INDIANAPOLIS — Watch Fever star Caitlin Clark play for 10 minutes and you’ll have an opinion on the way she moves.
She taunts opponents after a big shot. She yells at her coaches and officials. She prances around like a stadium MC after a scoring run. She postures like she’s ready to throw down in a heated moment — then walks away and lets her teammates handle it.
Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it. You have to have an opinion because she’s basketball’s biggest star.
So here’s an opinion: One thing I’ve always liked about Clark is her bravado. She’s full of herself, unafraid of consequence, in ways women are typically taught not to be. She’s launching that 30-footer whether her coach called it or not.
I wish I’d had more of that as a player, and I wish I had more of it in my life now.
Here’s another opinion: I sometimes find her outbursts unsettling. They can come off like entitlement from a straight white woman in a league built by — and precious to — so many who are Black, queer and otherwise marginalized. Plus, her “fans” often defend her by diminishing the league’s history and its players, which makes me feel protective.
I acknowledge this reaction isn’t fair to Clark. From my point of view as a Sky beat reporter, I don’t know what’s going on underneath the surface. I don’t know whether she feels entitled — or just frustrated, pressured, or something else. I don’t know what she really thinks of the obnoxious fans-slash-trolls, or whether she feels responsible for them.
I do know she’s a great player — the league’s leader in assists — whose teammates all speak highly of her.
So here’s one more opinion, maybe a fairer one: I’m interested in her thoughts on the connection between competitiveness, body language and greatness. Columnist Candace Buckner recently asked her about her body language, and her answer got me thinking.
“I think it’s something I can always work on,” she said. “You go back, you look at the mirror, and I’m competitive and I have an edge, and I think at the same time it’s what makes me great. But it’s not something you always love, too.
“I think that competitive fire and that drive and that passion, that joy and that edge, that’s what people come to watch. That’s what they love. It’s not always going to be pretty — and look at some of the best players in the world or some of the best players who have ever played this game, and they’re fierce. They’re fiery. They’re competitive.”
I hear her holding two things at once: that her fire is essential, and that it’s “not something you always love.” Which speaks to an interesting tension in our understanding of greatness.
There’s the conventional, masculine model: Greatness comes from drive and dominance, all stemming from an uncontrollable impulse to win. Michael Jordan punched a teammate. Kobe Bryant bowled one over.
But there’s an alternative understanding, too: that the same competitive impulse can turn into perfectionism, rumination and fear of failure — the very things that pull an athlete out of flow.
It’s part of why so many great ones turn to meditation, a fundamentally uncompetitive practice. It’s about staying in the moment. Detaching from outcome. Which, ironically, tends to produce better results.
Lately I’ve been asking myself: What is the connection between my need to win and my own potential for greatness?
In my work as a journalist, my competitiveness can make my coverage deeper and more compelling. But it can also cause me to rush, to forget to hydrate, to forget to be vulnerable — all of which work against my writing.
I first started thinking about my own competitiveness as a basketball player, and what I realized was that I wasn’t just driven by a desire to win. I was driven by a desire to be loved — to not let down my dad, who taught me the game and could be harsh in his criticism.
I also realized that, as a form of protection from the car rides home, I became ultra-critical of myself.
I did a lot of work in adulthood to reach those realizations, and guess what: I’m still super critical of myself!
I’ll be working to meet my deadline and suddenly feel a tension in my neck, notice an inner commentary about everything I’m doing wrong, and think: Wow, I am putting so much pressure on myself right now.
That isn’t something that’s ever going away. It’s just something I can try to notice and, like Clark often says, try to channel more positively.
She may be doing that with her body language this season. Though the buzz about her is that she’s yelling at officials more, she’s made progress in another area: She’s no longer visibly upset when teammates botch her passes.
Maybe the redirect of her competitive ire from teammates to officials isn’t the perfect or prettiest evolution.
But my last opinion is this: change is hard, and slow, and nonlinear. We should acknowledge small improvements, even if they don’t look how we imagined them.