The 1999 USWNT World Cup win was a pivotal time for women’s sports. Caitlin Clark has sparked another monumental moment.
A year and a half ago, a vast majority of Americans had no idea who she was, an athletic young woman tucked away in a Midwestern university town, known to women’s college basketball fans but otherwise hidden from the gaze of the national media.
Now Caitlin Clark is the most popular athlete in the nation, the driving force behind the greatest days in the history of women’s sports, America’s girl next door all grown up and the personification of everything the country was hoping Title IX might give us.
Grandmothers shopping in the produce section know her name. So do boys on the driveway who yell it out after swishing a long jumper. TV ratings that would have been unimaginable several months ago are now the norm; no one scoffed when women’s basketball easily outperformed the men during this year’s NCAA tournaments. It simply made sense, because of her.
The country’s biggest basketball arenas sell out within hours when she’s coming to town. It happened in college, now it’s happening in the pros. Disney+ has decided to air its first live sporting event ever, her first WNBA regular-season game Tuesday night, Indiana at Connecticut. Her No. 22 jersey flies off the virtual shelves, worn by thousands of girls, and probably thousands of boys as well, all of whom have fathers and grandfathers who never would have put on a woman’s sports jersey, ever, no way, no how.
It’s truly remarkable, this utter fascination with a female athlete in a team sport. When has something like this ever happened? Have we seen anything like this?
A quarter-century ago, yes. On July 10, 1999, a sun-splashed Saturday in Southern California, 90,185 fans filled the Rose Bowl, many of them dads and moms with their daughters, to watch the U.S. women’s national soccer team defeat China in penalty kicks in the Women’s World Cup final. If you were alive then, you probably remember where you were when Brandi Chastain scored the game-winner, then ripped off her shirt and whipped it over her head. Lucky me, I was in the press box, covering every second of it.
Like Clark, the stars of that team became household names that summer. They appeared in snappy TV commercials and were adored by the national news media. After their win, Chastain and her teammates appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, People and Sports Illustrated in the same week, the first and only time that has ever happened for any story.
To me, the 22-year-old Clark is the individualized version of that team. It was crystal clear in the summer of 1999, and it’s crystal clear now, that the nation has fallen in love with what it has created due to Title IX, the 1972 law that opened the floodgates for girls and women to play sports.
WNBA keeps Caitlin Clark in national spotlight
But the paths of the ‘99ers and Clark do diverge. Not long after the buzz and TV interviews subsided that summer, the USWNT largely disappeared, only to reappear in September 2000 at the Summer Olympic Games in Australia, where they won the silver medal. There were some friendlies and tournaments, to be sure, and plenty of newspaper stories, Olympic previews and honors, including the Sports Illustrated Sportswomen of the Year cover, but most significantly, there was no professional league, not yet. That wasn’t coming until 2001.