At lunch the other day I asked my friend Dave, who is knowledgeable about the game of basketball, what he thought of Caitlin Clark. He had his criticisms: she doesn’t like to shoot once she gets inside the 3-point line, and she doesn’t play defense. But he was impressed by her passing, and the way she filled arenas that had previously been practically empty. Jordan, he said, couldn’t even take credit for that, as people watched the NBA before his arrival on the scene.
And Dave had asked himself if anyone else in sport had ever done that, and he thought of one person: Mia Hamm. And she did it in a sport that was so unpopular in America that no one paid much attention when it was played by men.
Now, I didn’t hear or read all the commentary about the phenomenon of Clark, yet what I did hear and read didn’t include any mention of Hamm. The human tendency is to believe that one’s age is exceptional – it’s why athletes are continually given the label GOAT – and the conviction is infinitely aided by an ignorance of history. Today, when we are bombarded with so much news and information, it’s easier than ever to lose sight of the past, and think that our times are unprecedented. When in fact they’re simply self-absorbed.
It would have been nice, of course, to have been in the path of the yesterday’s eclipse. In the morning, as I saw people gathering in towns along the way, I thought it would have been even nicer to have the shared experience. That sentiment changed as the eclipse occurred and my TV roared with the shouts and cheers and applause of the observers. Their response seemed inappropriate to the event, which, in my mind at least, called for an awed and reverential hush. In 1969 a magazine, Time perhaps, asked a number of famous writers what the first man on the moon should say. Vladimir Nabokov replied: “I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack.”
A while back, we had dinner with friends who were heading to Montreal to visit their daughter, who had married a Canadian. Hania asked if the couple were thinking about returning to the States at some point (they had met in Miami). Vivian said it wasn’t likely; now that their children were both in school, they liked the safety that Canada afforded.
In the ’60s and ’70s, young Americans went to Canada to avoid the violence of a foreign war. Today, they go to Canada to avoid the violence of the United States.
I was on TV yesterday: https://www.c-span.org/video/?531964-1/falling-place