Woke Feminists may Bristle, but Pistol Pete Maravich’s Scoring Record Stands
For those of you who don’t follow women’s college basketball, Caitlin Clark is a true phenom.
Clark plays for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, and she has transformed the women’s game of basketball. She joined the Hawkeyes in 2020 during the Covid season, so her contributions and status as a rising star were obscured by the pandemic. However, Iowa made the NCAA tournament that year and every year since. Last season, with Clark leading the attack, the Hawkeyes reached the Tournament National Final before losing to a stacked LSU team.
Clark’s stats are other worldly. She is a career 46.5% shooter who hits 38.2% from the three-point line. For reference, Steph Curry, the greatest 3-point shooter of all time, averages 42.6% from beyond the arc.
Scoring is great, but what makes Clark so special is her moxie on the court. She is a deadly assassin, who can hit a bucket from anywhere and drop 40 on an opponent on any given night. Her game is similar to Curry’s in that circus shots are the norm, but she is also an elite passer, averaging 8.1 assists per game. Clark is talented and fun to watch, which is why she fills the seats like no one before her.
In fact, wherever Clark plays, attendance goes up. When the Hawkeyes visited Northern Iowa, attendance was 1.7x the Panthers usual draw. At Iowa State it was 1.5x. Wisconsin was 3.3x, and Rutgers was 3.1x. It’s fair to say that Clark is the biggest draw in women’s basketball at any level.
Pistol Pete Maravich
Pistol Pete Maravich is still considered the greatest natural shooter in basketball history. Gifted with an ability to see the entire court and anticipate where the ball was going before it got there, Maravich was perhaps the most accurate and creative player that ever stepped onto a basketball court.
While his pro career was hampered and cut short by serious injuries, while at LSU in the 1970s, Maravich set the all-time NCAA record by scoring 3,667 points over just three years. Amazingly, Maravich accomplished this feat without the benefit of the three-point shot, which wasn’t integrated into the college game until 1986. Maravich’s record has stood for over 53 years, which speaks to the incredible skill and talent he brought to the game.
For Woke Feminists, the Women’s Record Just Isn’t Enough
On February 15th of this year, Caitlin Clark broke the all-time women’s scoring record set in 2017 by Washington guard Kelsey Plum. It was a monumental event, and Clark deserves enormous accolades for the accomplishment.
Yet, as we could have guessed, setting the record for women’s basketball wasn’t enough for radical feminists because, as they’ve reminded us for decades, there are no differences between men and women. So, they had their sights set on a much bigger prize.
As the 2023-24 season progressed, woke media manufactured a new story that Clark was in hot pursuit of the all-time NCAA scoring record without specifying gender. The hype machine went full tilt, so, this past Sunday, in front of a standing room only crowd, Clark broke Maravich’s record, and the celebration began. Caitlin Clark was now the greatest collegiate basketball player in NCAA history, they proclaimed, and feminists dared anyone to challenge their narrative. They even pressured Pete Maravich’s son to congratulate Clark on surpassing his dad.
It was the ultimate “king has no clothes” moment. Was anyone taking this seriously? Putting Maravich and Clark in the same statistical category would be like saying Laila Ali was a better boxer than her dad, Muhammad Ali, because she was undefeated and he lost five times.
Forget for a moment that Clark played four seasons and Maravich only three, or that there was no 3-point line when Maravich played. The reality is that if Clark replaced Maravich at LSU in the 70s, she would have been lucky to score 100 points over the course of her career. Conversely, if Maravich played on Clark’s Hawkeyes, he would probably have scored 100 points a night.
Sports personalities have been largely quiet on this topic for obvious reasons. In today’s hypersensitive woke environment, if you point out the obvious absurdity of including men’s and women’s records in the same category, you’ll get an “ist” or “phobic” label hung on you, and in the world of sports journalism, that means certain career suicide.
Renee Graham of the Boston Globe was quick to close the door on any criticism of the validity of Clark’s record:
Underlying this insistence that the men’s and women’s games are too different to be comparable is the sexist belief that the basketball that women play is inferior to what men do on the court — and that’s why Clark had an easier road to the record than Maravich. Hence, the predictable conclusion is that Clark’s achievement should be confined to the annals of women’s college basketball history.
Caitlin Clark, who will forgo another season at Iowa for the WNBA draft, is the sole owner of NCAA college basketball’s all-time career scoring record. Period.
No, Renee, it’s really not a period. It’s an asterisk at best because anyone with an ounce of sense knows that comparing the men’s game to the women’s game is utterly absurd.
The irony in all of this cannot be overstated. Since the 1970s, feminists have told us that for all intents and purposes, women are equal to men in everything. No exceptions. Forcing record keepers to acknowledge that Clark broke Maravich’s scoring record is a manifestation of that irrational belief.
Yet, at the same time, a large contingent of feminists, led by J.K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova among others, are adamantly against trans women competing against biological women in women’s sports. I wonder how these feminists will feel when a biological male, competing on a women’s team in the NCAA, breaks Clark’s record? I mean, are we all equal, or aren’t we?
It’s a shame how Woke sucks the fun out of everything it touches. We should all be celebrating Caitlin Clark’s accomplishment on its own merits and collectively enjoying her amazing athletic triumph. Instead, we’re getting another lesson in woke feminist self righteousness.
It makes you wonder if this woke nonsense will ever pass…
