Caitlin Clark and her achievements stand on their own. Stop comparing her to Pistol Pete
If women’s basketball fans and advocates are honest about why the Caitlin Clark phenomenon is breaking through in a way that superstars in previous eras of their sport have not, they need to acknowledge an indelicate but crucial factor in her popularity.
While grievance is a powerful tool in sports and has long been necessary to advance equality and create opportunity for women, Clark has never presented herself as the face of a larger cause. Part of her appeal to the fans who have either ignored or mocked women’s basketball in the past — mostly men, of course — is that they aren’t being shamed to pay attention. Her charisma and style stand on their own.
And as this weekend approaches, where the narrative around Clark will now turn to the 3,667-point mark that has forever been associated with Pete Maravich, that’s exactly where her achievements should remain.
On their own.
Just like Pistol Pete’s.
The strain to call Clark’s eventual 3,668th point some kind of milestone or an important moment for women’s sports is the kind of forced, illogical nonsense that can only serve to create an unnecessary backlash for everything she has accomplished. Is being the most prolific scorer in the history of NCAA Division I women’s college basketball not enough?
There’s a simple reason for that: They are not the same. And in two or three games when Clark scores the 50 points necessary to match that number, she is not breaking a record because she and Maravich do not play in the same era under the same rules.
More:Watch out Pete Maravich: See how close Iowa basketball's Caitlin Clark is to scoring record
If Clark were a man doing the same things she’s doing now, I would write exactly what I wrote a year ago when Detroit Mercy’s Antoine Davis was on the verge of chasing down Pistol Pete, eventually coming up three points short.
Context matters.
While sports evolve and records are made to be broken, nobody in their right mind would have said that Davis and Maravich really belong in the same conversation.
Because Maravich played in an era when freshmen weren’t eligible for the varsity team, he only played 83 games at LSU and put up an absurd 44.2-point average without the help of a 3-point line or a shot clock.
It’s a statistical anomaly with no comparison. What does it accomplish either for Clark or women’s basketball to force one?
The attention given to numbers and records across all sports is warranted, but usually gets misused as fodder for mindless and inconsequential debates. The only functional reason they’re important is because they tell a never-ending story of how sports evolve over generations, as they all do.
But it’s only meaningful if the story is told accurately and completely.
We saw this play out during the final few years of Serena Williams’ career when she was supposedly chasing one more Grand Slam title to match Margaret Court’s 24 in women’s singles.
This was, of course, ridiculous.
Court may have been the best player of her era, but only 11 of her 24 were won during the Open Era when professionals were allowed to play at the Grand Slams. From 1960 to 1966, Court won seven straight Australian Opens when the tournament resembled something closer to a club championship with mostly local players than the major worldwide event it is today.
It’s more than reasonable to look at the context behind those numbers and conclude that Court and Williams, while both great in their time, were not remotely similar in what they accomplished.
So why compare them at all? Because that’s what we do — often to the point of inanity.
In fact, we saw it again earlier this year in the very same sport when ESPN became fond of flashing a graphic with Court’s 24 majors alongside Novak Djokovic’s 24 in men’s singles.
This somehow made even less sense than when they were doing it with Williams. Djokovic spent the last half decade chasing Roger Federer’s and then Rafael Nadal’s Grand Slam totals until he finally passed them. That was the record that mattered, the record that will one day accurately tell the story of this era of men's tennis and ultimately the sport. Trying to then shoehorn Court into that conversation is not just misleading, it's a shameless attempt to create a comparison where none actually exists.
But judging athletes in the context of their own time, against their own peers, seems to never be enough in sports. Whether it's JJ Redick needlessly slamming Bob Cousy’s competitors as “plumbers and firemen" on ESPN a couple years ago or LeBron James vs. Michael Jordan, we are constantly being force-fed comparisons that make no sense and urged to take sides of cross-era debates that can never be settled.
The Clark story has been so captivating in large part because it has never been about pitting men’s basketball vs. women’s basketball, a subject that almost always becomes fraught with outright misogyny on one side and a myopic view on the other side that women's basketball is a purer, more entertaining form of the sport. Ultimately, the market decides that.
Clark has managed to bridge that gap to a greater degree than anyone else, and she has done it without a chorus of people demanding that fans give women’s basketball more respect or that people “just don’t get it” if they weren’t watching before. The Clark boom has happened far more organically, and that’s probably why it has a chance to actually grow the sport to a certain degree beyond whatever happens this March.
But bringing Maravich’s record into the narrative threatens to change that because it is not organic. It’s completely forced and fake, taking two people from two different eras who played against different genders and putting the entire country in an episode of “First Take.”
When Clark scores her 3,668th point, she will still be the greatest scorer in the history of women’s college basketball. Maravich will still be the greatest scorer in the history of men’s college basketball.
Any attempt to link them beyond that only works to the detriment of both — and the rest of us who are trying to simply enjoy the Clark show for what it is.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken