Caitlin Clark and Iowa find peace in the process

ON A COLD, snowy Monday night in January, Caitlin Clark walked into a dimly lit restaurant in Iowa City and looked around the room for her parents. They smiled from a back table and waved her over. It was her 22nd birthday. Three teammates and the head Iowa Hawkeyes manager were with her, and soon everyone settled in and stories started to fly — senior year energy, still in college and nostalgic for it, too.

That meant, of course, tales of The Great Croatian Booze Cruise.

In summer 2023, as a reward for their Final Four season, the Iowa coaches arranged a boondoggle of an international preseason run through Italy and Croatia, grown-ass women, pockets thick with NIL money to burn. They saw places they’d never seen, spoke strange languages and walked narrow cobblestone streets. “One of the best nights was when we got bottles of wine and just sat on the rooftop of the hotel,” Caitlin said.

On the last free day of the trip, they proposed a vitally important mission to head manager Will McIntire, who now sat at the birthday table next to me.

They needed a yacht.

Like a real one, the kind of boat where Pat Riley and Jay-Z might be drinking mojitos on a summer Sunday. So McIntire found himself with the hotel concierge looking at photographs of boats. He asked Caitlin about the price of one that looked perfect.

“Book it right now,” she said.

They climbed aboard to find a stocked bar and an eager crew. The captain motored them out to nearby caves off the coast of Dubrovnik where the players could snorkel and float on their backs and stare up at the towering sky. They held their breath and swam into caves. They looked out for one another underwater. When stories of the Caitlin Clark Hawkeyes are told years from now, fans will remember logo 3s, blowout wins and the worldwide circus of attention, but players on the team will remember a glorious preseason yacht day on crystal blue waters, a time when they were young, strong and queens of all they beheld. They’ll talk about the color and clarity of the sea. A color that doesn’t exist in Iowa. Or didn’t until Caitlin Clark came along.

The Booze Cruise lived up to its name. After the stress of a Final Four run and the sudden rise of Caitlin’s star, it was a chance to be a team and have nobody care and to care about nobody else. Many of their coaches didn’t even find out about the yacht until the team got home.

“It was just what we needed,” McIntire said at the birthday dinner table. It was the kind of night parents dream of having with their grown children. Often three conversations were going at once. Caitlin’s dad, Brent, was telling McIntire about the wild screams and curses that come from their basement when one of their two sons is playing Fortnite.

“You should hear her play Fortnite,” McIntire said, pointing to Caitlin.

“Is she good?” Brent asked.

“No,” he laughed.

Caitlin told a story about her freshman year roommate almost burning the dorm down trying to make mac and cheese without water. She and Kate Martin told one about both of them oversleeping the bus at an away game — they awoke to both their phones ringing and someone knocking on the door as they made eye contact and shouted “S—!” in unison.

There was one about Caitlin in full conspiracy-theory rage, too, convinced that Ohio State had falsified her COVID-19 test result to keep her out of a game.

“This is rigged!” she told her mom on the phone. “They’re trying to hold me out!”

Anne took over the narration.

“Call the AD!” she said, imitating her daughter.

“I did not say that!” Caitlin said.

There was the time Caitlin needed to pass a COVID-19 test for games in Mexico. She showed up in the practice gym, throwing her mask on the ground while waving her phone and crowing, “I’m negative, bitches!” … until one of her teammates looked at the email and realized Caitlin had read it wrong, so she quickly grabbed her mask and bolted. As the stories flew, Caitlin smiled, loving to hear her teammates, happy to be with them.

We raised glasses again and again, and her dad beamed. Her mom kept thanking her teammates for taking such good care of her. They toasted to Caitlin, to CC, to 22 and to Deuce-Deuce. The waitress brought over a framed collage she had made, along with a note thanking Caitlin for inspiring “girl power.”

Caitlin’s mom made a final toast.

“Happy birthday,” she said.

“Happy birthday, Caitlin,” Kate Martin said, turning to her left and asking her, “What was the best thing that happened in Year 21?”

Caitlin thought about it for a second.

“Final Four,” she said.

Everyone clinked their glasses.

“Not even the booze cruise?” one of them asked.

They all laughed.

“Booze cruise!” everyone shouted.

MY INTRODUCTION TO Caitlin Clark’s world began in September over breakfast with Hawkeyes associate head coach Jan Jensen, who grew up on an Iowa farm before building a basketball legend of her own.

We met at an old-guard Jewish deli while Jensen was on a brief Los Angeles recruiting trip, flying in from Alaska that morning and flying back home that night. We ogled the cake case with the towering meringue pompadours but settled on something healthy, along with about a million refills of coffee. Jensen held a cup in her hands and summed up the challenge now of being Caitlin Clark.

“She’s figuring out how to really live with getting what she’s always wanted,” she said.

Jensen smiled before she continued.

“She wants to be the greatest that ever was.”

She pointed at me as if to underline her meaning.

“I believe that in my heart,” she said.

Jensen averaged 66 points a game in high school in the days when girls played 6-on-6. She is in Iowa’s girls high school basketball Hall of Fame. Her grandmother, Dorcas Andersen Randolph, who went by “Lottie” because she scored a lot of points, is too. Jensen still has her uniform. She sees Caitlin standing on the shoulders of generations of women like Lottie.

She also understands Caitlin is standing on no one’s shoulders.

“She’s uncensored,” Jensen said. “So many times women have to be censored.”

Jensen leaned across the table again.

“There is something in her,” she said. “Unapologetic.”

To Jensen, Caitlin seems immortal; young, talented, dedicated, rich, famous and on the rise.

“She’s 21,” she said.

A magic age, her confidence and talent startling to older people like me and Jensen.

“Don’t ever let anyone steal that from her,” Jensen said. “Protecting that is the coach’s job.”

Jensen spoke with pride of Caitlin’s 15 national awards, but she also said she is so talented, and driven, that she sometimes struggles to trust her teammates. This would be the work of this season and the epic battle of Caitlin’s athletic life. She sees things other people do not see, including her teammates. She imagines what other people even in her close orbit cannot imagine, has achieved what none of them have achieved and has done so because she listens to the singular voice in her head and her heart. She must protect that and nurture it. At the same time, she is learning that her power grows exponentially when it lives in concert with other people. A great team multiplies her. A bad team diminishes her. The trust her coaches ask her to have in her teammates, especially new ones, comes with great personal risk. Believing in her coaches requires faith and courage. For their part, the Iowa coaches know that they are holding a rare diamond and are constantly reminding themselves their job is to polish, not to ask her to cut to their precise specifications. It’s an effort, possession by possession, game by game, practice by practice, to meld two truths, to find the right balance, to elevate.

“It’s a work in progress,” Jensen said.

After last season’s run to the NCAA title game, the Hawkeyes lost their star center, Monika Czinano, who’s now playing pro ball in Hungary. She started every game Caitlin had ever played except one, and her dominance in the post taught Caitlin how successful teammates created space and opportunities at other spots on the floor. She still talks to Monika. Her trust in Monika’s replacements is the Hawkeyes’ most fragile place this year and will say a lot about whether this team can return to the Final Four.

“That’s gonna be the struggle for her,” Jensen said.

This idea would, in the coming five months, create two narratives for me, one public, one private, one about a superstar standing on center stage surrounded by an ever-growing mania, and another about a young woman trying to find herself, trying to decide how and who she wanted to be, in the center of that madness.

The waitress warmed up our coffee.

Jensen said she’d introduce me to Caitlin as soon as there was time in her schedule. Then she slipped out of our booth and headed out for a scouting visit at a nearby high school. I had a meeting with Priscilla Presley for another project later that day across town. We talked about life in the fishbowl with Elvis. She told me about how only a handful of memories remained hers alone even all these years later. I thought about Caitlin somewhere 30,000 feet in the air on a plane home from New York City after she received her final award of the 2023 season.

THIS IS A STORY about being 21. Do you remember turning 21?

At 18 you feel immortal but just three years later, a crack has opened in that immortality. You feel the gap between ambitions held and realized. You’re aware that wanting things badly enough won’t always be enough. You guard against bad energy and thoughts and hold fast to every ounce of confidence. That’s when life really begins.

The size of Caitlin Clark’s stage and the scale of her dreams and the reach of her talent leave little margin for error. She is chasing being the best of all time, which is an isolating thing. She isn’t scared to voice her ambitions even when they separate her from the people she loves. Her teammates dream of merely making a WNBA roster. Kate Martin did the math for me one evening. There are 12 teams. Each team has 12 roster spots. College basketball might be a bigger public stage than the professional league, but it is much easier. The normal dream of a 21-year-old women’s college basketball player, then, is the nearly impossible task of finding just one of 144 spots on a WNBA team, which has nothing to do with normal. A lofty dream might be to win one national award, not 15. When Caitlin gave her Associated Press Player of the Year trophy to her parents, her mom looked inside and gasped — some of the metal on the inside was already peeling and rusting.

“What happened?” she asked Caitlin.

Caitlin shrugged sheepishly.

“The managers got it,” she said.

It turns out the trophy, her mom said with a shake of the head, holds two beers. (Actually, the managers fact-checked — it’s two hard seltzers.) Caitlin is grateful for the awards but got tired of traveling around to get them, not because she didn’t appreciate the attention but because she seemed to sense that her survival and continued success would depend in part on her closing the book on last season. The past is dangerous to an ambitious 21-year-old. It was a struggle to get her on the plane to New York City to accept the AAU’s prestigious Sullivan Award. She asked whether it couldn’t simply be mailed to her instead. In the end, she and her family had 12 hours in the city so she wouldn’t miss any class. Michael Jordan talks about this — the speed at which things come at you, the way, when you look back, it becomes hard to remember what happened where and when. That’s Caitlin Clark’s world right now, and inside she feels both like a superstar and like the little girl begging her father to expand the driveway concrete so she’d have a full 3-point line to shoot from. She references her childhood a lot in public, revealing comments hiding in the plain sight of news conferences and one-on-one interviews.

“I feel like I was just that little girl playing outside with my brother,” she says.

The Clarks landed in New York and went straight to their hotel. Thirty minutes later, Caitlin hit the lobby dressed for the show. She signed autographs, posed for pictures, received the Sullivan Award, took more pictures, gave a speech and took more pictures. The family had just a few hours to sleep before heading to the airport for the flight home. But it was her first trip to New York City, and Caitlin said she wanted to see Times Square and get a slice of pizza. They went out and took a photograph, everyone together, then watched as Caitlin ordered a pepperoni slice, which arrived greasy on a stack of cheap paper plates. She folded it like a veteran. In the morning, they flew home. Caitlin rode with her headphones on. She likes Luke Combs. Turned up. Hearts on fire and crazy dreams. The next day she’d be at morning practice and then take her usual seat in Professor Walsh’s product and pricing class.

IN MID-OCTOBER, I got to Iowa City in time for the second practice of the year. I ran into head coach Lisa Bluder in the elevator down to the Carver-Hawkeye practice gym, and she laughed about how two fans from Indiana just showed up at the first practice and were walking onto the court taking selfies. Bluder had to stop practice and politely ask, you know, what the hell? They explained they had traveled far to see Caitlin Clark in person.

At 8 a.m., practice began, and almost immediately Caitlin was vibrating with anger at the referees, who were actually team managers with whistles. The whole team looked out of sorts — “little sh–s,” one of their assistants called them during a water break — and Caitlin fought her temper as several of her young teammates made mistakes. The main object of her scorn was a sophomore named Addison O’Grady, No. 44, who had become a bit of a punching bag. And all the while she raged at what she thought was the terrible job being done calling fouls and traveling.

“Stop letting him ref!” she barked to Jensen about a manager on the baseline. “He’s not calling anything!”

She jacked up a 3.

“I don’t love that 3,” Bluder told her. “You were in range, no doubt. But you were not in rhythm and were contested.”

Now Caitlin started talking to herself. What is the offense right now? This is a pretty regular thing, Caitlin Clark talking to Caitlin Clark, scolding her, cursing her, complaining to her, because who else could understand?

“Call screens,” she muttered.

“We must call screens,” Bluder yelled. “Somebody’s gonna get hurt. Somebody’s gonna get rocked.”

Then Caitlin touched her leg gingerly, which set off a chain reaction of anxiety and hushed attention. She took herself out of an end-of-game drill to rest it. Then, unable to resist, ended up in the drill anyway.

At the end of practice, Bluder described the long road awaiting them if they wanted a return to the Final Four. The promised land, she called it. Everyone on the team knows that Caitlin has given all of them a challenge, yes, but also a gift. An opportunity to breathe rare air. Caitlin’s best requires their best, and if they give it, they might just be able to beat anyone.

“Caitlin’s got a hell of a lot of pressure,” Bluder told them. “I get it.”

But it was more than that.

“We are her,” she said.