Caitlin Clark is a great distraction. At a time when many things seem to be going off the rails, the girl next door from West Des Moines has Iowans of all stripes cheering as she turns women’s basketball into a mass market event.

I can’t remember experiencing so much pure sports joy since 1961, when New York Yankees Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were chasing Babe Ruth’s single season record of 60 home runs.

The Mick was my earliest sports hero. My boyhood chum, Iowa Softball Hall of Fame coach  Bob Best, was a Yankees fan, and I became one, too. As cartoonist Frank Miller used to say, “It isn’t an official World Series” without the Yankees, who won nine titles in 12 years when we were growing up.

The Yankees demolished the Cincinnati Reds in the 1961 World Series, but the real focus that year was Ruth’s record. Mantle was eventually sidelined by an injury and a bad injection from a doctor, who was later convicted of malpractice. Maris later confessed the pressure caused him to smoke too much and said his hair fell out in clumps.

During the season’s last game, Maris hit his 61st dinger to claim the record – marked with an asterisk because teams played fewer games in 1927 when Ruth was crushing the ball.

Like today, sports in the 1960s were a distraction from weighty problems, including the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, civil rights battles, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Decades later, we know what the pressure did to athletes like Mantle and Maris, and it wasn’t pretty. Maris died of lung cancer at age 51. Alcoholism and early male deaths ran in Mantle’s family, and before he died in 1995 at the age of 63, he said he would have taken better care of his body if he’d known he would live so long.

That’s part of what I find so fascinating about Caitlin Clark – the ease with which she wears her fame. The only Iowa athlete who came close was Nile Kinnick, who was 21 when he won the Heisman Trophy in 1939. He died in 1943.

At 22, Clark is the embodiment of “Iowa nice,” masterfully ignoring jealous critics. 

Last fall, at the start of her senior year, we all knew her Iowa Hawkeye team was special. And even after a No. 2 finish in the national title game and being selected first in this year’s draft by the Women’s National Basketball Association, I thought it would be a couple more years before Clark grew into her new role in the WNBA. 

But after barely two months of dazzling floor play with the Indiana Fever, she’s attracted even wider attention. Indiana was in the WNBA cellar each of the past four years; today, midway through the season, Clark’s Fever are in the middle of the pack and rising.

The whole country is watching.

Why else would ABC TV broadcast the Fever’s Wednesday-morning, July 10 game against Washington? And who else could fill up Francie’s Bar and Grill, a sports bar just off Fleur Drive across from the Wakonda Club, at 11 a.m.? Maybe the British Open on a Saturday or a Sunday morning, but not on a Wednesday. 

Clark’s accomplishments are off the charts. Before she scored her first WNBA basket, she cut a $28 million deal with Nike; because of “the Clark effect” – her ability to attract and engage fans – she’s been unofficially proclaimed the youngest-ever GOAT (sports speak for “Greatest Of All Time”).

The same Wednesday that Francie’s hosted a watch party for the Fever’s 11 a.m. tipoff, Clark received two ESPY Awards for her college play from the folks who invented TV sports networks. Among the 20 athletes receiving awards that night, only one other received twin ESPYs: WNBA star A’ja Wilson for the Las Vegas Aces.

Wilson’s awards set a new goal for Clark, one that will be pure joy for fans to follow in 2025.