Culture
South Carolina and Iowa prove if 'given an opportunity, women’s sports just thrives'
CLEVELAND — Everyone wanted to talk about the game, which was expected after the South Carolina women’s basketball team held off Iowa for an 87-75 victory and second national championship in three years. But Dawn Staley also wanted to talk about the other game. Actually, that’s not strong enough. She was going to discuss it.
Basketball has played such an important role in her life that she protects it as fiercely as a mother would a newborn. Her love for it is matched only by her respect for it. So even as questioners asked about the Gamecocks becoming just the 10th team in NCAA Division I history to finish a season undefeated, going 38-0, Staley purposely turned the spotlight back to the person who was central in helping to make this a transformative season and inflection point in the game’s evolution.
“I don’t want to not utilize this opportunity to thank Caitlin (Clark) for what she’s done for women’s basketball,” she said of the Iowa guard whose transcendent play helped drive record viewership numbers. “Her shoulders were heavy and getting a lot of eyeballs on our game. And sometimes as a young person, it can be a bit much. But I thought she handled it with class. I hope that every step of the ladder of success that she goes, she’s able to elevate whatever room she’s in.”
Minutes earlier, Staley had elevated herself to the upper rungs of a ladder in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. She snipped the final polyester strands from the net and placed it around her neck. Then she turned each way and waved to fans.
As I later listened to her describe her feelings, Maya Angelou’s words came to mind: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
That summarizes the 2023-24 women’s basketball season for me. Years from now, I will likely forget Clark’s career points total, how many games South Carolina won, why Kim Mulkey always seemed so angry, and which players were involved in the moving screen at the end of the UConn-Iowa national semifinal. But I will never forget the sense of satisfaction derived from seeing the sport come of age.
Dynasty?
🏆 @GamecockWBB pic.twitter.com/ij7ovmsJ1b
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) April 7, 2024
For decades, broadcast partners and the public marginalized women’s basketball, ostensibly relegating it to the kids’ table. The calls for respect were heard but ignored. But this season was different. The women no longer asked for respect; they demanded it with the record-breaking viewership that stemmed from the genius of Clark, the high-level play of South Carolina, Iowa, UConn, LSU and others, and the storylines and grudge matches that set social media ablaze.
How far has the game come? When the Final Four was held in Tacoma, Wash., in 1988 and ’89, the local newspaper didn’t send any of its top sportswriters to cover the event. It sent a lowly community news reporter who had never staffed a major sporting event. I know because that person was me.
I was stunned there wasn’t more interest after experiencing the intensity of Tennessee coach Pat Summitt’s piercing blue eyes, the playmaking of Long Beach State guard Penny Toler, the generalship of Stanford guard Jennifer Azzi, the consistency of Tennessee forward Bridgette Gordon, and the promise of Louisiana Tech center Venus Lacy. But traction is hard to come by when broadcast rights are sold to a cable outlet that views you as an afterthought.
ESPN should be ashamed for that. The fact is, it’s not deserving of what it now has — one of the hottest products in sports. The women’s game this year attracted more viewers than the NBA Finals, World Series, college football playoffs — you name it. And while there might be a drop-off with Clark leaving for the WNBA, the chances of a significant decline seem remote at best.
The reason is the abundance of elite teams and playmaking young stars, including USC freshman JuJu Watkins, who ranked second in the country in scoring; Notre Dame freshman Hannah Hildago, who was must-see TV; and South Carolina freshmen MiLaysia Fulwiley and Tessa Johnson, who just played prominent roles in winning the Gamecocks their third national championship in franchise history. And then there is senior guard Paige Bueckers, who led Connecticut to the Final Four and should be in the running for national Player of the Year next season.
“I just want our game to grow. I don’t care if it’s us. I don’t care if it’s Caitlin. I don’t care if it’s JuJu or Hannah,” Staley said. “I just want our games to grow, no matter who it is. Because there’s a lot of people that are out there growing our game, a lot of programs out there growing our game. We need to continue to uplift them as well, as we take our game to the next level.”
GO DEEPER
Dawn Staley created South Carolina’s perfect championship season out of last year’s loss
There will be plenty of time to discuss the passing of the baton, so to speak. But Sunday was about recognizing those who, if not created this moment, unquestionably built on the momentum created in recent seasons. And Clark was at the front of the line.
Before disappearing from the dais for the final time as a college player, she reflected on the things she will remember and appreciate most — her teammates, her coaches, and her support inside and outside the program. And she will also take great pride and satisfaction that she played a part in making the women’s game top of mind.
“When I think about women’s basketball going forward, obviously it’s just going to continue to grow, whether it’s at the WNBA level, whether it’s at the college level,” Clark said. “Everybody sees it. Everybody knows. Everybody sees the viewership numbers. When you’re given an opportunity, women’s sports just kind of thrives. I think that’s been the coolest thing for me on this journey. We started our season playing in front of 55,000 people in Kinnick Stadium, and now we’re ending it playing in (front of) probably 15 million people or more on TV. It just continues to get better and better. That’s never going to stop.”
(Photo of Dawn Staley: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
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