How’s everyone’s weekend going? Happy Spring!
Thanks for spending a portion of your Sunday with the Six.
Let’s get right to it.
HOW WE KNOW WOMEN’S SPORTS HAS ARRIVED
There’s an expression in our society that refers to when something decreases in popularity or quality.
It’s called “jumping the shark,” usually the reference made when a once good TV show (Walking Dead) or team (Golden State Warriors) starts to suck.
Women’s college basketball in 2024 doesn’t suck or suffer from apathy. As a relatively new semi-regular viewer this winter and early spring, from the games I’ve seen, the quality of play has been quite good. And with every Caitlin Clark-led Iowa game, the sport records record viewership.
The girls are seemingly in a healthy place and that’s great for women’s athletics in general. But beyond the level of play and audience, there’s another reason we know women’s basketball is flowing rapidly through the cultural bloodstream.
Mainstream media cares enough to pick sides.
Towards the sport’s more prominent figures, they are asking questions, writing stories that imbed a recurrent underlying binary narrative familiar to observers of our country’s never ending political discourse.
Using by-the-book dog whistle tactics commonly implemented by the legacy press, what they are trying to find out is this: are you with us or against us?
The first test came when the Washington Post published a lengthy article on LSU women’s head coach Kim Mulkey. Before the story was published, Mulkey lashed out against the reporter, Kent Babb, calling the article a “hit piece.”
Babb’s article traced Mulkey’s humble origins from the backwoods of Louisiana to championship-winning coach. He tracked down some ex-players who admitted Mulkey can act like a tyrant and isn’t the nicest person all the time (no kidding. Most great coaches don’t suffer fools). I thought it was standard profile-type material, albeit with some juicy details about family estrangement.
The fact the Washington Post devoted the resources to write such a story on a women’s basketball coach not named Geno Auriemma is a significant development.
A follow up column from another legacy brand, the Los Angeles Times, fueled more debate when the writer referred to Mulkey’s players as “dirty debutantes.” (feel free to Google that term. It isn’t flattering)
Things were getting mighty interesting.
For much of last week, “Mulkey vs the media” became a talking point on not just sports but news outlets. Debaters took positions, although Mulkey is a tough figure to tidily silo into an ideological box. She’s white, southern, outspoken against government overreach (she once publicly questioned the efficacy of the Covid vaccine) yet she herself runs her program in an authoritarian manner (Trumpian). But she’s also a divorced woman, a grandmother actually, who has spent a large chunk of her professional career coaching and mentoring black female athletes (not MAGA). It’s not easy to pick a side with her, but the beltway press sure did try.
(There was an attempt to label Mulkey as anti-American for not having her team on the court for the national anthem. Never one to let a crisis go to waste, the Louisiana governor weighed in. That contrived controversy quickly fizzled out.)
Also this week, the coach of South Carolina, Dawn Staley, got dragged into yet another popular culture war dispute, that over the merits of Christianity.
On Easter Sunday, Staley’s Gamecocks advanced to the Final Four. During a postgame interview, Staley said “if you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you.” Her comments immediately were interpreted as religious advocacy by the anti-Christianity left (a club in which many members of the media belong) and Staley was forced to further explain her comments in subsequent press briefings.
It’s all kabuki theater. None of it matters. Who cares if Staley references God to reporters or if Mulkey lectures her players about how they dress. At the end of the day, do they win games, get their best players to the pros and graduate the rest of the roster? That’s the job of a college basketball coach.
But that’s boring. That’s what women’s college basketball used to be.
No more.
Judging by the identitarian fishing expedition from the mainstream press corps this past week, the sport has finally arrived and relevant in America.
Let’s proceed with the Six.
1. How RFK Jr. Could Doom Joe Biden.
New polling data out this week has Trump leading Biden in what’s considered to be swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. We’re seven months out from election day, a lot still to be determined. A legit third party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has no shot at winning in November. But he can be a thorn in the side of the Democrats or Republicans. According to this piece from Politico, RFK, Jr. will more likely hurt Biden, as Latino voters appear to be warming towards the nephew of former president JFK.
Quite a bit of conversation in the culture today around the subject of mental health. It seems to permeate all discussion around young people and authority. Books are being written, one titled “The Anxious Generation.” In it, the author (NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt) argues that destigmatizing mental illness, while a positive development, comes at a great cost. “We don’t want people to be ashamed but its a terrible idea to valorize it. Meaning the more you talk about this, the more popular you will be and support,” Haidt said in an interview. David Epstein, the author who wrote the excellent book “Range” conducts a Q&A with Haidt about “The Anxious Generation” and whether mental health and kids is a panic or crisis.
Well kept, successful neighborhoods have always had “eyes on the street,” the watchful awareness of its local businesses and residents going about their lives. Now cameras and digital watch platforms replace human custodians. But there’s an unintended consequence of such technology, according to this article via New Atlantis: “These tools have co-opted the language of belonging — citizen, neighbor, next door. Reassuring terms that evoke what many have lost: a sense of genuine community and belonging.” My neighborhood held an easter egg hunt for the little kids last week. That’s a good use of community, I’d say.
I thought this to be a fascinating read from an online magazine titled Hazlitt. It’s a profile of a Maryland man named Frank Warren, who in 2004, while working a monotonous job at a medical document delivery business, started collecting secrets from strangers. He initially handed out 3,000 self-addressed postcards in the street, asking them to write down their secrets, and the anonymous responses flooded in. He kept doing it and now, has compiled over a million and has built a curated ad-free website around the venture titled PostSecret. Warren is leaving a lot of money on the table here as one absolute in this country: people are will always be obsessed with their internal demons.
5. Caitlin Clark And Iowa Find Peace In The Process.
If we want to talk ball and get away from the culture wars, there’s an easy outlet. Her name is Caitlin Clark, the Iowa star and arguably the most famous active female athlete in the country. Her Hawkeyes play South Carolina today in the women’s college basketball title game. There’s been a lot written about Clark, but this high word count article from the great Wright Thompson of ESPN is the definitive piece. Clark is an imperfect person but you’d have to strain yourself into knots to try to argue against her being the perfect role model at the perfect time in women’s athletics. It’ll take awhile, but read it.
6. The Squatter’s Real Estate Agent.
When satire is closer to the truth than what’s real, absurdity reigns. This hilarious video ain’t that far from the reality of life in sections of America in 2024.
Thanks for reading everybody and have a great rest of your weekend.
Enjoy Solar Eclipse Day.
Have a suggestion for The Sunday Six? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.