Finally! Another Man Has Thoughts on Caitlin Clark…
(the man is Karl Marx)
In a 1948 article on Karl Marx for, of all places, Life magazine, a writer named Hubert Kay got a little poetic in his description of historical materialism:
“In the Marxian view, human history is like a river. From any given vantage point, a river looks much the same day after day. But actually it is constantly flowing and changing, crumbling its banks, widening and deepening its channel. The water seen one day is never the same as that seen the next. Some of it is constantly being evaporated and drawn up, to return as rain. From year to year these changes may be scarcely perceptible. But one day, when the banks are thoroughly weakened and the rains long and heavy, the river floods, bursts its banks, and may take a new course. This represents the dialectical part of Marx's famous theory of dialectical (or historical) materialism.”
In other words, people in history, like the water in a river, are flowing inexorably in the direction that has been carved for them. And yet there are moments of such sudden change — moments “when the banks are thoroughly weakened and the rains long and heavy” — that it does seem as if the water were completely remaking the river, as if history really does change direction. These moments are usually the result of gradual accumulation of the constant change that has been going on under the surface for years and years, but the people who emerge in these moments often seem like they are the ones who have caused the change themselves.
When you look, for example, at the history of something like the Civil Rights Movement, there are dozens and dozens of historical trends that pointed in that direction. Things like the Great Migration, the Cold War, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and a million other social trends all pointed to something like the Civil Rights Movement happening in the US when it did. And yet it tends to be remembered primarily as the result of specific famous leaders acting on history, rather than the other way around. In other words, there are people who emerge at moments of such rapid change that they seem to be the sole cause of social forces that are, in fact, way beyond their own power.
Caitlin Clark seems to be one of those people. Women’s basketball has been growing in popularity for years, for many structural reasons. The proverbial tipping point seems to have been inevitable in hindsight — Clark’s own draft class featured a bevy of exciting new stars. And yet, for a variety of reasons, both fair and unfair, good and bad, Clark has become the focal point. So when the league announces that teams will finally get chartered planes, Clark gets the credit; when the ratings go up, it’s deemed “the Clark effect”; when a bunch of people who don’t know shit about the WNBA start bloviating about it on TV, people blame Clark.
Basketball has seen this before. Michael Jordan is almost always cited to explain the globalization of the game in the 1990s. The decade before that, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came to symbolize national anxieties about race and class. All three of them were obviously swept up in larger social and economic forces, but to basketball fans they came to be almost synonymous with those forces by the end of their careers.
As a socialist, I’m not crazy about the way people latch onto individuals as the prime causes of historical trends. Such things replace historical materialism with a watered-down Great Man theory of history. But over time I’ve come to think of these things as inevitable. Most people relate to the world through other people. It is simply easier to understand things through the stories of individuals. This is true of EVERYTHING, from history to art to economics to religion, is made easier. And it is obviously true of sports. It is easy to understand the WNBA through the excitement around Caitlin Clark, even if that oversimplifies things.
Of course, that puts a degree of pressure and focus on Clark that is unfair, both to her and other people in the sport. Hence the resentment and ambivalence about her around the league, and mini-controversy over leaving a rookie off Team USA. And because of the weird role that women’s sports occupies in the current culture wars, she also has to deal with all kinds of bullshit that Jordan/Magic/Bird never had to deal with. But such is the cost of leadership…
In fact, this seems to me like a more sophisticated understanding of what “leadership” really is. A leader is not someone who bends history to his or her will. A leader is someone who happens to come along in a moment of crisis — at a moment when “the river floods, bursts its banks, and may take a new course” — and doesn’t get crushed by the mudslide.