The Tacklebox Syndrome and Other Wisdom

I guess I’m getting older, but some stuff in popular culture baffles me at the moment. One example is the ongoing spoon-feed advocacy of Caitlin Clark as the greatest college basketball player of all time. Give me a freaking break. You’re telling me she’s better than “Pistol” Pete Maravich?

Let’s be honest, if Caitlin Clark played men’s basketball she would probably be average at best. Can she beat me? Sure, I suck. You know why she doesn’t play men’s basketball? Because she’d likely get killed. Oh sure, she’d probably nail a bunch of three pointers, but she’d get worked in all other areas of physical competition. That’s why we have men’s and women’s sports.

It’s my opinion that men are, more often than not, much larger than women. Not just larger, but bigger, studier, built to take a beating. It’s nature. It’s the same reason why there isn’t any type of viable women’s American football. Just like 99.9% of the rest of us, women are not built to play football on the gridiron.

I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of misogynist. I believe that women are actually a little more than equal to men in almost all areas. I’ll have to post my thoughts about the term “Pick Me Girl.”

It really surprises me that people have the audacity to compare men and women basketball on such an apples to onions basis. You have to compare players against the type of competition they play against or, in other words, the overall context of the competitive atmosphere they play in. You wouldn’t say that a high school sports star or Special Olympics athlete scored more points than a college player. In my mind that would be like saying a college player broke NBA records. Sounds weird right, but to me it’s the same thing.

At the same time all this hoopla is going on, badass sailor Cole Brauer became the first American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world last week after finishing in Spain. Brauer, who is 29 years old, joined a group of fewer than 200 people in the world who have ever done that. Now, that’s a gosh darn feat! That’s something you can compare. She’s one of the best PEOPLE to ever do something that almost all PEOPLE could not do.

A quick Google search and you’ll realize that without exception every headline says Ms. Bauer is the first “American woman” to accomplish this feat. These are what you call qualifying statements. She’s not the first person. She’s apparently not even the first woman.

Which brings me back to Caitlin Clark. You can’t say that she is the highest scoring person in College Basketball history much less the greatest player. What’s funny is there doesn’t even seem to be any debate or critique of the strangeness of awarding records across different sports. That, really, is what this is. Run it in your mind… it doesn’t make any sense.

There seems to be this ongoing spurious comparison of a women’s college basketball player with a men’s college basketball player. When really, there should have to be a comparison of the individual women’s college basketball player with all of men’s college basketball. There seems to be no one that points out that Caitlin Clark has the most three-points for a woman in women’s college basketball. Could I also say that she has the record for an NBA or WNBA player? I mean she has the points in the game of basketball, right? That’s why you must include qualifying statements, or the whole point is wasted. They seem glaringly absent from the reporting on Ms. Clark and it’s actually a disservice to the real records she has or will break. Further it’s disrespectful to men’s college basketball and those record breakers in that sport.