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I.
As many of you have discovered by now, this newsletter is driven largely by my tendency to indulge in nostalgia and regularly tumble into Proustian rabbit-holes. Which brings me to an evening last week, when I caught the tail end of an epic women’s basketball game between Stanford and Iowa State, and my mind trailed off to a frigid February evening in central Pennsylvania in 1988.
Here I was, watching these two dynamic and disparate post players, Stanford’s Cam Brink and Iowa State’s Audi Crooks, trade baskets on the way to overtime; this was the moment when I fully realized that this year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, as a complete entity, was empirically better and more consistently entertaining than the men’s tournament.
And so I began thinking about how we got here. And I began searching online for details of an event that I probably attended (though I cannot guarantee it), in which three thousand people streamed into a bandbox of a gym to watch two of the greatest point guards in the history of women’s basketball go head to head.
II.
I grew up in a college town where the women’s basketball team was consistently better than the men’s team. That contrast reached its apex in the mid-to-late 1980s, when a 5-foot-3 inch point guard named Suzie McConnell committed to play at Penn State. McConnell was one of the best passers in the history of college basketball; she possessed perhaps the most impeccable court vision I have seen this side of Magic Johnson. She went on to play and coach in the WNBA, and to coach multiple college teams in her hometown of Pittsburgh; she is widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes to ever emerge from the state of Pennsylvania.
In 1988, McConnell was a senior. Penn State had a decent team, but not a great team, with a firebrand of a coach who had emerged out of the first generation of transcendent women’s basketball talent at Immaculata College (and who turned out to be a deeply problematic historical figure). The Lady Lions’ opponent that night was Louisiana Tech, which had won its first 20 games of the season, which would go on win the national championship that year, and which was led by an unflappably cool point guard named Teresa Weatherspoon, who also wore perhaps the most kickass uniform in the annals of women’s sports:
Weatherspoon would go on to become one of the greatest players in WNBA history; she is now a head coach in the league, with the Chicago Sky. She could score, she could defend, she could do pretty much everything. A few weeks later, during the NCAA tournament, she would tell reporters, “I don’t think the game revolves around me as much as you news media makes it seem.”
And her coach, Leon Barmore, sitting next to her, interrupted and said, “Yes it does.”
III.
McConnell willed Penn State to a victory that evening in 1988: She played 40 minutes and scored 31 points, as Weatherspoon struggled to do much of anything. It was one of Louisiana Tech’s two losses that season on the way to the national title. Later that year, McConnell and Weatherspoon would win a gold medal for the United States as teammates as the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea…
The late 1980s were still an aspirational moment for women’s basketball. But it was also a moment when you could begin to see the path forward. Take this quote from Iowa coach C. Vivian Stringer, which would become eerily prescient some 35 years later:
IV.
And here is Weatherspoon, speaking last year about Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark:
“Her approach is unreal. She believes the moment she steps on the floor, this is my house — I don't care where I am, I'm coming to destroy.”
V.
That furious approach to basketball has elevated Caitlin Clark into the most compelling women’s player of her generation. She is the primary reason women’s basketball has taken a giant leap forward over the course of the past two years, but she is not the only reason. Watching Audi Crooks face Cam Brink in that Stanford-Iowa State game was like watching a young Shaq face a young Dirk Nowitzki. And there are so many others, like Angel Reese at LSU, whose coach, Kim Mulkey, has positioned herself rather skillfully as the villain from a network melodrama. (Author’s Note: I am writing this in advance of Monday night’s Iowa-LSU game, perhaps the most hyped single game in women’s basketball history.)
There are more storylines in the women’s tournament than the men’s tournament, and they are better storylines in the women’s tournament than the men’s tournament. And maybe this is my fault for not realizing we’d reached the tipping point, but the truth is this momentum been building for generations now, as Immaculata gave way to Louisiana Tech, as Weatherspoon and McConnell gave way to Sheryl Swoopes and Candace Parker, as the women’s basketball has become more fluid and more consistent from coast to coast.
And at the same time, men’s college basketball is scrambling to redefine itself for a new era. The one thing it had going for it was the NCAA tournament, but this year, only a few major upsets materialized—even as the powers-that-be agitate for an expanded field with fewer small-conference underdogs—and two of the best teams feature plodding big men who appear to have materialized straight out of 1974.
There is joy in that kind of retro chic, but it no longer feels like the game revolves around those guys. The sport is different now, and at least right now, at this moment, the women’s game is leading the way. To insist otherwise is a purely reactionary choice, a refusal to admit that the old ways of thinking have been completely destroyed.
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