SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Few names are bigger in sports today than Caitlin Clark. When she played the 2024 NCAA women's final for her college team, the Iowa Hawkeyes, the ratings topped the men's final by four million viewers. Her regular-season games with her pro team, the Indiana Fever, average more than a million viewers. Even fans who root for other teams thrill to see Caitlin Clark's long, lofty 3-point shots. Christine Brennan, the famed sports columnist for USA Today and a frequent commentator, has written a book that looks at the role Caitlin Clark now occupies in U.S. sports and culture, "On Her Game: Caitlin Clark And The Revolution In Women's Sports." Christine Brennan joins us now. Christine, thanks so much for being with us.
CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Oh, my pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: So Caitlin Clark had to join a boys' team at first to play basketball?
BRENNAN: Exactly. And, of course, that tells you that where we are now with women's sports, we weren't there, even in her lifetime. But it helped her because she played against the boys for quite a while. And as her AAU coach told me in the book, boys can be tougher, bigger, as he said, they're meaner. And they toughened Caitlin Clark up and helped her on her way.
SIMON: Tell us about a call her - I guess her parents got from school officials in St. Francis of Assisi in West Des Moines, Iowa, with concerns that teachers had about young Caitlin.
BRENNAN: So we know that people get calls, and parents all the time, about grades or a kid behaving in history class or English or whatever. But it's pretty rare when they're calling about the child's behavior at recess. And that's young Caitlin Clark, being too aggressive, being too competitive. As she has said many times now, as an adult, you know, she wants to win at everything. Boys, girls, nothing fazed her, confidence galore, even at a very young age. And yeah, she was being told she was being too competitive. Stop beating everybody on the playground.
SIMON: She got lots of offers from big-name basketball schools coming out of West Des Moines, but you conclude she made a wise decision to stay in Iowa. How so?
BRENNAN: Absolutely. I quote Muffet McGraw, the famed Notre Dame coach, who actually thought she had her. It was a soft commitment that Caitlin Clark said she was coming to Notre Dame and then she changed her mind. And Muffet McGraw said, had she come to Notre Dame, it would have been a better team, more talented players because Muffet and Notre Dame were often at the upper echelon of women's basketball and in the final four, winning a couple national titles.
Well, Caitlin Clark, you know, chucking it from the parking lot and it's going in, you know, just the amazing high wire act that is Caitlin Clark, that wouldn't have been allowed at Notre Dame because there would have been other players. You would pass the ball. You're part of the overall machinery of the offense, but you are not the star of that. You're not the most important cog. You're just, you know, one piece of it. So, the fact she went to Iowa, very good program. They hadn't been into the women's final four in a long time. But Coach Lisa Bluder let Caitlin Clark be Caitlin Clark. And that meant all the entertaining, amazing shots that Americans fell in love with.
SIMON: Can we use Caitlin Clark's rise as a measure of the influence of Title IX that mandated equality for women's sports in schools?
BRENNAN: Absolutely. You know, for generations, we were telling our daughters, our nieces, our granddaughters, no, you cannot play sports. You cannot learn those life lessons, winning, losing at a young age, teamwork, sportsmanship. And Title IX, this law that mandates equity and equality for women in high school, college sports, it's of course a law, but it's also a mindset. And to me, that's even more important, where you expect that your daughter's going to have opportunities. That girl you see in the kitchen every morning or the girl you wave at from the driveway who's got her - her bag with her volleyball gear or softball gear in it as she goes off to another game, that doesn't surprise us. And 50 years ago, you never saw that. And if you did, you wondered what was going on? What's that girl doing? You know, this is that continuation of not just a sports story, Scott, but truly an American cultural story.
SIMON: Christine, some people do seem to resent Caitlin Clark's success. Would that be a fair way to put it?
BRENNAN: We've certainly seen that, unfortunately. There was, I think, anger, resentment. Why does she get to do this? It's a 74% Black league. That is understandable in our racially polarized society, a white woman from Iowa coming in and being the star of a league that never got the attention it deserved. And now, this is the one? Of course, as someone who's covered this, the WNBA, back to the '90s, you know that that spotlight that is shining on Caitlin Clark now also shines on all those players who deserve the attention that they never got, but they are getting it now. And that certainly is the positive in a conversation that I think will be ongoing as the WNBA works through this.
SIMON: And I thought when Caitlin Clark made a surprise appearance on "Saturday Night Live," she was very pointed and moving about her feeling of gratitude and debt that she felt she owed.
BRENNAN: Yeah, she was. After the requisite jokes (laughter) with the - the Weekend Update people, then she went into a wonderful little thank you, praising and thanking several players for being her role models and paving the way and opening the door for her, and all of those women that she mentioned were Black, including the great Maya Moore, who was her hero. And when she was a little girl in Iowa, her dad drove her up 3 1/2 hours to Minneapolis and Caitlin Clark broke away from her dad to hug Maya Moore. And, of course, they have now replicated that hug several times as Caitlin has become the superstar and Maya Moore says, I can't believe that one of the little kids who hugged me turned out to be Caitlin Clark.
SIMON: Christine, how do we explain that Caitlin Clark's salary to play for the Indiana Fever is reportedly just $78,000? Though her endorsement deal for Nike is, I guess, reportedly worth $28 million. And, of course, rookies in the NBA routinely make tens of millions of dollars.
BRENNAN: Well, capitalism. When this story broke when people were looking at her salary and the top pick in the NBA draft, 57 million. So (laughter) there's a long way to go. But for years, people were ignoring the WNBA. I mean, as I said to folks then, did you buy any tickets? Did you ever watch a game? Did you buy the - a jersey of a player? Did you take your granddaughter or your niece to a game? And the answer usually was no because most Americans weren't paying any attention to the WNBA - the income, the interest, the TV dollars. Now, they do have a new TV contract that is four times the value of what they've previously had. So the money is starting to come in. The salaries will rise. I would love to say they'll someday be equal, but Scott, you and I will certainly not live to see that day, no matter if we make it to 110, I think, just because the disparity is so great. But moving in the right direction, I think, is also a victory of sorts.
SIMON: Does the success of Caitlin Clark help women athletes in all sports?
BRENNAN: Absolutely, it does, Scott. When you have guys who would never give the time of day to women's sports, who would go on sports talk shows and laugh about women's basketball or other women's sports, well, those guys that 25, whatever, 30 years ago, were laughing about women's basketball, college or pro, those are the guys now that are proudly wearing their No. 22 jerseys, not only to games, but also to the grocery store and the gas station. It's those - the holdouts, right? It's maybe some of the guys who, you know, a little bit sexist or a lot sexist, who just didn't think it matched up. You know, the women don't dunk.
That was a conversation, always. They're playing below the rim. Why would anyone watch this compared to men's basketball? Well, now we have our answer. Again, the eyeball she gets, then everyone sees the WNBA, and those people that - those players that never got the attention they deserve, are finally getting it. And other women's sports as well, which are exploding - women's pro hockey, women's pro softball, women's pro lacrosse, in addition to the more traditional women's sports and the Olympic sports. I do think there's a greater respect every day because Caitlin Clark is able to nail those logo threes and bring more people who didn't like women's sports now into the arena.
SIMON: Christine Brennan, her new book on the Caitlin Clark explosion, "On Her Game." Thanks so much for being with us.
BRENNAN: Scott, thank you very much.
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