Dave Hannigan: Fever is growing around Caitlin Clark - but can women’s basketball handle the heat?

Caitlin Clark doesn’t play her first professional basketball match until next Tuesday but it’s not difficult to glimpse how she’s already changing the face of the sport in the US. Three hours before her Indiana Fever took on the Dallas Wings in a preseason run-out the other night, fans wearing her University of Iowa singlet were already lined up outside the venue. For a game that meant nothing. The upper deck of College Park Center, often empty and usually covered with tarp for competitive WNBA matches, was full, every ticket sold. Unheard of.

Within an hour of the Fever selecting Clark with the number one pick in the WNBA draft last month, her number 22 shirt sold out. Thirty-six of her 40 games in the coming campaign will be nationally televised; Nike just signed her to an endorsement deal, including a signature shoe, worth $28 million over eight years; and the Fever are going to pay her an annual salary of $76,535. The last, startling number has generated the most headlines. Clark’s record-setting, groundbreaking achievements at the collegiate level may have captured the American imagination but she’s entering a league where the highest-paid player earns $252,420 and she will remain on the rookie basic for her first four seasons.

Conscious that six teams have folded in its 27-year existence, the league adheres to a rigid salary structure and that financial prudence extends to transportation. Aside from during the playoffs, WNBA players always flew commercial rather than chartered flights across the country, a budgetary constraint that exerts a physical toll on tall athletes folded into economy seats for journeys up to 3,000 miles, at the end of which they must then play games.

When Clark touched down at Dallas-Fort Worth airport last week, greeted by television news crews, the stir caused by her presence in baggage claim immediately intensified the argument around personal security and how players travel to games. Last Tuesday, the WNBA announced it spend more than $12 million per season underwriting private planes for teams.

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That’s only one representation of the Clark effect. Aping what Sporting Kansas City did for the recent visit of Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, teams are already moving matches against the Fever to larger venues to cash in on her broader appeal. For some, this could mean flogging 17,000 rather than 6,000 tickets for games. The sound you hear is tills ringing.

With television audiences, broadcast rights deals and advertising set to spike, revenues are going to go way up. This may explain why so much coverage of her impending debut has been giddy and breathless. One male journalist, since reassigned, mortifyingly made a heart sign to her before asking a question at a recent press conference and the tone of some arriviste reporting has, at times, been a tad dismissive of how much hard work it has taken to keep the league alive this long. There was women’s basketball before Clark.

In the WNBA’s first quarter-of-a-century in existence, women’s professional soccer had three different iterations of a pro league, two of which failed spectacularly. The basketball equivalent endured through financial underpinning by the NBA and opting for slow and steady growth, paying players what they could afford rather than what they were worth, and even now has just 12 teams.

For all that, it has always boasted the best distaff ballers in the world – just none whose fame transcended sport the way Clark’s does. Inevitably, some have attempted to concoct drama in which a few of these older, more established stars are supposedly bristling at the fuss being made about her imminent arrival. They are not. They have, however, offered realistic takes on potential teething problems.

“There’s levels to this thing,” said the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi, entering her 20th season and acknowledged as the best shooter in WNBA history. “You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you’re going to be playing against some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time. Not saying her skills are not gonna translate, because when you’re great at what you do, you’re just gonna get better. But there is gonna be a transition period where you’re gonna have to give yourself some grace as a rookie.”

[ Dave Hannigan: Caitlin Clark ready to extend the boundaries of women’s basketball ]

Nobody doubts Clark will adjust to the faster-paced, more physical pro game. She poured in 21 points against the Dallas Wings. But there are concerns the WNBA might be ill-equipped for the obsessive interest surrounding her. The league’s streaming pass service experienced glitches on the opening night of preseason amid suspicions those in charge don’t quite grasp the enormity of what they have here. This is a woman poised to bring eyeballs to her sport in a way no athlete has managed since Tiger Woods turned every golf tournament into must-see TV, simultaneously transforming the earning power of all his peers.

If that’s enormous pressure to heap upon a 22-year-old, Clark has been one of the most famous athletes in the US for a while now and has never once looked like she struggles with the burden of recognition, or the increasingly ludicrous demands placed upon her by celebrity. When she turned up to watch the Indiana Pacers vs Milwaukee Bucks playoff recently, a woman asked her to sign an ultrasound photograph of her unborn baby. Almost immediately there was feverish online speculation about how much the autographed pic might be worth at auction.

Like everything she touches, its value is only going to go up.