges from last season with a whole new profile, a lot of new fans, a lot of new attention. And in this sort of fluke of historical timing, Caitlin Clark's college career is coming along at a time when there is this massive shift happening in college sports. Prior to 2021, college athletes could not make money off of their name, image, and likeness. Now that's a possibility. So that combined with being an extremely effective

narrator of her own story, she's becoming extremely famous in a time when becoming extremely famous as a college athlete is very lucrative business. So, okay, this translates to sponsors and advertisers. Presumably, they come calling. They do. Quite a few of them. Iowa's Caitlin Clark now has her own brand of cereal on Hy-Vee's show. So Clark is the latest athlete to join Nike's lineup. The sorts of sponsors who associate with professional players. Shoot.

Shoot. Okay, I'll shoot. What's happening? But I don't see any hoop. State Farm. If we can draw 56,000 fans, you can draw 57. Gatorade. If I can sign with Gatorade, you can too.

But these are not, you know, local car dealerships. These are major national brands. No, this is not. She's obviously huge in Iowa, but these are national brands who come calling and who stay very much a part of the picture. So by the time her senior season starts for 23-24, I mean, this thing is off and running. The first sellout in the history of the women's program here at Northwestern, of course, the big draw. I went to a couple of games, both at home and on the road.

It's been packed almost the entire day, and that's because of this line that formed here. It is stretching, I think I've heard, about a quarter mile around the building. And it's just a rock concert everywhere. Let's go, Caitlin Clark! I gotta be like Caitlin. A lot of kids with signs, you know, I want to be like Cait. They're wearing her jersey. She definitely changed the game for the better and even just changed the world.

But so are, you know, a lot of, like, grown men. People are driving hours to see her. They're selling out arenas. Over 52,000 tickets have been sold. Not a single empty seat with crowds flocking to see Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlyn Clark. Not a single empty seat with crowds flocking to see Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark. Secondary ticket prices for resale are going for like $400, $500. It's really become kind of the hottest thing in town.

And celebrities are going to Iowa City to watch college basketball. And there is this really kind of breakthrough cultural power. She knows this. She knows she's being consumed in this way. And she'll file away little scenes that she takes in. There was a game at Iowa that I was at. There was this girl. It was cute.

She was like copying our stretching, warming up. So I thought it was like adorable. She was doing like legs. She noticed before the game. So she files that away. They play the game. She plays great. They win. She goes up to the girl and gives her the shoes that she'd worn for the game.

What is the little girl to? She actually, I mean, she's beaming. That is probably the most special moment that has ever happened. You know, something easy I can make her day, and I'm sure she loved it. So it was cool. But Caitlyn has sort of talked about that being her experience as a fan at that age, too. And it really keeps going.

Here comes Clark. How will she go for history? Yes! She's essentially breaking a new record every few games. She has the most points of anybody to ever play on the women's side. Eventually, it's the men's record. Kaitlyn Clark becomes the all-time leading scorer in major college basketball history. Either men or women, nobody has scored more points

playing college basketball in Division I than Kaitlyn Clark. Wow. It's quite something. The record she broke on the men's side was held by Pete Maravich, to whom she was compared last year. So it's a lot of history that It's quite something. The record she broke on the men's side was held by Pete Maravich, to whom she was compared last year. So it's a lot of history that she's transcending. And you see the sport itself start to reap some of the benefits

of this newfound attention. The television contract for the women's tournament valued the tournament at $65 million annually, which was a many-fold increase over the last contract. There is a sense that ratings will persist. And she's also not the only player in the country right now getting a lot of attention. There are great players throughout the college game, including Angel Reese, Juju Watkins, who's a freshman at USC, who are really, frankly, bigger stars than any men's college basketball player right now. So this doesn't just begin and end with Kaitlyn, and it won't end for college sports when she leaves. Obviously, Kaitlyn Clark will not be the college basketball player forever, but she helped drive attention to the sport, and there is a hope that it can sustain itself after she's gone. So this tremendously popular college player is really kind of blowing up the sport economically and culturally. But as you say, she's not going to be in college forever.

At some point, she's going to graduate. She will. So she faces this choice. Despite being a senior, there was this allowance given to athletes during COVID to stay for an extra year. So really all year she's faced this choice. People have asked her about it constantly. Will she go back to school for a fifth season or will she turn pro? But, Matt, why wouldn't she go pro?

I mean, isn't it every athlete's aspiration and goal to go pro? I mean, she's getting a ton of attention, selling out stadiums. Like, why would going pro even be a question? Yeah, if she were a male college athlete playing basketball, this might be a lot more straightforward. The best players in college on the men's side tend to go pro at the first opportunity. There is money to be made. There are eyeballs in the NBA. On the women's side, there is the WMDA, the Professional Basketball League for Women.

And it's just a very different thing. You know, it's a league that has gotten far fewer viewers than women's college basketball. It is a league that doesn't have the attendance of the games that Caitlin Clark has been playing in at Iowa. And for some context, there were more than 9 million people, almost 10 million people who watched the national championship game that Caitlin Clark played in last year. The college tournament, the WNBA finals last year for the professional league were viewed by under a million people. So we're talking about, you know, a fraction, a tenth.

So much less. So much less. And, you know, Caitlin Clark is not making a kind of formal salary as a player in college, but her stature does afford her a kind of profile that has made these sponsorships possible, that has made her earning potential pretty stratospheric. And it's hard to say if that will translate in a league where the viewership is not the same. You know, being the biggest star in college basketball at the moment affords you a bigger platform than being the biggest star in the WNBA. But it's just not consumed in the same way that college sports has been. And why is that, Matt?

I think there's a couple reasons. There is this kind of tribal quality to college sports fandom. You know, you go to a school, you become a fan of a school, you live in an area, you become a fan of that team. The WNBA is such a young league. It's, you know, barely older than Caitlin Clark is. There hasn't necessarily been that same attachment formed to the teams. And despite a lot of really passionate fans and some improvements in attention over the years. There was the Olympic team having women's basketball in 1996. There was the onset of the WNBA, obviously. There have been moments with stars in the league like Amaya Moore, Diana Taurasi. But it hasn't sustained in the way that I think some might have hoped. Okay, so far lower viewership.

I'm assuming that that's translating into lower salaries. It does. Far lower salaries. Kaitlin Clark, who's widely expected to be the first pick in the draft for the WNBA, will make about $75,000 in salary per rookie season. Wow. That's pretty low. It's pretty low, particularly when you compare it to the NBA. The first pick last year makes about $12 million this year, and it just accelerates on the veteran scale too. So you have like the very best players in the WNBA making, you know, more than $200,000 as the kind of ceiling. But we're talking about just a totally different stratosphere than the men's game where

you have all sorts of contracts in the tens of millions per year. Kalen Clark's been compared to Steph Curry in the NBA, the incredible shooter from Golden State. He makes about $50 million a year. God, that's a huge differential. Huge differential. So what you've seen a lot of female players do over the years is supplement that income by playing abroad in other leagues professionally. This is why Brittany Griner was in Russia.

It's why players have traveled internationally for many years to try to make some of that money that wasn't available to them in WNBA salary some other way. Okay, so Kaitlyn Clark had this decision to make, go pro or stay another year in her college team. What did she decide to do? She decided to go pro. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

I think there's a real strong basketball case. Going back to Iowa, having that experience again, maybe she doesn't grow as a player in the same way that she might to go pro, compete against the best. Maybe she doesn't grow as a player in the same way that she might to go pro, compete against the best. There's also the sponsorship side. She actually can, you know, retain a lot of the sponsors that she's had. Gatorade's sticking with her.

Nike's going to be around. And, you know, I think there's a sense that she might be the exception that changes things. She hopes that she is part of the, you know the next generation of players who can draw more eyeballs to that league, who can maybe over the long run raise salaries, bring sponsorship dollars to the pros. She also can't stay in college forever. She can't be in Iowa until she's 40. So essentially Caitlyn's bet here is that she can take all of her firepower that she has right now and potentially transform women's basketball. But how likely is that really, Matt? You know, it's hard to know at this point.

There are some data points so far that are pretty encouraging if you're Caitlin Clark at the WNBA. Tickets are already being sold. Ticket prices are up because of the demand for games for the Indiana Fever, who have the first pick in the professional draft coming up, are expected to take Caitlin Clark. So this hasn't even happened yet. She has not been officially selected first, and we're already seeing ticket prices and ticket sales spiking in anticipation for Caitlin Clark showing up. But I think there is a sense that she is entering the league on a different level of stature with a different profile, but it's untested. So Matt, what does the phenomenon of Caitlin Clark

tell us about women's sports? It tells us it's come a pretty long way. You know, in some ways, she's kind of the culmination of this long arc that dates to Title IX, which was, you know, legislation that dictated that there could not be discrimination on the basis of sex and was applied widely to sports, creating opportunities for women. And at the time, obviously, this had to be legislated.

This had to be mandated. What is happening now with Caitlin Clark, this is the free market deciding that they're pretty interested in women's sports. You know, sports is a business and there is a strong business case, as many sponsors are deciding for themselves to watch Caitlin Clark, to follow Caitlin Clark, for leagues to watch Caitlin Clark, to follow Caitlin Clark, for leagues to want Caitlin Clark in their midst. And then there's the sort of broader cultural point.

Her coaches have talked about just the role model she is for tenacity and, you know, she was given a technical foul last year after saying damn it to herself after she missed a shot. It's the sort of thing that would, like, never be penalized in the men's game. They printed t-shirts that said damn it and she posed with somebody. Like, she has owned the kind of competitive streak that men have been owning for so long. And I think modeling that beyond the sort of business case is a real

legacy that she's left. Yeah. Like don't judge me differently, right? Don't judge me differently. And, you know, her coach still thinks that there is not as much latitude given to women athletes. And I think that's certainly true. But it's moved some. I think there is certainly more space given to that kind of competitive fire in a female athlete than there might have been even a few years ago. Matt, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Iowa is scheduled to play on Saturday. It will be the first game of the last tournament of Caitlin Clark's college career. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Texas scored a fleeting win in its fight with the Biden administration over a controversial immigration law. That law would allow Texas police to arrest migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally. The administration argues that immigration policy and foreign affairs are the purview of the federal government. But Texas argues the law is authorized by a clause of the Constitution that allows states in rare circumstances to take action if they are, quote, invaded, an argument that a lower court

rejected in February. On Tuesday, a U.S. Supreme Court procedural ruling briefly allowed the law to take effect, causing some confusion at the border until an appeals court put the law back on hold. Texas will press its case for the law in oral arguments before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in early April. A decision to let the law take effect would upset decades of legal precedent. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he expects the constitutionality of the law will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. by the Supreme Court. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennesketter, Olivia Natt, Alex Stern, and Rochelle Bonja,

with help from Muj Zaydi. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Michael Benoit. Fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Marian Lozano, Alicia Baetube, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemesto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Bunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily i'm sabrina tavernisi see you tomorrow