Caitlin Clark is the sum of all of Iowa's parts

The most traditionally fertile soil for women's basketball has produced its ideal.

Denise Long, Jeanette Olson

The true nature of Kim Mulkey was hanging over this NCAA women’s basketball tournament like a Louisiana petrochemical cloud. On Monday night, Caitlin Clark took care of that too. She has an endless plate of tasks these days and, fortunately, a massive appetite.

Mulkey is the LSU coach who complained about a Washington Post profile of her, five days before it surfaced. It turned out to be fair and bleakly accurate. Her brilliance as a coach was cited, as well as her wrecked relationships with family, friends and players alike. When a far less professional story also surfaced, in the Los Angeles Times, Mulkey was happy to seize the low ground again. Regardless of her appearance on the bench, martyrdom is her favorite accessory.

Mulkey ditched the Phyllis Diller costumes in Monday’s regional final game with Iowa, choosing a business outfit. She must have sensed that it was a good night to lay low. Iowa beat LSU, 94-87, reversing the outcome of last year’s championship game, and Clark scored 41. She had nine 3-pointers, out of 20 attempts, and LSU had only eight. She also had seven rebounds and 12 assists. If you hadn’t seen her before and wanted to find impurities in the hype, you probably came away thinking she was being undersold.

“I told her I was glad she was leaving,” Mulkey said graciously. “I said, ‘Girl. you’re something else. Never seen anything like it.’

“She  makes everyone else better. That’s what the great ones do. It’s what she does to make those other teammates better that helps her score points, and helps them score points, to beat you.”

Clark leads Division I in assists (nine per game), not just points (32). Only Trae Young of Oklahoma ever did that in the men’s game (2018). She takes 13.6 three-point shots per game, which are four more than anyone else, yet she still ranks 19th in accuracy (38 percent). She is Iowa’s leading rebounder (7.3), as a six-foot guard. And there’s a deflationary element to the 3-pointers she makes from the edge of the coaching box, or from the edge of the midcourt logo, a place where Steph Curry and very few others have operated. She stops rallies, mutes fans, makes the other bench sit down.

It did not help that Mulkey assigned Hailey Van Lith, and hardly anyone else, to guard her.  Van Lith didn’t impede Clark and missed eight of 10 shots herself. For Iowa, Kate Martin, who would be a force on any team she played on, scored 21 with six rebounds, and Sydney Affolter, who has raised her game in recent weeks, scored 16.

Clark grew up watching the WNBA and identifying with Minnesota’s Maya Moore. Now girls grow up watching her and know that they can not only thrive financially as they play college basketball. They can someday range outside their realm. Clark has been the most famous college athlete in America for a while now. Now she’ll be landing on covers of magazines that have nothing to do with sports, and the Indiana Fever is absolutely feverish over taking Clark with the top pick in the WNBA draft.

Three years behind her is Juju Watkins, the USC freshman who was eliminated by Connecticut Monday night. (UConn plays Iowa in the semifinals.) A year behind Watkins is Joyce Edwards, the top high school player in the nation, who will move 30 miles west of home to play for South Carolina. Clark is the natural antecedent of Brianna Stewart, of Sabrina Ionescu, of Elena Della Donne. She might have broken the chain and attached it to a taller star, but she knows she’s part of the progression.

And Iowa is the most appropriate place to give women’s basketball its main accelerant. The women’s game is planted deep within the culture. When high school administrators refused to sanction girls’ basketball in 1925, several rural school districts formed the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union and provided a home. By the time E. Wayne Cooley took over the organization in 1954, there was a televised state tournament with only one champion, and Cooley moved it into the 15,000-seat Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, brought in bands and hoopla, and made it part of the state’s identity. Cooley also pushed for other sports, and in 1970, twenty percent of high school girls who were playing sports in America lived in Iowa.

Lisa Bluder is Clark’s coach at Iowa. She was asked if she ever yapped at opponents when she played, the way Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese occasionally do. She pointed out that it was difficult to do so back then, because her high school team in Marion, Iowa played 6-on-6 ball, the way all the high schools did. Three players were on each side of the mid-court line, and they never crossed it. They also were limited to two dribbles at a time. In the pre-war years, they wore bloomers and skirts.

Generations of Iowans can tell you the details of the Dream Game in 1968, when the Union-Whitten Cobras defeated the Everly Cattlefeeders, 113-107. Denise Long, of Union-Whitten, had a 62.4-point average, coming in. Jeannette Olson, of Everly, averaged 59.7. Long had a 110-point game that season and scored 93 in the first game of the tournament. And even though Olson won the individual duel, 76-64, thanks to 24 of 25 free throws, Union-Whitten won the game, 113-107.

Long was drafted in the 13th round by the Warriors in 1969, although the league nullified the pick. In the next round the Lakers picked Mack Calvin, who would play 12 professional seasons. The game was televised in nine Midwestern states, but then the tournament had been televised since 1951. At that time, there were 47,000 TV sets in Iowa. WOI-TV estimated the audience for the first final at 26,000.

When Title IX came along, some families sued the association, claiming that every one else in the country was playing 5 on 5, and to stick with 6-on-6 was to hold back Iowans from college opportunities. The Union gave its schools a choice, and at first most schools stuck with the status, and static, quo. But surrender came in 1993, and 5 on 5 became the only game.

Caitlin Clark might belong to the world, but in Iowa they know she’s actually the sum of all those parts. In triplicate.