Culture
Caitlin Clark's senior day another Iowa milestone as she passes Pistol Pete's record
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Standing in front of every seat throughout Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Sunday was a similar story. Caitlin Clark, the most transcendent figure in modern sports, once again brought out the stars and fans.
In her final regular-season game in the state she calls home, Clark scored 35 points to surpass “Pistol” Pete Maravich’s career total and become the most prolific scorer in Division I basketball history, men’s or women’s.
Clark’s moment was communal for all in attendance, from the fans clad in her T-shirts to the celebrities adding flavor to the spectacle. Rapper Travis Scott danced courtside with the Iowa cheerleaders. The “Jake from State Farm” commercial actor wore a Kristin Juszczyk-designed Clark vest, and Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan took in the scene near the floor.
Clark’s childhood hero and former Lynx great Maya Moore congratulated her protege after the game. Iowa brought in former Kansas star Lynette Woodard — who set the AIAW women’s basketball scoring record — to a standing ovation. ESPN broadcaster Holly Rowe emceed the senior day ceremony. College Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman Robert Gallery was decked in a Clark No. 22 jersey. Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks sat inauspiciously 10 rows behind the Iowa bench wearing a Clark T-shirt.
It’s 9:30 a.m., but the stars are out in Iowa City. @MooreMaya x @CaitlinClark22 #Hawkeyes pic.twitter.com/0tc7xzLeTm
— Iowa Women’s Basketball (@IowaWBB) March 3, 2024
Those names and faces turned the event into an extravaganza. The fans built it into a celebration. Everyone wanted a piece of Clark, and she was more than happy to share herself in the moment.
“You can just feel the energy and the joy and the excitement that our team plays with, and that’s contagious,” Clark said. “Our fans give us that energy, but we give it right back to them.”
Clark passed Maravich’s record with 0.3 seconds left in the first half. Instead of sending a long-distance 3-pointer — as she had with previous record-breaking buckets — Clark sank two free throws following a technical foul to surpass Maravich’s mark, which he set at LSU in 1970. She had needed just 18 points against Ohio State to pass Maravich, her latest milestone after setting the NCAA women’s all-time scoring record.
“Honestly, I didn’t really care,” Clark said. “It was cool to hear everybody just start screaming. I thought that gave us a lot of momentum going into halftime.”
More important to Clark, the No. 6 Hawkeyes beat No. 2 Ohio State 93-83 to split their season series.
GO DEEPER
Pete Maravich’s son sees his dad in Caitlin Clark’s game: ‘He would have been a big fan’
Fans young and old, local and from more than 1,000 miles away, came to take in one of the last glimpses of Clark playing at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Hayden Kinnick Zacher, 11, came from Colorado to watch her. He wedged himself amid the courtside chaos with hundreds of other youngsters to collect an autographed Caitlin Clark jersey. He succeeded. Georgia teens Pierce Moore and Ellie Hargrove, both 14, who flew in for the game as a birthday present to Moore, displayed their homemade signs with pride. One read: “Pistol taught me how to dribble. Caitlin taught me to dream.”
These fans from Georgia came to watch Clark play in her final regular-season home game at Iowa. (Scott Dochterman / The Athletic)
Phyllis Opperman, a retired former Iowa resident, left her winter home in Panama City Beach, Fla., and held a sign about her 1,022-mile drive that started Thursday. She laughed and said the trip was 1,028 miles but liked including the 22 as part of her sign.
Welcome to the Caitlin Clark Experience, which is nearing its black-and-gold conclusion, as Clark will enter the WNBA Draft in April, where she’s the presumed No. 1 selection. Of Iowa’s 32 regular-season games this year, 30 have sold out, with several breaking arena attendance records. This coming weekend, the second-seeded Hawkeyes will compete in the Big Ten tournament, which was sold out for the first time — 12 days in advance. Iowa likely will host the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, which means another pair of sellouts.
Just to get into Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Sunday, resale tickets started at $451. ESPN’s “College GameDay” aired live before tipoff, Fox broadcasted the game, and 275 credentialed media members were present. The arena was half-full three hours before tipoff and jampacked well before starting lineups. The crowd’s roar consistently exceeded 100 decibels in almost every possession of the game. Four times it peaked at 116 decibels.
Clark fandom might be reaching its peak nationally, but in Iowa City, the faithful have known nearly since she arrived on campus in 2020 that they were in for four years of fun. She scored 27 points in her college debut, recorded the only 40-point triple-double in the NCAA Tournament and set program records with 49 points in a game while leading Iowa to two Big Ten tournament titles and a national championship appearance last season.
Since February, she has climbed the scoring ranks, first passing Kelsey Plum on Feb. 15 to become the all-time leading scorer in NCAA women’s basketball. Last week, she moved past Woodard’s AIAW large-school record. After passing Maravich’s total, she has 3,685 career points to sit at the pinnacle of major college basketball scoring.
Nowhere is Clark’s stardom more apparent than when she walks off the floor. Knowing it was her final regular-season game, Clark met hundreds of youngsters near the Iowa bench and signed posters, shoes, jerseys and even a stuffed animal. Every other second, a high-pitched “Caitlin!” was yelped from near the tunnel.
With four security guards bracketing her from anyone too ambitious, Clark signed for nearly 20 minutes. This started along the Iowa bench 45 minutes after the game. It ended right in front of the locker room.
When it comes to Clark, it’s not just about the points, the logo 3s, the cross-court assists or the shrugs. It’s about how she makes fans feel in her presence. About a month ago, 9-year-old Penelope Pearson of North Liberty, Iowa, sat courtside for the Iowa-Nebraska game. Pearson’s Christmas present in December was a ticket to watch Clark. A week before the holiday, Pearson was diagnosed with leukemia and couldn’t attend.
One day before Iowa-Nebraska on Jan. 27, Penelope had a chemotherapy treatment. Then her mother, Liz, got a call from someone who could give them tickets. Penelope wanted to go despite her weakened state. “She’s the strongest kid I know,” Liz Pearson said. Penelope dyed her hair pink and sat near the court. Clark, who was alerted about her presence, grabbed security as soon as the game ended, pointed to Penelope and pulled the family onto the floor for an autograph, a hug and a conversation.
“It’s just been an inspiration to be able to see these strong women. And Penelope knows that she can pretty much do anything, as long as she has these people to look up to,” Liz Pearson said as she teared up.
Clark’s impact transcends gender as well. Two hours after Clark left the floor, the West Burlington (Iowa) High boys basketball team held a practice at Carver-Hawkeye ahead of the state tournament. Boys took turns launching 3-pointers from Clark’s marker from where she broke Plum’s NCAA record. That spot is 33 feet from the basket. Of their repeated attempts — too many to count — more balls hit the floor than drew iron. But every 3-pointer from Clark’s depth led to high-fives.
From the “College GameDay” setup to the Falcons shooting from the logo 10 hours later, Clark reminded everyone why she is one of one. She’s Teflon to pressure and expectations and proves it on the court. She is beyond generous with her time. Whether it’s a millionaire rapper, a little girl with cancer or a grandmother who has held tickets for 30 years, Clark treats everyone with kindness and a flash of her megawatt smile.
“I’m just so happy for Caitlin,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said. “I think she represents the university, our sport. … She’s such a good ambassador. And I’m very thankful for that.”
(Top photo: Matthew Holst / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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