No harmony in women's hoops, but lots of convergence

The unsightly South Carolina-LSU scuffle just adds to the sizzle of a fast-growing game

We’ve all become familiar with polarization. In most aspects of life, it’s not good. In sports, it often is.

Professional wrestling understood this. It always had Heels and Babyfaces, from Nikolai Volkov singing the Soviet anthem in the ring while absorbing flying cups of beer, to the villainous and mysterious Iron Sheik, to the noble and clean-cut Bob Backlund.

When Jimmy Connors walked onto a tennis court, there was no neutrality around him, at least not if he could help it. Same with Muhammad Ali in the ring or Dale Earnhardt on a racetrack. Polarization is just another word for magnetism. A game between two teams who provoke no emotion might as well be wallpaper.

Put differently, a sport is dependent on the stories it tells. Women’s college basketball is becoming our best raconteur. Its popularity is skyrocketing because of the feelings it inspires, at least this year. On Sunday, during a tripleheader of conference championships, it showed why.

The main event was the middle one, an SEC championship game between undefeated South Carolina and defending NCAA champion LSU, two brawny teams with an acquired distaste for each other. Near the end of South Carolina’s 77-72 victory, tournament MVP MiLaysia Fulwiley was intentionally fouled by LSU’s Flan’jae Johnson, who then bumped into the Gamecocks’ Ashlyn Watkins. Kamilla Cardoso, South Carolina’s 6-foot-7 center, saw the contact and shoved the 5-7 Johnson to the hardwood, with authority.

Six players were ejected for leaving the bench area, and Cardoso won’t be available for the Gamecocks’ first NCAA tournament game. She’s probably lucky the suspension wasn’t longer. Johnson’s brother leaped over the scorer’s table to get involved and was arrested.

As if all that heat wasn’t enough, LSU coach Kim Mulkey got behind a microphone later and again proved there isn’t a flame she won’t fan.

“No one wants to be part of that,’ Mulkey said. “But I’ll tell you this. I wish Cardoso would have pushed (6-foot-3) Angel Reese. If you’re 6-8, don’t push somebody that little. That was uncalled for in my opinion. Let those two girls who were jawing, let them go at it.”

Except that Reese wasn’t the player who was menacing Cardoso’s teammate. Cardoso apologized later for taking her traffic-cop role a bit too far. But she wasn’t interested in turning it into Fight Club.

Mulkey is one of the true lightning rods in sport, from her Phyllis Diller outfits on nationally-televised game nights, to her suspension of Reese earlier in the season without giving an explanation, to her defense of various criminal acts by football players when she was at Baylor, to her odd refusal to speak up on behalf of Brittney Griner when Griner was jailed in Russia. Griner, a lesbian, was the fulcrum of an NCAA title team that Mulkey coached at Baylor,  but also said Mulkey discouraged her from coming “all the way out.”

Near the end of last year’s championship game victory, Reese mocked Iowa’s Caitlin Clark by encircling her ring finger. That brought down torrential opinions, some of them voiced by folks who had never seen a women’s basketball game. To mock Clark is to commit the vilest heresy, although Clark can do a little chirping of her own. All of which will pump up the interest for any LSU-Iowa or LSU-South Carolina games in the future.

Clark was part of the passion play on Sunday. Iowa had a clear path to the Big 10 tournament title because top-seeded Ohio State lost to Maryland. But neither Clark nor the Hawkeyes were functioning properly in the first half of the title game against Nebraska. Clark was 1-for-5 at halftime, 0-for-3 from the 3-point line, and Iowa trailed by nine points. In Iowa’s previous game with Nebraska, a loss, Clark had not scored in the fourth quarter.

Yeah, Tiger Woods had some bad front nines, too. Clark and Iowa won it in overtime, 94-89, and Clark wound up with 34 points, although her three steals were just as important. Veteran musical aficionados remember the mid-60s, when a British band called the Dave Clark Five rode the wave that the Beatles began. Well, Iowa isn’t just the Caitlin Clark Five, not with sophomore Hannah Stuelke scoring 25 with nine rebounds.

Chapter Three on Sunday was both retro and futuristic. USC once ruled the women’s game with Cheryl Miller and Cynthia Cooper. Its last previous NCAA appearance was 2014. The Trojans followed it up with one 9-9 Pac-12 season and seven losing ones, until they hired Lindsay Gottlieb to coach. They went 11-7 in the league last year, made the tournament, and Gottlieb signed JuJu Watkins, who had a 51-point game against Stanford in this regular season and broke Clark’s record for points by an NCAA freshman. But in the title game against Stanford, Watkins found the water too deep. She missed 13 of 15 shots and scored nine points.

No problem. Tournament MVP McKenzie Forbes hit 11 of 21 shots and scored 26, and the Trojans won, 74-61. Forbes played at Cal one year and then transferred to Harvard. Three years later she was a grad transfer at USC, along with transfers from Columbia and Penn. “I call them Juju And The Nerds,” Gottlieb said.

The further adventures of Watkins and USC will be played out in the Big Ten next year.

That wasn’t all. In the ACC, Virginia Tech’s Elizabeth Kitley hurt her knee and couldn’t play in the tournament, and Notre Dame beat North Carolina State, 55-51, in the final. The Irish have their own first-year flash in Hannah Hidalgo, a guard from Haddonfield, N.J. who led the ACC with 25.1 points a game. She also broke Skylar Diggins’ school record for steals in a season.

Hidalgo was so obvious in her very first game, a loss to South Carolina in Paris, that Kevin Durant tweeted, “Hidalgo and Fulwiley moving DIFFERENT out here, turn on ESPN.”

The women’s tournament is also on ESPN, which for years was the vessel for the men’s game and then lost its tournament coverage to Turner and CBS. Suddenly the women’s event is no consolation prize. The early entries to the NBA draft have forced the men’s game to become more of an ensemble production, a team game, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it also means the best players in that age group simply aren’t there.

Zack Edey of Purdue will be the college Player of the Year, and he has a dubious pro future. In most mock NBA drafts, the first four players are Europeans. Kentucky freshman Reed Sheppard is turning heads with every game, and he might crack that club. But how long has it been since the men’s game have a player who was box-office gold, who came close to the impact that Clark has? Maybe Zion Williamson for Duke in 2019, maybe Lonzo Ball for UCLA in 2017.

Although Williamson wore the widely-scorned Duke uniform, he wasn’t Public Enemy No. 1, not like Christian Laettner in the early 90s. Again, the men’s players aren’t around long enough to spark antagonism. Connecticut has an excellent team that could well win back-to-back titles for the first time since Florida in 2006-07. And the fans will come out to boo….who? Maybe Cam Spencer’s chippiness, along with his unshakeable clutch jump shots, will ruffle some feathers, but he was at Rutgers last year. It’s a new team. Most of them are.

There will be no trouble identifying a theme in the women’s Final Four, provided the most familiar teams get there. Don’t look now but Connecticut is starting to gather speed, with Paige Bueckers, who was supposed to be Caitlin Clark, filling it up regularly. UConn was a ruthless 11-time NCAA champion, and coach Geno Auriema had a tenuous relationship, to be kind, with Tennessee’s Pat Summitt. One night in Knoxville, someone asked UConn’s Diana Taurasi if she minded all the booing. “Booing?” Taurasi repeated. “I thought they were mooing.”

Them’s fighting words these days, at least between teams that are poles apart.