Jenny Jordan
I’ve loved basketball as long as I can remember. I’ve heard a lot of pros say that they can remember the first time someone put a basketball in their hands. For me, this happened before I can remember. In my earliest recollections, that orange-brown round thing with the funny black lines was already a familiar object. Basketball was one of the first words I knew.
When I was six, we moved into a house my father had built, located in the heart of Wichita’s Black neighborhood. There was a large cement patio at the back door, and my father installed a basketball hoop. Starting around then, whether at home, at school, or at one of the parks in the neighbor, I played basketball almost every day.
I was never close to good enough to dream of going pro. I was too fat and too slow, and already being deeply immersed in academics, I didn’t put nearly enough time into it. The peak of my ability relative to my peers was in the seventh and eighth grade. I played pick-up games with guys on the team.
When I was in junior high school in the late 80s, there was a girl named Jenny I used to play basketball with. I don’t remember Jenny’s last name because we always called her Jenny Jordan. She was good. She was good enough to run with the guys I played with, and I played with the guys who were on the team. She may have been better than me. I really should have been on the team, maybe about eight or ninth in the rotation, but an unfortunate and particularly relevant event in tryouts prevented this. But I’m going to make you buy a book to hear about that.
I often wondered if Jenny might have been good enough to play on the boy’s team. As I recall, she wasn’t on the girl’s team. I can’t imagine this was because she wasn’t good enough. Maybe she was silently protesting.
Jenny was cool. All the guys respected her. And she was pretty cute too. But it’s funny, I spent so much time thinking about her as a basketball player that I never thought about her as a girl until twenty years later when I was looking at her beautiful elegant signature in my old yearbook. She signed it “Jenny Jordan”. But I never really though about how much I liked Jenny The Girl because of how much I liked Jenny the Basketball Player. I don’t know, ladies, is that what you want, or not? I don’t think you know either.
Anyway, I’ve been watching games in the women’s NCAA tourney this year, and a lot of the games have been exciting, better than the men’s games which largely suck in this era. In my view, while the NBA is the best basketball there is by far, women’s college basketball has a higher level of play than men’s college basketball, which has been disastrously awful for the last decade-plus. Overcoached, too many ticky tack fouls called while blatant fouls that should be called aren’t. And while I support guys going pro and getting their money, the one-and-done thing destroys the college game.
Right now, at the college level, the women’s game is just better. I’m not just saying this to be pro-girl. Women’s basketball used to kind of suck. Because I’ve always been pro-girl, I didn’t say much about it, but I didn’t watch.
I started watching the women’s tourney because I saw a clip of a Caitlin Clark game a few weeks ago and I was surprised. Men and women play on the same size court. Those are Steph Curry shots she’s making. I’ve never seen a girl that could make shots like that consistently. So I started watching and I realized, the women’s game has gotten a lot better. A lot of these girls are GOOD. A lot of you girl’s are pretty cute, too, which is also a new development.
Last night’s UConn-NC State game was one of the greatest basketball games I’ve ever seen. Not one of the greatest girl’s games. Not one of the greatest tournament games. One of the greatest games, full stop. Watching Paige Bueckers take over that game in overtime, it was a performance on par with the best I’ve see from players like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. The ice-cold pull-up jumpers she was making are the same shots they used to make. It was a weird feeling watching a pretty cute girl go Jordan in a big basketball game. I’ve never seen THAT before…
Look, obviously there is a physical difference in the speed strength and elevation of the men’s game but I’m talking in relative terms. Let’s not get stupid and act like we could put Paige on the court with Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Or even at the end of an NBA bench. But those were Durant-like shots she was hitting last night in terms of the skill and focus that making them over and over under pressure requires. I play basketball. I know how tough those shots are.
The UConn-NC State game was the ultumate example of a hard act to follow, so the Louisville-Michigan game seemed like a little bit of a letsown, but it was a good game too. Hailey Van Lith was equally impressive in a different way. She doesn’t have the same shooting ability as Paige or Caitlin (though she made some big shots), but I watched two of her games and she has this LeBron-like thing where she hardly ever makes bad DECISIONS. Her mentor Kobe Bryant, for all his greatness, made an awful lot of them relative to Jordan or LeBron. One of the ways you know a great player is when you are surprised when they make a bad play. My level of surprise when Hailey missed those two consecutive layups tells how good she is. She was probably fouled.
So anyway, I’m going to watch the Women’s Final Four. I’m far more interested in the Women’s than the Men’s. If you’d said to me thirty years ago that the Final Four was going to be Duke-UNC, Kansas-Villanova, I’d have been LOCKED IN. It’s easy to get caught up in names and tradition, but I’ve watched all fours of those teams and, ehhh.
Unlike years past, of all the men’s games I saw, there wasn’t a single player that stood out to me. I’m sure several players from this tourney will go to the NBA and be good. It has more to do with the way the men’s college game is played. I may watch because I’m bored, but I’m not excited about it. The storylines are more interesting than the actual teams.
But Hailey Van Lith going up against Lady Shaq Aliyah Boston? I want to see that. Paige Bueckers going against the Hull sisters and my alma mater Stanford? I want to see that. Shout out to Lexie and Lacie Hull. I don’t know girls. I know you’re good. i watched a couple of your games too. But in case you need it, there was a chant we used to use when we were losing, “That’s alright, That’s okay, you’ll all work for us one day!”. Better buy a WNBA team cause that’s where Paige is gonna be working. I believe Stanford is the favorite, but if you watched Paige Bueckers last night and you want to bet against that girl (and Geno Auriemma), good luck. But I won’t bet against Stanford again. I did once and Chris Draft and the boys sent me home from Reno broke.
It just so happens that the Louisville-Michigan regional final game was played in Wichita, Kansas where I grew up. I wish I could say it was played in an arena I know, but life isn’t so elegant. The venue is new. But the people are not. So, Hailey Van Lith, you punched your tickets to the Final Four in front of hundreds, possibly thousands of people I know. Perhaps some of my friends I played basketball with, like Jason Anders or Wilkie Barrie, were in the audience. Perhaps Jenny Jordan was there.
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