Caitlin Clark: The Making and Meaning of a Misunderstood Superstar takes readers outside of the basketball arena for a Skycam view of the shaping of one of the greatest athletes America has ever produced.
Author Teresa Mull, herself a former college basketball player, goes to where it all started: West Des Moines, Iowa, where she chronicles the people and places that influenced Caitlin Clark's rise from a regular Catholic Midwestern kid competing against her brothers in the backyard to a global sports icon.
Through interviews, research, and first-person accounts, Caitlin Clark: The Making and Meaning of a Misundertood Superstar offers the deepest exploration yet of how Clark, celebrity-athlete-turned-social-lightning-rod, is shaping not just the public's perception of women's sports, but our entire culture.
Mull shows how ever since she exploded on the national scene at the University of Iowa and then single-handedly lifted the WNBA from the margins of pro sports to the hottest ticket in town, Clark has been misused and misjudged and mistreated by her peers and the media. She explains how Clark has come to transform and transfix the world of sports. And she shows how Clark has herself been subject to the distorting pressures of celebrity.
The result is a fascinating account of who Caitlin Clark is, how she became an international phenomenon, and what it all means.