CAITLIN CLARK’S SEASON FOR THE AGES, METS A MESS & JIMMY V AND THE FIRST CINDERELLA …
The first rock star of a women’s basketball player I saw in person and wrote about was Cheryl Miller, back at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, when she was almost as big an attraction there as Michael Jordan was for the men.
Now, all this time later, and with so many great players who came after Reggie’s sister, we have Caitlin Clark, who has become for this one season the biggest star the women’s side of college basketball has ever seen.
And what I sort of don’t need is for anybody else to explain what I’m seeing from Ms. Clark, or what she’s meant to her sport, or how the media has gone overboard praising her.
Yeah……no.
This isn’t about race, or lack of context, or lack of historical perspective.
It’s about knowing what we’re all seeing.
I don’t care whether you think she’s the GOAT or not.
No one has ever had a season like this.
No one has ever brought more people into the tent. If you can’t appreciate that, or understand that, go bowling.
I wish I could hit my 4-iron off the ground the way Pete Alonso golfed that ball out of Citi Field in the bottom of the 9th the other day.
When Uncle Steve said the Mets were going to surprise us this season, did he mean by them losing 100 games?
There was so much Jimmy V. talk the past week or so, because of the run North Carolina State made to the Final Four.
And it got me remembering what it was like being with him in Albuquerque in 1983, when his NC State team basically invented Cinderella for the modern version of March Madness.
He’d given his Sunday press conference and I was walking with him to his car, and he finally said, “They keep telling me I don’t have a chance. Let me ask you something: Kentucky got a chance? UCLA got a chance? Carolina got a chance? There’s only two teams left. I gotta have some kind of chance.”
He stopped then, and grinned, as if he were going to live forever.
“It’s why I brought two suits,” Jimmy Valvano said.
If everybody misses Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka so much, how come nobody watches them on TV?
Finally today:
Happy birthday to our youngest son, Zach.
He’s always been the glue guy in our family.
Now he’s known that way on Instagram.
Go find him if you haven’t already (@glue.guy).
It’s where the cool kids hang to talk about sports.