DALLAS — One of the many charms of basketball is that it is a city game and a country game. Games are honed on net-less rims in urban parks and homemade backboards nailed to ancient barns. When the Iowa and LSU women play for the championship of a culturally homogenized and politically divided country Sunday, they will emerge from opposite ends of the sport’s landscape. It will be Midwest against South and East, country against city, mostly white against mostly Black—contrasts that could be combustible in so many places in America but not on a hardwood floor. There, it will just be game against game.
At times, Iowa born-and-raised Caitlin Clark will be guarded by a professional rapper. LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson has a record deal with Roc Nation, and she says that some coaches were wary of recruiting her because they thought she would choose rap over hoop. She is the daughter of another rapper, Camouflage, who was shot to death outside his studio in Savannah, Georgia, the city where Flau’jae grew up. But when Johnson was asked about Clark, a product of Dowling Catholic in West Des Moines, she dropped the opposite of a diss track.
“If I’m guarding Caitlin Clark, I’m gonna play my best defense ever and throw a prayer up at the same time,” Johnson said Saturday. “Watching her play last night in person was different.”
