Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, being careful around mirrors, and staying far away from ladders. Just in case. It's Friday, June thirteenth. Happy Friday the thirteenth to everybody except my Triskadeca folks. On today's show, we'll be skipping the need to know and jumping straight into my conversation with Howard Meggill, founder and editor of The Nine Newsletter and the Next Women's
Basketball Newsroom. He's got a new book coming out on June seventeenth, titled Becoming Caitlin Clark, The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar. So we talked about how we approached putting Clark's meteoric rise in context, the research he did to tell the history of women's basketball and dig up the stories of past women's soups grates, and his role guiding young writers in the evolving women's sports media landscape. It's all coming up right after this, joining
us now. He's the founder and editor of The Nine Newsletter and the Next Women's Basketball Newsroom, a staff writer for Baseball Prospectives, and senior contributor at Forbes dot com. He's published eight books, including his latest, Becoming Caitlin Clark, out June seventeenth. He'll take the occasional break from women's sports to down a Metz Cheese steak, egg roll, or witness the glory of the Philly fanatic hot dog Cannon. It's Howard Magdoll.
Hi, Howard, Hi, Sarah. Great to be with you always.
Yeah, great to have you. Congrats on the book. Before we get to that, I want to back up a little for our listeners that might not know your extensive history in the women's sports space. So can you give us a sort of condensed version of how you got here and how you've been such a big part of women's basketball and women's sports.
I appreciate that, you know, for me, it has been our journey over the course of my career. I've been in sports journalism about twenty years. And as soon as you get involved and you know this that you can see this gap between how men's sports and women's sports are covered, and you can't unsee it. And so the question is in my mind and has been what do
you do about it? And I've covered women's sports at legacy publications for many years, always felt like I was building in sand, and so how do you go about building the infrastructure that creates the everyday coverage Number one and number two creates opportunities for others to be doing the work as well. And so in twenty eighteen started
The Nine, which is a women's sports newsletter. It was three sports, then we're up to six now one per day, and then in twenty twenty the newsroom the next, which is a women's basketball twenty four seven, three sixty five newsroom where we have over one hundred reported pieces every single month on women's sports. We have a WNBA beat reporter or sometimes two on every single team. We try to cover with the fierce urgency that you can really
take for granted when it comes to men's sports. And so that's essentially the thumbnail version of how I'm here.
I love it, and it's so true, and it's something of course we think about a lot here at this show. The only daily podcast is what can we bring to people consistently and with regularity that they can't find anywhere else, so that they can keep up and connect all the
stories in different stars across the space. For those who want to subscribe The Nine is like title nine the Roman numerals IX, so if you're searching forward, it's the IX newsletter and then the next Women's basketball so you can subscribe to those and get all the goodness in your inbox. I want to talk really quickly about that, because it's great to have those goals. It's great to
want to create something. But did you actually want to be a boss, an entrepreneur, someone who had to handle a staff and manage payroll and like all those other things, because I don't. So I'm very impressed that you are helping so many other young reporters and journalists in the space, because that's a lot of extra work on top of the stuff you actually want to do, presumably, which is the journalism side.
I appreciate that question. You know.
What I have found is being able to create these opportunities and build this infra structure with permanence makes it worth doing those other things. I can't tell you that I love the process of taking on payroll by hand every single month, but absolutely to be able to reward the folks who are doing it is also really significant to me. And being a mentor in this space is
something that's really important to me. So there's enough that I love out of it that, Yes, the place where I feel most at home is in a pressure room or sitting in a one on one interview, but being able to do those things as well important in something that I've come to really find joy in.
What's the toughest part about managing folks, especially folks that they're maybe in one of their first gigs learning the ropes as journalists.
The most difficult? Then? That's hard to say.
You know, everyone comes with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, and it's sort of identifying what are the best ways that I can support a young journalist, you know, as she makes your way forward in this work. So I wouldn't say that there's one thing that stands out most of all. You know, they're different challenges for different people, But the joy of seeing somebody figure it out is my favorite thing. I may enjoy that more than doing the work itself.
Honestly, Oh, that's amazing. That's probably why you're in the position that you're in. That's that's a really good quality to have to care so much about watching other people as they rise. I find what's interesting to me moving across different spaces is even at ESPN, at different spaces at ESPN, how the newsroom, whether that was a radio or a TV or a written kind of newsroom operated differently, And I wonder for you how that works. You've got sort of whatever you make and create is the rules
for how you operate. But then you're working with journalists who might have jobs at other places. You're working with folks who maybe have never worked in an official journalistic
capacity anywhere. What do you tell them about how to handle themselves in the women's sports space, particularly as it changes so much, because it went from sort of pay your own way, show up if you care about it, sometimes too sick a phantic coverage because you're trying to make sure you connect with the athletes and continue to get access to Now where there's an expectation to really be professional in the space and to potentially be able
to and have access to ask tougher questions. How do you help them adjust to that?
There's no simple answer to that, but the way you framed it is exactly right. I mean reflects obviously the work that you do in this space all the time. Right, there's a baseline we have to set up professionalism of an understanding of you are there to cover and a lot of people come from and this is not a criticism from a place of we love the sport. We
care about the sport. You may even have fandom that you bring into it, and we check that at the door and we say, look, this is what we need to do, and you do it for not just the reasons of being able to maintain that distance, to be able to cover, so that our audience understands we are you can trust.
Because we are here to inform.
And ultimately our relationship is with the reader, the viewer, the listener in all these cases, but also so that there is that space to allow a writer to be critical when necessary, not critical in a way that you cannot look that person in the eye when you see her the next day at practice, but to make sure that you are telling the truth about what's happening. And I think we've found a lot of success with that.
Being able to provide people the access to do the work is something that is of course a fight in and of itself sometimes but critical part of making sure that people are there, people are showing up. And then the flip side of that is is that the people who we have covered through the years. Understand we will be there. We will be there when they're winning, we
will be there when they're not. We covered the Indiana fever when they were five and thirty one, no less than we cover the Indiana fever today.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a big part of this space in general, is how are teams and leagues and pr people and comms folks adjusting to the new normal, and in some cases, I think not always that great. I was talking to a local sports person who said that their access to the women's teams in their city is significantly less than the men's that they
are trying to give them more coverage. But whether it's bandwidth resources that you know, not long tenures of the folks working there who don't have relationships in the city the same way, or whether it's the athletes themselves who
are rightfully gunchy about some of the coverage. How have you seen the players in the w change over the last couple of years, Because I do think that they have a good reason to wonder about some of the reporters parachuting in for the first time and asking dumb questions, But they also need to be ready to make the transition from fan like reporters to higher level journalists asking tougher questions that are fair.
I think it's less binary than this. I think you've identified a lot of critical parts of the issue that we see right now, and it's severalfold. And one is that not all teams and not all leads have come to the conclusion we don't need to credential literally everyone, whether or not they're.
Doing the work.
And as a result, players are not going to necessarily know whether somebody is parachuting in without a lot of information, somebody is coming to cover, or somebody is there in a fan capacity but credentialed as if they are media. And when you don't know where the next question is coming from, I don't just mean physically, but I just mean from what perspective you can meet unshy as a result. And so there's a lot of work that needs to
be done on multiple levels. Right The media needs to come in an informed way and that needs to happen. Needs to be work at the team and lead level to understand who ought to be in those spaces, and then for players, you know there's an information and understanding of who are the people as individuals who are covering me rather than the media as a monolith, I mean
those of us. And you've been in these rooms too, where you just you want to bang your head against the wall when you're a question from another quote unquote media member. And unfortunately even it's even binary hpray area. It's not old media versus new media. It's not print versus digital. You know, there's it's always complishing.
Case by case really yeah, And I think like one of the things that stood out to me was talking to a veteran player who said, it's as simple as being able to tell by someone's question that they don't know that they were just traded this year, or they used to be an MVP, or they've won a title before, and I think.
Their name is pronounce right. I mean, there's a lot of basics.
Yeah, And I think a lot of that though, is also like there's a real fear and I've been there of walking into male professional league locker rooms and worrying what the other media will think about you if you haven't done your homework. And in the women's space, there are far too many media who stroll in having done zero homework and feel perfectly fine. Asking dumbshit questions that the people who do know recognize as dumb shit immediately.
On the other hand, I do think it's more helpful you are allowed to be mad about that, and where does that get you as a player if your reaction is frustration as opposed to can you choose instead, especially if someone seems to be coming with good intention and just maybe needs to learn how to better prep to help them through that. It's not their responsibility or their job, but for their response to be offering a little bit of grace, we'll probably serve them in the coverage of
them better than to get frustrated and shut down. So I think there's like a little bit of both sides, where again it's not the player's responsibility to do that, and also does it help them or the league or their team to essentially be mad and not do media anymore because they want everybody to show up and ask better questions, you know, like what's the end goal? The end goal is more coverage, better coverage, you know, and teaching those people with the dumb shit questions.
I think it's important to note as well that we want to see places that haven't necessarily covered. The WNBA or room in sports in the past to cover it. But a lot of times that means that the editorial structure in place doesn't even have folks who are able to bring people along to do it the right way, and so they are forced to learn on the job. It's something that I'm really conscious of at the next where we're trying to build people up to the point
that for those who stay with us, that's amazing. And for the people who end up at a lot of other places and they have they're coming in with the training to be able to do it the right way, but that type of modeling is not there in the way that it is for a lot of men's sports, just because the structures have not covered it before. So I just think it's significant, and I, you know, I just wanted to mention it as well.
Yeah, no, I agree, And like I think that's why in the end, everybody has allowed their feelings. But what ends up getting us to the best place, and that's a little bit of grace on both sides, right and understanding that some of those people got assigned to you an hour before drove out. They're trying to do their best and when you help them, the coverage is better than when you stonewall because you're frustrated. And we talked to athletes about that too, and how they're ready for
the fair and tough questions. They just want them to be well researched, which I understand. Let's talk about the book, because you've written a number of books. Why, Caitlin Clark? Why right now?
It's several years in the making, to be frank, And it goes back to even just seeing her as an initial phenomenon and seeing an understanding that as she blew up and I mean that before she blew up in an audience sens so she just blew up as a player, which you could see right from the start, right from day one as a freshman at Iowa, there was this legacy clearly tied not just to the previous few years
at University of Iowa, but going back a century. And you know, I've had the privilege of covering and writing about Molly Kashmir, who was Molly bowlan machine dun Molly, dating back to the nineteen seventies in the WBL, and you just couldn't help but see those parallels right away. And so just the more I dug into it, the more it was just very clear to me this is
a multi generational story. And then the more she blew up, the more it was clear and obvious that there's a large audience out there who may not know why this is happening now. And I think that's what's really important. That's what drove me when I wrote Rare Jam, which is about effectively four generations of women's players in Minnesota and where that came from, and to see this history in Iowa, it goes back even further and there are
these direct links. You know, Jan Jensen is the lead assistant coaching Caitlin Clark, and her grandmother was a star in girls six on six basketball, not only in the nineteen twenties, but writing about it, and I had access to her journals in a way that no one had ever seen before writeing about it in ways the language parallels the way Caitlin talks about living as a basketball
player today. And so the more you see that, the more you just feel like, you know, Wow, this is a story that runs so much deeper than I'm going to be able to get to in one story or one podcast.
We got to take a quick break when we come back more with Howard mgdal hang tight. I loved the history that was in the book because it's Caitlin Clark has done a lot, but her story is still relatively short. So the idea that you connect that short story that's been broadcast on the highest and biggest stages alongside this
lengthy history. And you talk mostly about Iowa and how Iowa's had this incredible support for women's basketball dating back to even previous iterations of the sport, and you do compare it to other places and how it's different, And of course the part about Illinois is stuck with me, but it was uniform across many states. But this is the example you used from Illinois, you write, as historian
Scott Johnson Chronicle quote. Not long after the introduction of basketball as an athletic activity for high school girls, all levels of the educational hierarchy were engaged in a debate over its merits. As a simple playground game, girls basketball had prompted few objections. However, when girls started developing interscholastic programs that rivaled those of the boys, basketball quickly turned
into a nightmare for school administrators. While students and empathetic teachers push for more interschool play, school principles, and professional educators marshaled their resistance to what they perceived as the masculinization of the female athletic program. This scenario played itself out in practically every state during the early twentieth century. Now, this is not surprising to folks who have been in
the women's sports space. In fact, it feels weirdly reminiscent of some of the reactions to the w last year, for folks who hadn't watched before, who said, oh, this is mma. They're boxing out there, this is too physical, everyone's mean, they're targeting Caitlin, and we're all like, this
is basketball, bro, Like, why have you been watching? But the idea that girls playing is fine until people come to watch, or tickets get sold, or the stakes get high, or it becomes similar to the boys or surpasses the boys. And there were plenty of examples in early Iowa basketball that you cite where thousands of people are going to games, where there's a tiny town of just a couple hundred and two thousand people show up to celebrate when they win,
lining down the street. And what was the big takeaway for you of the waves of fighting that are required to push women's sport forward from the eighteen hundreds to the early nineteen hundreds and carrying on.
So this is a big takeaway for me from this book, but frankly, this is a big takeaway for me from Rare Gems. This is a big takeaway for me from covering women's sports with a historical lens, and that is that every time you see a gap between outcomes with men's and women's sports, you can always trace it back to process. And the thing that I think frustrates me the most is where I hear people mistake process for outcome, and to your point, and this is the most significant
part of it. Every time there's an elevation, every time there is growth, there is a backlash to what we're seeing. Look, we're seeing it in women's sports. We're seeing it, and we've seen it at every wave of feminism that we've had in this country throughout the world as well, you know, again and again and again a pushback. And so that for me is the big takeaway for people to understand that women were playing basketball as soon as there was basketball,
just the same as men were. So everything that we've seen for the EBB and flow and the fact that there is not a parallel rise in men's basketball and women's basketball is everything to do with efforts made to stop the progress of women's basketball.
Yeah, one thousand percent. I talk about that all the time, that if you don't understand the intention behind holding back women's sports, you will continue to blame the product. And the product has never been the problem. It has always been the infrastructure and the people around it who are trying to hold women back or keep women in a specific lane. And it's frustrating to see that ebb and flow and come back and repeat itself over the course
of time. We're currently fighting our way still in this massive moment of growth, but of course we look at some larger administration and other folks, the Trump administration, other folks looking to push us back into yet another eb What was the most surprising thing you learned about Caitlin in the process of writing this book, because you sort of tell these parallel stories of the history and then her history as well.
The most surprising thing to me is that she never had a moment of breaking. If that made sense, there was something and it made sense within the context of understanding that in a lot of ways she was born and raised to meet this moment. But she did not have a moment where her game failed her. She didn't have a moment where she wasn't able to handle what has been a gradually rising but clearly attention that she has been receiving dating back to her high school days
and even before that. You know, she's playing at seventh and eighth grade in these AAU tournaments in front of you know, people like Lisa Bluter, and at no point did she falter. And that is astonished.
So she is a robot.
I mean, it's astonishing, right, I mean, this is a twenty three year old woman, and I just think about myself at twenty three and what we are all prepared to handle, and for her to handle this hurricane around her that gets more and more intense, seemingly.
By the day.
And there was no moment where publicly she cracked. And that to me is amazing because she would be understandable, she would be human, she would be forgiven for having done so. But we haven't seen it, yeah at all.
You talk about the coverage and conversation around her in the book and on our show, we have struggled to both address the problems that result from some of the toxic discussion around her, and also embrace and acknowledge how conversation around the league itself has changed and grown as a result of her arrival. And I always describe her as the match that lit the bonfire. You needed this giant stack of sticks for that match to do anything, but the match also expedited the fire in a way
that we'd never seen before. And you write in the book the WNBA had existed as a safe space for marginalized people for nearly three decades because broader American culture so often ignored it. That trade off was felt in ways large and small that filled the league's players, coaches, executives,
in long tenured fans with ambivalence. So this feeling of we don't know how to feel about this growth because we love it, and it's also bringing with it a whole new kind of conversation that wasn't here before and frankly, is not welcome. Ultimately, I loved that you came to the conclusion that we have here, which is that you can't name one thing or one reason as to why Caitlin blew up the way she did. You can't name one thing or one reason as to why the reaction
to Caitlin blowing up became so problematic? Can you talk about some of the things that when writing this you really recognized about how Caitlin became such a for many people, black and white evil or good villain or hero sort of character or avatar in the league.
And I would be remiss not to point out, as a Rabbit listener that I am very appreciative of the way you guys frame this on a regular basis, as well as it relates to the question you asked. It is mind boggling to me that people are trying to come up with a single answer or to assign singular motivations to how people even ought to feel about it. And I spoke to players and coaches and gms all
around the lead. You know, I do that anyway in the day to day course of my work, but for this book, specifically in the idea that a player cannot simultaneously be thrilled that the media rights deal is going to be worth between eight and nine times what the last media rights deal is, but also to want to go out there and beat the hell out of her opponent, whether it's Kitlan or anybody else, it doesn't make sense. Both of these things are obviously significant motivations in a
professional athlete. You know, the idea that Caitlin is doing this now and breaking through now is very much a consequence of what we have seen in terms of growth of the lead in the years leading up to it. If we look at the number of games on national television when Kathy Engelbert took over as commissioner, compared to where we are now, it's exponentially larger.
When you look at the fact that.
There is shoulder programming around WNBA games, that was a thing, Oh my god, a WNBA pregame show. No, you couldn't imagine it in a million years. Now we see it at ESPN, we see it at ION and CBS it just last week. And you know, all of these things matter. We know, for instance, that when shoulder programming was built and there was cross promotion leading up to the twenty fifteen Women's World Cup, that is when the US women's national team in soccer broke through into the larger culture.
And so there are all of these elements that play apart. But yes, absolutely there is this awful, ugly undertone that reflects where the country is here in twenty twenty five. There are people who are new to the WNBA space who are fans, and there are people who have entered the WNBA space because it is part of broader culture and using this as an opportunity to attack women who
are overwhelmingly black women in the WNBA. And those two things are both true at the same time, and pretending one or the other doesn't exist is doing a disservice to the current moment that we're in.
Completely agree. I really liked what you had to say about DJ Carrington being assigned to guard Caitlin Clark and then afterwards being asked about her in a way that felt in congruous with the job she'd just been assigned. You wrote, was it difficult for Carrington to effusively praise Clark even as she fulfilled the obligation of her job to battle her fiercely on the court? Of course? Why
was that even her responsibility? And I think that's something that stands out to me is players can be grateful for the attention Caitlin brings and also be frustrated if that's the only thing they're asked about. I've heard of players in the league tell reporters, I'm happy to sit down with, you know, Kaitlin Clark questions, And maybe that's
going too far. And I can get why that's frustrating for the reporter, but also maybe if you don't say that, you sit down and you answer ten straight questions about another player and not yourself, and you ask, what are we getting at here? Are we really trying to uplift the league, spotlight other players, get everyone to watch more, or are we operating to idolize a single individual and keep her separate from the whole. And I think that's a job that's still happening now. I think that's a
conflict we're all still feeling. I got frustrated last year when I wanted to get excited about Caitlin, and if I did, I was accused of being quote unquote on a side of the larger thing. And then if I didn't cover her, then I was accused of being on the other side and actively working against her. So we're so sick of that. And I think it's gotten better this year, but maybe just because she's been injured, so there's been fewer opportunities for people to lose their shit
over stuff. That's just basketball. Has writing the book changed your coverage of Caitlin day to day at all?
No, not at all, which has been a delightful part of it. And it reflects the mission that we have over at the next which is to make sure that the type of coverage that Caitlin Clark deserves is the type of coverage that we need to see throughout the league. And the stars are going to get more coverage than the role players, but to make sure that everybody is being covered is something significant.
And this is a critical story.
I mean, to your point that you just made is very amusing to me to be in the middle of writing a book about Caitlin Clark and to say, oh wow, I feel like these people are going too far in terms of isolating focus on Caitlin Clark.
There's a very.
Strange moment to be in. But you know, again, it comes back to are we treating Caitlin Clark like she is the sum total and the only reason for anyone to pay attention.
To this league.
That's insane And we know this is and I know this is someone who's been privileged to cover this lead for over a decade, and so it's getting the opportunity to see she is growing an audience. I mean, listen, I wrote about this in the book, but one of the most satisfying things for me was at Caitlin Clark's pro debut.
Two point one million.
People also got to see Alssa Thomas put up a triple doll, which is for some reason normal for Lysa Thomas, but for you know, those of us were humans instead
of immortals. That's a crazy thing to conceive of. And so you know, there are all these ancillary effects, and for positive and for negative as well, right, and and so I do I think about someone like a Djna Carrington who had to work her way into this regular opportunity, somebody who had the privilege of covering dating back to college, and so what kind of player she was, you know
in championship teams. She is now at a moment where, yeah, like you said, simultaneously, she's going to get more opportunity, She's going to get more financial reward. The league is going to right size financially to where it needs to be, where it ought to have always been. But yeah, I could also see her being very tired of the tenth Caitlin Clark question and when it's when it's framed in poor in bad faith, then.
That's a whole other question.
For sure. You know, I actually wrote a coll thesis on Michael Jordan and his intersection with cable becoming global and global capitalism and how his arrival was as much about him being an unbelievable player, being charming, telegenic, all the other things, but also that the world was pivoting at this moment, at the right time for him to explode. And I think writing about Caitlin Clark in this moment
is that conversation. It's not just singling out one person, but it's this one person in this moment is having this impact. And you mentioned Molly Bolan earlier. There's a great espn. I think it's one of the nine for nine stories about her, and if you don't know about her, you would have your mind blown by the statistics and the ability. And she was Kaitlyn Clark, but she didn't end up like Caitlin Clark because she didn't arrive in
the same moment that Caitlyn did. And that's why I think the conversations about Caitlin and the moment that we're having in women's sports are so necessary and shouldn't be shy away away from because we're afraid of putting a spotlight in one player. But I wanted to just read this quickly. A biography in a program for a tournament in nineteen eighty three that Molly Bolan played in. Read three year pro a high school All American. Molly averaged fifty four point eight points per game and hit a
record high of eighty three points as a senior. Just an unbelievable score. Whatever you think Caitlin Clark is doing, she's not averaging fifty four point eight points per game. And there's a really incredible story around Molly having to try to sell calendars and other things to help promote her ability to play so she could keep playing. The end of her bio says she's working construction and Riverside,
And that was your point. That's what it meant to be Caitlin Clark in nineteen eighty three, is you're working construction in Riverside and then when you go hoop you get fifty plus points. And the difference between what it means to be great now and what it meant to be great then is something to celebrate. And when we can strip away all the bullshit around Caitlin. We can't celebrate it, which is I think what you're trying to
do with this book. Here's a whole bunch of context so that when I tell you about Caitlin you could enjoy it. Did you get to talk to Caitlin much for the book.
Yeah, And she understands that she is standing on the shoulders of the people who came before her, and she knows about stories like Molly's, and she knows.
About and there's pictures of them together.
That's right, that's right.
And to see that come full circle, I mean that moment you talked about. I've had the ability to talk to and cover Molly for many years, and we dedicate a significant portion of our coverage to the WBL and to those stories of that lead, which there is no WNBA without the WBL from nineteen seventy eight through nineteen eighty one. And we have a special section over at the next about it. And I say all that to say I knew Molly, I knew her story, I.
Know it well.
And yet I'm in the Iowa Women's Center researching for this book. I come across this clip as part of the molleyball and papers that are in there, and it just it hits you just to see that that after all this she's working as a house painter, what is the prime of her basketball career. And so yes, there there Again, I think there is a misunderstanding of the way in which most people are processing this Caitlin Clark moment.
Within the game of women's basketball, there is an understanding of a yes and mentality when it comes to it, you know, And so from that perspective, I think it was important that people understand, you know, we talk about all the time at the next but we want to live within the dray area that it's okay if the player you're going to cover goes, doesn't go for forty or has an offer or anything like that, that's okay. We're not telling the story of player axes amazing or player axes the worst.
It's here's what's.
Going on with player X right now, and so making sure that we're able to do that again, the broader context time is Caitlin Clark comes of age at a moment, the first moment that ESPN broadcasts all of the women's NCAA tournament, the entirety that doesn't happen until twenty twenty one. This comes at a moment where we are seeing understanding the gaps between the men's and women's Final four, right up to the point that the logo had to be changed.
It was the final four in the women's Final four, and the NCAA finally got around to, oh, yeah, we can actually call it the men's instead of making it obvious in our branding that women's is the other.
And speaking of.
Branding, March Madness branding was finally being used by the NCAA. What an owned goal for the NCAA say, we're going to not use that branding on our own women's basketball tournament. So all of which is to say, this is Caitlin's moment. Caitlin is the transcendent athlete who has taken advantage of this. I spent a lot of time thinking about my time covering Brianna Stewart, and if it had been Brianna Stuart
when this happened, she would have broken through. If it had been in twenty ten, it would have been maya more. If it had been in twenty oh four, it would have been Diana Taraji. And if it had been nineteen seventy eight, it would have been Molly Bowling.
I want to ask, there's a I don't know if competing is the right word, But there's another Caitlin Clark book from Christine Brennan coming on around the same time. Why are the covers basically identical? Can you explain to us is there some sort of like photo rights only using this particular game uniform ball position, because they're almost the same covers.
It's amusing to see, I know the truth that.
Is amusing the word you first thought of, or have you come around defining an amusing?
It is?
No, No, I like what I think it's funny to be honest with you. No, I just I haven't had any contact. You know, Christine, someone who I've certainly been in contact with in the past, and you know I would anybody and everyone Locke covering women's basketball. There needs to be more. I'm not of the belief there needs to be one book anymore than we want to have
one reporter who is covering at any given time. But no, it's as I understand it, it's a coincidence, but I haven't been able to speak to that specifically.
Well, we're excited for everybody to get to read it. June seventeenth is the date that the book comes out. Howard, Thank you so much, not just for coming on, but for all you've done for the game and for furthering what we try to do here as well, which is how do we give everyone the stars, stake, stats and stories every single day to keep up with and care about women's sports. And you've been doing that for a long time.
Well, Sarah, thank you for everything you guys do.
Thanks so much to Howard for taking the time to chat. We got to take another quick break when we come back. What the fact that puts the discrepancy between WNBA and MNBA salaries in perspective? Welcome back slices. It's time for another What the fact? As folks who've been around the women's sports space for some time now, we've seen all sorts of gender pay gaps from soccer to tennis, to golf and more. Women and nonsense, male athletes always seem
to get the short end of the stick. This, of course, parallels the traditional labor market, where women still earn only eighty four cents for every dollar a man earns. Today, I want to talk about the pay gap in pro basketball. Claudia Golden, a labor economist, economic historian, and Harvard professor, wrote a guest essay in The New York Times last week laying out just how underpaid WNBA players are, and she brought the data and facts. Y'all, let's start with
one of those facts. The average MNBA player's salary, approximately ten million dollars in the twenty twenty five season, is eighty times the average WNBA players salary about one hundred and twenty seven thousand for the twenty twenty four campaign eighty times eight zero. And here's another from Golden quote. A key fact is that the NBA and WNBA resemble a joint venture in which the league's individual finances are
not transparent to the public. The NBA owns around half of the WNBA and helps a portion money between the two leagues. Last year, the NBA negotiated joint television contracts for the leagues, in which Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video agreed to pay the two leagues roughly seventy seven billion dollars for the right to show their games over eleven years. The gap in player salaries appears to reflect the highly unequal way that NBA owners divide the league's
revenue end quote. So Golden worked with the WNBA Players Association over the past year to dive into the relationship between player salaries and the revenue, viewership and attendance numbers in the MNBA and WNBA, using those numbers to decipher what a reasonable gap between the salaries might be. The most significant factor she looked at in each league's revenue is viewership, which is what makes big networks pay big
bucks to sell ads during games. From Golden's article quote, the average WNBA game recently drew about seventy seven percent of the eyeballs for the average NBA game. The gap in total eyeballs per player is much larger because the NBA has more games per season and longer games. Taking into account all of these differences shows that the WNBA attracts about thirty percent, or roughly one third as many
eyeballs per player as the NBA does. This ratio is a reasonable estimate of the actual relationship between WNBA and NBA broadcast revenue per player, and by extension, what WNBA players should receive in salary relative to NBA players end quote. Another important factor in the dollars and cents is attendance. So here's what Golden had to say about how butts in seats should affect money in pockets. Quote. In twenty twenty four, for example, the WNBA's total attendance was about
one tenth as large as the NBA's attendance. Adjusting for the fewer teams in the WNBA shows that it attracts about one quarter of the attendants per player in the NBA. All these numbers suggest that the average WNBA salary should be roughly one quarter to one third of the average NBA salary to achieve pay equity end quote. We've all known that WNBA players were not making enough of a percentage of revenue when compared to their MNBA counterparts, but
Golden has laid it out with facts and data. It should be one quarter to one third, not one eightieth what the guys are making.
Well.
Link to Golden's essay at our show notes so you can read it for yourself. Her concluding paragraph really hammers the point home she wrote. Quote, the world of women's professional basketball is ripe for an economic update that better reflects its influence and irresistibility, but it has not happened. Yet the people who run the NBA and WNBA are instead badly underpaying the women who enter tain and thrill us with their feats of athleticism. End quote. Yet again, y'all,
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We always love that your listing slices, but we want you to get in the game every day too, So here's our good game play of the day pre order Howard's book, we'll link to a site where you can snag your copy. In our show notes and we always love to hear from you, so hit us up on email good game at wondermedianetwork dot com or leave us a voicemail at eight seven two two o four fifty seventy and don't forget to subscribe, Rate and review. It's easy.
Watch the ultra runner who stopped to breastfeed three times and still one, rating ten out of ten. What Can't Women Do? Review? At the recent Ultratrail Snowdonia one hundred kilometer race in northern Wales, forty two year old runner and new mom Stephanie Case paused at three different times during the race to breastfeed her six month old daughter, and not only still finished, she placed first among female competitors. That's sixty two plus miles of running six months after
baby and balancing both roles at once with grace. Case told NPR of the photos of her mid race that went viral, they show quote an athlete being a mom at the same time, and those things not actually competing with one another. We don't have to lose ourselves in becoming a mom, and we can keep setting big goals for ourselves end quote. The course has thirteen hundred and twenty five feet of elevation gain, with runners traversing the tallest mountain in Wales and traveling rough and tough terrain.
Case stopped at checkpoints at twenty fifty and eighty kilometers to nurse her daughter, Pepper, and then jump right back into the race and the story somehow gets better. Case ran while on parental leave from her job working for the United Nations as a human rights lawyer per NPR quote. Running long distances helps Case cope with the stress of
working in a humanitarian crisis end quote. Case's experiences inspired her to found Free to Run, a nonprofit that empowers girls and young women in conflict areas through running and other outdoor activities. So if you want to show love to a woman holding it down for moms, for women over forty and human rights advocates, go check it out free toorun dot org and you can read the whole NPR article. We'll link to it in our show notes.
Now it's your turn, rate and review, y'all. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Good game, Howard, good game, Stephanie Case. You tech Nik from writing for hours and hours and hours on Deadline. I'm telling y'all write a book for yourself. You'll see. Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You could find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network, our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rudder. Our editors are Emily Rudder, Brittany Martinez, Grace Lynch, and Gianna Palmer. Our associate producer is Lucy Jones and I'm your host Sarah Spain