Caitlin Clark's rise parallels Tiger's early brilliance, from talent to skeptics

One sports career is in disheartening decline. The other is in exhilarating ascendance. Born in different centuries, Tiger Woods and Caitlin Clark are going in opposite directions.

Yet, while one is 26 years older than the other, they do have much in common. It’s as if their thrilling careers have been running on parallel tracks a generation apart.

How often over the past year and a half, since Clark’s rise to her immense popularity, has the rush to buy tickets to see her or national obsession to watch her on TV reminded us of someone else? And when we thought about it, and landed on who that someone might be, wasn’t it Tiger?

Woods, 48, brought millions of new fans to the game of golf. Clark, 22, is bringing millions of new fans to women’s basketball. In both cases, most of these fans never watched or cared about the sport before Woods or Clark arrived. Grandmothers who didn’t like golf started planning their Sundays around Woods’ final-round tee time. Grandfathers who usually scoffed at women’s sports began arranging their afternoons or evenings around tipoff of Clark’s Iowa or Indiana Fever games.

Quickly the masses realized these weren’t just terrific athletes, they were entertainers daring to pull off breathtaking shots (and in Clark’s case, breathtaking passes) that no one else in their sport could. And they were doing it in a way that particularly appealed to the newcomer to the sport: often set apart from the other athletes, appearing on the TV screen alone, so visually approachable.

The parallels don’t end there. While a good portion of the nation was falling in love with them, they both had their doubters: peers and pundits who couldn’t believe someone so young could rise to the top of their sport so quickly, make the leap from the amateur or college world to the professional ranks and succeed almost immediately.

Two-time U.S. Open champion and longtime golf commentator Curtis Strange was interviewing the 20-year-old Woods, playing as a professional for the first time in Milwaukee in August 1996, when Woods said he wanted “a victory” in his first pro tournament.

Strange smiled. “You’ll learn.”

In less than two months, Woods won his first PGA Tour event in Las Vegas. In April 1997, at 21, he won the Masters, the first of his 15 major titles.

“I said what the world was thinking at the time,” Strange said in a phone interview the other day. “I have to laugh now. I’m the first one to say, I was the one who learned. We all learned very quickly and we all admitted it.”

Woods had Strange; Clark had legendary WNBA veteran Diana Taurasi . At the 2024 Women’s Final Four, in which Clark led Iowa to its second consecutive NCAA final, losing to South Carolina, Taurasi looked ahead to Clark’s WNBA career and said, “Reality is coming.”

In the three and a half months since Taurasi said those words on ESPN, Clark has become one of the best players in the league while facing more defensive attention than any other WNBA player and playing the toughest schedule.

On Wednesday, she set the WNBA single-game assist record with 19. That’s not a rookie record. That’s the most assists in a game in league history. In that game, she scored or assisted on 66 points for Indiana, the most ever in a WNBA game. She is the WNBA leader in assists per game and is in the top 20 in the league in points, rebounds, blocks and steals per game.

After she and the Fever beat Taurasi’s Phoenix Mercury last month, Taurasi changed her tune.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “What Caitlin’s been able to do in her short career so far has just been nothing short of remarkable.”

It turns out reality was coming for the WNBA, not for Clark.

For Strange, who said he watches “every second” he can of Clark’s games, it’s easy to see what’s happening.

“Quickly the WNBA players are learning with Caitlin what we all learned with Tiger,” Strange said. “Both of them had tremendous resumes coming up but we all know the jump from amateur to professional is the largest leap of your life, so how was that person going to transform from that to that? In both cases they did it so well.”

Golf TV ratings soared for more than two decades with Woods and only now are falling back to earth. The story is similar for Clark — the soaring part, not the falling part — with women’s college and pro basketball, with a significant caveat: Men’s golf already was an established, mainstream sport pre-Tiger due to the popularity of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, among others. Woods then lifted it into the stratosphere. Women’s basketball has had great stars for decades but has been largely ignored by the male-dominated sports TV and media establishment. So this is all uncharted territory, led by Clark.

“It’s the whole package,” Strange said of Woods and Clark. “The TV camera likes them, which means we’re going to like them. It’s the smile, it’s the look, it’s the fitness, it’s the way they go about it. With Caitlin, she comes across mid-court and you can’t take your eyes off of her. It’s like going to a Mike Tyson fight, don’t go to the bathroom in the first round, you’re gonna miss the knockout. Don’t take your eyes off her when she crosses mid-court because it might go up from anywhere.”

Clark's maturity is obvious as she tries to grow her sport

There also are some noteworthy differences between Woods and Clark, especially as role models. Until very recently, Woods never wanted to sign autographs before or after a round of golf and generally disliked his time around the media.

Clark on the other hand wades into crowds of parents and children, many waving signs and wearing her No. 22 jersey, before and after every game, home and away, signing scores of autographs and posing for dozens of selfies.

And interviews? She is often available to the media two or three times a day on game days, and seems to enjoy the back-and-forth no matter how mundane it might be.

In this way, a young Tiger often acted his age, and the golf media accepted it. Clark never has acted her age. She’s 22 going on 40. Maybe 50. Her poise and maturity in the glare of the national spotlight has been so admirable, and women’s basketball and all women’s sports are better because of it.

Why does this matter? Clark sees herself as someone who wants to grow her sport, and talks constantly about how important it is to her to encourage young girls — and boys — to play basketball as well as other sports. If we had a dollar for every time she mentions “girls and boys,” well, we would have a lot of dollars by now.

But she does focus extensively on female athletes, which she knows is essential considering the massive gap between men’s and women’s sports in this country in terms of TV ratings, TV rights deals, player salaries and professional opportunities.

It is fitting that in April, she reposted this tweet from The Sporting News: “The final three games of Caitlin Clark’s career at Iowa all broke the record for most-watched women’s college basketball game (fire emoji)” The post on X, formerly Twitter, continued with these numbers: 12.3 million vs. LSU, 14.2 million vs. UConn and 18.7 million vs. South Carolina.

Clark added this underneath the tweet: “18.7 MILLION (fire emoji)”

That’s the viewership total that beat the men’s NCAA final by nearly 4 million, an unthinkable achievement until Clark arrived on the scene.

As a Black man in a lily-white, exclusive, country-club sport, Woods largely preferred to not speak out on societal and cultural issues. Early on, a 1996 Nike ad about him did make waves: "There are still golf courses in the United States that I cannot play because of the color of my skin,” it said, but not long after it appeared, Woods decided to avoid most controversial topics for the length of his time at the top of the game.

It was of course his right to do that, but the result, all these years later, is illuminating. The diversity many golf leaders hoped Tiger would produce has failed to materialize. It’s obvious any time you turn on the TV and watch who’s playing on the PGA and LPGA tours.

In stark contrast, change did occur in the women’s game as talented young South Koreans flocked to the LPGA Tour after countrywoman Se Ri Pak’s 1998 U.S. Open victory. Woods never had such coattails.

Of course there are many barriers to entry in American golf, including how difficult the game can be to learn, how much it costs and how far golf courses are from diverse neighborhoods, but one wonders what might have been had Woods championed diversity from the get-go the way Clark has embraced Title IX’s message of inclusion for girls and women in sports.

With Clark, there’s no need to wonder. Even though she’s only 22, we know how much she cares about being a role model. She said she never missed a game in college because she felt a responsibility to play for the fans who were coming just to see her.

So we can be pretty sure what youth sports will look like in the near future. Thousands of kids hooping it up, many of them girls new to sports. And what will they be doing? Racing down the court in transition, passing behind their backs and launching 3’s from the logo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Caitlin Clark's rise parallels Tiger's early brilliance, from talent to skeptics