It certainly was not unexpected or unusual to notice a number of celebrities – basketball and otherwise – sprinkled among the capacity crowd at the 2023 NCAA Women’s Final Four. First Lady Jill Biden and First Lady of Tennis Billie Jean King made the trip to Dallas for the title game. Such legends of the game as Dirk Nowitzki, A’ja Wilson, Pau Gasol and Sheryl Swoopes were in attendance. What made this occasion extraordinary, though, this game between LSU and Iowa, was that two of those who attended in uniform and helped decide the championship ranked among the most famous people in the building.
Iowa guard Caitlin Clark and LSU forward Angel Reese are stars. Clark has been featured in a national television commercial along with “Jake from State Farm,” the kind of prominence usually accorded Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes and NBA All-Star Chris Paul. Reese has been featured in a photo shoot and article in Teen Vogue and in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.
On the court, should Clark stay healthy and continue producing at her current, astronomical rate, she will become the leading career scorer in Division I women’s history, passing Kelsey Plum of Washington sometime in late February. Under the same conditions, she figures to rank no worse than No. 6 in career assists and will be the only player in history to stand among the top 10 in scoring and assists. She scored more points in a single NCAA Tournament than any player in history.
Reese is the reigning Most Outstanding Player at the Women’s Final Four and a first-team All-American. She ranked No. 2 in the nation in rebounding last season and No. 5 in scoring, and she set an NCAA record for double-doubles when she rang up her 34th in the title game. She has been All-Conference and All-Defense in two major leagues, the Big Ten as a sophomore and the SEC her junior season. Of the two players, she is the one who wears an NCAA Championship ring.
MORE: List of past Sporting News Athlete of the Year winners
When they met last April for the national title, it wasn’t so much the big names nearby as the millions who watched at home on television that made it such an astonishing occasion. The average audience for the game telecast registered just under 10 million people, about the same as last year’s Rose Bowl or Game 4 of the NBA Finals — and nearly double the record since ESPN began broadcasting the event in 1996.
Caitlin vs. Angel, Iowa vs. LSU, was an occasion.
And that continued well beyond the final buzzer.
Their impact on their sport in particular, on the world of sports in general, compelled The Sporting News to select Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese as our Athletes of the Year for 2023, making them the successors to soccer superstar Lionel Messi baseball’s Shohei Ohtani and placing them in the same category as icons LeBron James, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
“I was at the game. Caitlin and I are friends, and Angel is remarkable … It just made me smile, honestly made me smile, just to see the growth of the game, the incredible athletes on both sides,” Nancy Lieberman, the first woman to become a household name playing basketball, told The Sporting News. “It’s really wonderful to see where the game has gone and finally to be able to catch on with some mainstream appeal.”
*****
There was no way for Angel Reese to comprehend, while competing for the NCAA Championship, the totality of what was occurring beyond the boundaries of the basketball court. The sold-out crowd at the American Airlines Center was appropriately enthusiastic, but given the split between LSU fans and Iowa fans and those without an attachment to either, it never was going to be overwhelming.
No, that occurred later on, the following day, when the celebration of LSU’s championship was escalated by reports of the TV ratings for the game.
No one saw coming how many people saw that game.
“Yeah, 9.9 million people watching the game was crazy,” Reese told TSN. “To be able to see that was crazy. I mean, I’m just happy to be a part of history and being able to be part of a group, regardless of who won or who lost, we made history. Both teams. We’ll always remember that when we we’re older, 40 years from now, sitting in our rocking chairs just thinking about how we were trailblazers in a moment where that was so special.”
That is the promise of a game like LSU-Iowa, that so many who were curious about Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark and turned on that game that Sunday afternoon last April will invest their attention more broadly into women’s basketball – whether or not that audience number ever is revisited, whether or not it’s a while before there’s an individual dual as intriguing as Reese vs. Clark.
Men’s college basketball never again has hit the 40-million mark the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird confrontation achieved in the 1979 NCAA Championship game, but that helped launch the explosion of March Madness as a month-long obsession. The 18 million who watched the 1999 World Cup final won by the United States women’s national team helped elevate the sport to a place of prominence and made national stars of Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain – and, eventually, such successors as Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe.
“Back when I was playing, there was only one game per season that was televised. Now you can watch pretty much every game in one way or another,” LSU coach Kim Mulkey told TSN. “I think what we are seeing now in women’s college basketball is that all these players have brands beyond the sport that can attract new audiences to the sport. You have players like Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark that are spectacular to watch play basketball, and that captivates fans to want to watch.”
It nearly was inevitable Angel would become a basketball player. Her mother, also named Angel, had her No. 10 jersey retired at UMBC. Her brother, Julian, is a junior power forward at Maryland.
Considered the No. 2 prospect in her recruiting class, Reese began her career at Maryland. As a sophomore, she averaged 17.8 points and 10.6 rebounds for a 23-9 Terps squad that reached the NCAA Sweet 16. She left that perennially successful program in part because center Shakira Austin transferred out, leaving Reese as the primary big player.
“Sometimes you outgrow things,” Reese told TSN. “I loved being at Maryland. I loved everything about Maryland: the atmosphere, my family being able to come to the games. But I think it was a time to take a step of faith and focus on and prioritize myself, because I know at the WNBA – the next level – I won’t be playing the 5 position. So being able to stretch my game, being able to be more versatile, just having a fresh start was something I really wanted.”
She was an immediate sensation, even before she scored an official basket for LSU.
“Our first scrimmage during preseason practice, I think Angel had over 15 rebounds in the first 10 minutes,” Mulkey said. “She is a beast on the boards and the type of player who can lead a team. We had nine new pieces last year – and obviously, Angel was one of them – but she came in ready to go to work and do whatever it took to win.”
When Reese did score her first real bucket, in the opening game of the 2022-23 season against McNeese State, she didn’t stop until she’d recorded the first 30-point game of her career. She finished the year with five such performances, including a personal-best 36 against Ole Miss. She grabbed 20 rebounds or more rebounds six times. In the NCAA Tournament second-round win over Michigan, Reese delivered 25 points and 24 rebounds. That was more rebounds than UM managed as a team.
“Seeing Angel Reese play is a thing of beauty,” Lieberman said. “And I’m not just talking about the outer beauty that the fans see. There’s a beauty in her game and her tenacity. She had such a mentality for greatness. Angel Reese has such an incredible amount of privilege – I don’t call it pressure, I call it privilege – to uplift this game for so many generations. She’s very special.”
The meeting that developed between LSU and Iowa at the Final Four, between Angel and Caitlin, never was assured. Neither was a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed. South Carolina was the nation’s dominant team, entering the Final Four with a perfect record that included a 24-point victory over Reese and the Tigers.
When Iowa upset South Carolina in the national semifinals, that meant Reese and her teammates would not get the shot at revenge they coveted. They got something better, though: A chance to borrow or steal the spotlight that followed Caitlin Clark throughout the season, that increased in intensity as the Hawkeyes advanced so deep into March Madness.
*****
Clark long since had qualified as a phenomenon at her university, in her state, in her sport when she found herself in the final 1.5 seconds of the No. 3 Hawkeyes’ final regular-season game against No. 2 Indiana at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. That night, though, the wonder of Caitlin began spreading to those not inclined to pay attention to the women’s game.
There would be no league title for the Hawkeyes. Indiana already had assured that by losing only one of its first 17 conference games, but this did not mean there was no consequence. With ESPN’s College Gameday choosing to stage its weekly Saturday show from Iowa City, the two teams played the first 39 minutes, 58.5 seconds as if everything the sport had to offer was on the line. And it appeared to belong to IU after All-American Mackenzie Holmes converted two free throws to make the score Hoosiers 85, Hawkeyes 83.
The play that followed will remain Clark’s singular moment at Iowa – unless she fashions something of greater consequence in the 2024 edition of NCAA March Madness. Clark began in the corner opposite the ball on a frontcourt sideline inbounds play, slipped behind a quick ghost screen from wing McKenna Warnock, left a defender buried behind a powerful screen from center Monika Czinano and bounced into an off-balance 3-point attempt from the right wing that, naturally, ripped directly through the net.
CAITLIN CLARK BUZZER-BEATER 🚨
No. 6 Iowa takes down No. 2 Indiana! pic.twitter.com/pRfXlgSCl4
— ESPN (@espn) February 26, 2023
“I would say by the time that Indiana game came around, there literally was not a seat in the room, and the fans were just going crazy. It just felt like the energy was kind of different, in a way,” Clark told TSN. “We go to the Big Ten Tournament in Minneapolis, and it’s four hours from Iowa City, and the place is sold-out, black-and-gold. And it’s pretty incredible. I thought that was another testament to our fans, and what we were building.
“We come back and host two NCAA games, and it’s impossible to get a ticket. By the time we go to Seattle, I didn’t know what to expect. And we get there, and it’s a ton of Iowa fans again. I was just like, ‘Wow, these people really love us.’ And then we get to Dallas, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. People were driving down to Dallas just to be in the environment, not even get into the game, because a ticket was so hard to come by. They just wanted to be a part of it.
“It just kind of got more and more and more. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the magnitude of what we were able to do.”
The fascination around Clark as a player has been building since she hit her first logo-length 3-pointer at some point during her freshman season. There has been an audacity about her play since she arrived on campus as a 6-0 guard from West Des Moines. There was no adjustment period to Division I competition. In her first five games, three of them against major opponents, she averaged 29.8 points. By the end of the season, she’d powered Iowa to the final of the Big Ten Tournament and to the NCAA Sweet 16, finishing first in Division I in scoring and third in assists.
Clark plays a style of basketball that seems to be borrowed from the 1970s, when Pete Maravich was gunning up big numbers in the men’s game and Lieberman was controlling games and winning championships for Old Dominion among the women.
“Caitlin plays with a confidence that other people don’t really possess. Or, if they possess it, they don’t want to show it, for some reason,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder told TSN. “She loves the game, and she wants to show that off. I think you have to have that kind of confidence in yourself in order to perform the way she does.”
Clark is one of those rare players of whom it can be said that when she crosses the midcourt line, she is in shooting range. She has converted more than 400 3-pointers in her career, which represents more than a third of her total scoring output, but it seems there ought to be some sort of bonus for total distance traveled by those shots.
“How many times, I can’t count – It’s like, ‘Oh, no! … Oh, yes!’ It was more earlier, and now I’m more expecting them,” Bluder said. “Earlier in her career, it was like, ‘No way a freshman should be doing that.’ And then I got to learn how to coach her better and understood she’s going to take some of those. You’re going to have to live with some of those ‘Oh, nos’. And sometimes, they’re going to be ‘nos’, and sometimes they’re going to be ‘yes’. But it builds a huge momentum when they are a ‘yes’.”
As the audience has built, Clark has become the most recognizable figure in current college sports. More so than USC’s Caleb Williams, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2022 and was able to gain commercial appearances for Toyota and Dr. Pepper but largely resisted media interaction. More so than Purdue center Zach Edey, the reigning Naismith Award winner on the men’s side.
She has ignited a brand of stardom rare in college sports, but more lucrative than ever given changes this decade to NCAA rules.
“I think she’s handled it as well as can be expected,” said Steph White, head coach of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and a women’s NCAA and NBA analyst for ESPN. “She’s surrounded by smart people who are great resources for her, at a time when you’re getting all the love – and hate – on social media, when you’re constantly being watched and people are, quite frankly, waiting for you to screw up. She’s handled it with grace. She’s gotten, if it’s even possible, more competitive. Her game has become more complete.
“The last player like that was Diana Taurasi, and you think about Taurasi, and it was before Twitter or X or whatever is now, and Instagram. There was certainly the internet, but there wasn’t social media. So at the college level and her early pro days, people who weren’t specific women’s basketball fans might not have seen that edge, that flair that she had, that she played with.
“Caitlin Clark has that. And she just happened to come along at a time when we were embracing that in our female athletes, when more eyeballs were on women’s basketball, at a time that was, quite frankly, a tipping point for the sport – and for women’s sports, in general. She’s a different kind of player than we’ve seen in women’s basketball; I think if you mix Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi together, that’s what Caitlin Clark is.”
*****
In a showdown of basketball superstars in which one party is a power forward and the other is a point guard, their intersections on the floor are going to be less common than the pre-game hype might indicate. In that famous Magic-Bird NCAA title game, Michigan State didn’t even play a man-to-man defense. The beauty of a rivalry like Chris Evert-Martina Navratilova was they played each other 60 times in tournament finals, confronting each other directly with no one else on the court.
So Clark vs. Reese didn’t really play out so much during the course of last April’s championship game. Even though Clark scored 30 points and passed for 8 assists, her team fell by 17 points. Even though Reese scored 15 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, she was not the most significant reason her team won the final. For all of their collective star power, it was Tigers reserve guard Jasmine Carson who stole the afternoon with her 5-of-6 shooting from 3-point range and 22 points. She had not scored a point in the team’s three previous tournament games.
That is not to say the battle of the stars was not eventually forced onto the stage.
Toward the end of the game, with LSU’s victory secure, Reese waved her hand in front of her face in the “You can’t see me” gesture introduced by John Cena when he was a champion WWE wrestler. It was something Clark had done in an Elite Eight victory over Louisville, and now it was turned against her. Reese also pointed to her right ring finger for everyone to see, to indicate there soon would be a piece of jewelry there to signify a championship.
This was something the sports world earlier had seen from LSU quarterback Joe Burrow, toward the end of the College Football Playoff title game in January 2020. When Los Angeles Rams superstar Aaron Donald finally secured his first Super Bowl victory in February 2022, he held his left hand above his head and did the same.
White said when her Purdue team won its championship in 1999, “We were doing the same things. Just nobody saw it … We were doing it, probably with different fingers. Nobody saw it.”
Despite all of this, the reaction to Reese’s comportment was swift, and sometimes furious.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy called her “classless”, and then continued in that tweet with profanity that made it much worse. Former sportscaster Keith Olbermann’s Twitter comment was even more profane, and at least equally insulting.
“I don’t think I was really surprised, you see, because I had been criticized a lot during the year for a lot of things I did,” Reese told TSN. “Because I’m a trash talker. That’s what I do. And a lot of people aren’t really used to that. I think people don’t expect that from women in sports. If it was flipped, and it was a man, you know it wouldn’t have been talked about or said or anything.”
Clark defended her opponent after becoming aware of the degree of vitriol Reese had encountered, insisting there was no reason to criticize her for competing hard – and pointing out they were not the only players who trash-talked their way through the tournament. It’s been the culture of the sport for decades.
“I think Angel’s great. I think that’s why so many people tuned into to watch the game, because there were so many great players,” Clark told TSN. “Honestly, it wasn’t just me and Angel that were great on the court. Neither one of us would have been in the national championship game if it was that way. I had really great teammates. She had really great teammates – that really went off in the national championship game, and that’s why we struggled to guard them.
“I admire her game. I think it’s great for the game. That’s what you need. You need that competitive fire. And I hope that spreads not only from Iowa and LSU, but to many other teams. I hope it’s the same way with all those top teams, that people can continue to show emotion.”
When the game was over, before joining her players to accept the winner’s trophy, Mulkey made sure to pull aside Clark and tell her she is a “generational talent” and to thank her for the attention she is bringing to the sport.
Mulkey is only 61, but she has been in this game almost as long as there has been a game. That’s how late America’s institutions of higher learning were to acknowledging women belonged in intercollegiate athletic competition every bit as much as men. She became a two-time champion playing for Louisiana Tech, including 1982, when the NCAA first began sponsoring a women’s basketball tournament. She has won four such titles as a coach as is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
“Last season was a huge moment for our sport,” she told TSN, “and I think Angel and Caitlin are the two most recognizable faces that helped drive interest for what turned out to be a record-setting tournament.”
When White won her championship, the Boilers ranked third in the nation in attendance at 9,681 per game. Last season, there were only four teams that topped that number, so progress has been gradual. Until now. Iowa already has announced there will be no single-game tickets available this season. For any game. They’re all gone. LSU’s attendance is up nearly 20 percent, pushing the Tigers’ nightly audience into five figures.
“I’m so thankful that we have female athletes who, No. 1, are as competitive and talented and versatile as they are. I’m thankful that we have a game that is garnering the attention that it deserves. And the players are allowed to authentically be themselves. No longer are we in that day and age when it’s not ‘ladylike’ to compete like this, that it’s not respected to compete like that,” White told TSN.
“With each generation, the expectations of what it means to be a female athlete have been laid out for them. And these two are defining their own way, their own identities, their own expectations. And I think that’s what it means to be an elite athlete.”
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