Caitlin Clark needed a nap.

It was Monday afternoon, and the culmination of a whirlwind eight-day stretch that began with the end of her brilliant collegiate career. The previous Sunday, in Cleveland, the Clark-led Iowa Hawkeyes had been defeated by the South Carolina Gamecocks in a national title game that generated a record audience. Clark and her teammates flew back to Iowa City the following day, but she wasn’t home for long. Next stop Los Angeles, where she accepted the John R. Wooden Award on Friday night. The next morning, Clark was bound for New York, where she hustled over to 30 Rock immediately after touching down. Later that evening, Clark would make a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, dropping in during the show’s Weekend Update segment.

“I did pretty good,” she said assuredly of her cameo.

Clark was sitting in a cramped hotel room 39 floors above Manhattan, six hours before the Indiana Fever officially made her the top pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft. Adrenaline was doing its thing, but Clark admitted that she was fading. In fact, the week’s jam-packed schedule had already forced her to make a sacrifice. An avid golfer, Clark had planned on making a pilgrimage to Augusta for the Masters, but that was asking too much—even for a 22-year-old phenom.

“Augusta to LA to New York City to Indianapolis wasn’t the greatest,” Clark said of her would-be itinerary. “I’m very thankful that I’m here because I’m so tired. I haven’t slept much.”

Clark was wearing gray sweatpants adorned with the Hawkeye logo and a light purple Nike T-shirt, a comfy prelude before slipping into high fashion for Monday night’s festivities. At the draft, which was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Clark arrived in head-to-toe Prada: a white double satin skirt and shirt; an embroidered rhinestone mesh top; a black leather Galleria handbag with matching black slingback pumps. She topped off the look with a pair of acetate sunglasses.

But at the hotel hours earlier, Clark was sporting a pair of gold undereye patches as stylists primped her hair and did her makeup. “Don’t make me look crazy,” she instructed the makeup artist. Clark likened the moment to a high schooler getting ready for prom, before revealing that she wasn’t drawing from personal experience. “I never went to prom,” she said. “Junior year I had AAU basketball, and then senior year it was COVID.”

Organized chaos unfolded all around her, with a steady stream of people breezing in and out—a woman delivering Glossier gift bags one minute, a repairman arriving to fix the broken air conditioner the next. A film crew was on hand, capturing it all for a docuseries that will premiere next month on ABC and ESPN+. Clark’s boyfriend, Connor McCaffery, and two of her Iowa teammates, Jada Gyamfi and Gabbie Marshall, lounged on the bed. Kate Martin, another member of the Hawkeyes, joined the crew eventually. Martin wasn’t among the prospects invited to Monday’s draft, but she still hoped to hear her name called. Clark was certain that it would be, and demanded that Martin go onstage when it happened.

“When you get picked, we’re sending your ass up there,” Clark said.

“No, I’m not going up,” Martin said.

Clark wasn’t having it.

“Yeah, you are,” she said. “If we’re fucking there, you’re going up.”

Martin would ultimately get drafted by the Las Vegas Aces with the 18th pick. And she would, indeed, venture up to the stage.

The frenzy inside the hotel room was a fitting scene for Clark, who has been on an unstoppable ride since she became the darling of last year’s NCAA tournament and established herself as one of the biggest draws in women’s sports. Her upward crest continued this season, beginning with Clark and her teammates setting a women’s basketball attendance record in an exhibition game played before 55,646 people at Iowa’s football stadium. 

It reached its apex over the last month, as Clark led the Hawkeyes to a second consecutive Final Four and lifted the entire sport to unprecedented heights. The championship between Iowa and South Carolina garnered an average television audience of nearly 19 million, easily the most ever for the women’s game and the biggest rating for any basketball game—men or women, college or pro—in five years. Now Clark shoulders the expectations of the WNBA, which is hoping that those fans follow her to the next stage of her career.

It’s unclear how many will, but it is not hard to understand why Clark has drawn them in the first place: “logo threes” that evoke Steph Curry, passes that invite comparisons to Steve Nash, alpha-level competitiveness that is pure Kobe Bryant. Still, I was curious for her own take on Clark mania. Why does she think that so many people who had paid little attention to the sport before are suddenly tuning in to watch her play? How did she turn women’s basketball into appointment TV?

“She’s a bucket,” said McCaffery, the son of Iowa men’s basketball coach Fran McCaffery.

That distinguishes her from everyone on the collegiate level, where she set a new all-time scoring record—for women and men—earlier this year. But Clark offered a different explanation.

“I feel like I’m relatable,” she told me. “I feel like whether you’re old or young, whether you’re male or female, there’s so many different ways you can relate to me.”

But Clark also knows she has that other quality that separates the athletic icons from those who are merely great at what they do: charisma.

“I’m a very relatable person but also I have personality,” she said. “In everything I do, I smile, I have fun, I’m myself. When I’m out there competing, I’m fierce, I’m intense. But when I step off the court, I understand that basketball is basketball and not everything to me. That’s just how I go about my life.”

Clark arrives in the WNBA with an unrivaled celebrity. She is immediately the league’s most famous player, probably ever, and the WNBA is wasting no time thrusting her into the spotlight. Thirty-six of the Fever’s 40 games this season will be on national television, more than any other team in the league.

But Clark is one of several incoming rookies who could help lift the league. The 2024 WNBA Draft class is one of the deepest in league history, stacked with marketable stars who burnished their reputations––and brands––at the collegiate level. In addition to Clark, draftees such as Cameron Brink, the all-American from Stanford who was selected second overall by the Los Angeles Sparks, and Angel Reese, the LSU star taken seventh by the Chicago Sky, also cashed in on endorsement deals while they were still in school, a by-product of the NCAA’s new “NIL” era.

Clark’s draft day began at the Empire State Building, where she joined Brink, Reese, and other prospects for a ceremonial lighting; by sundown on Monday, the tower would be illuminated in the WNBA’s signature orange. About 30 members of the media huddled together in a roped-off pen on the building’s main floor as Clark and the other players, all wearing bright orange WNBA hoodies, entered at around 9 a.m. A group of children stood outside the entrance on 34th Street, pressing their faces against the glass. One kid held up an Iowa Hawkeyes shirt bearing Clark’s number 22, desperate to get her attention. After some brief remarks by WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, Clark joined Kamilla Cardoso, the six-foot-seven center from South Carolina who would be selected third overall by the Sky, to flip the ceremonial light switch. A photo op followed with all of the draftees gathered around a replica of the skyscraper, with Clark in the middle. It may be a talent-rich draft, but there is no question who is front and center.

Clark’s rookie season will be the most highly anticipated debut in the WNBA’s 28-year-history. More than 17,000 fans claimed tickets for the Fever’s draft party on Monday night in Indianapolis. The team, which ranked near the bottom of the league in home attendance last season, said that interest in ticket sales has seen a “spike” in anticipation of Clark’s arrival. Other teams across the league are getting in on the Clark phenomenon too. The Las Vegas Aces, the two-time defending WNBA champions, moved their July home game against the Fever from Michelob Ultra Arena, the team’s 12,000-seat home arena, to the 18,000-seat T-Mobile Arena.

All of that has some wondering if the WNBA has arrived at a place similar to where the NBA found itself in 1979, when a pair of rookies named Larry Bird and Magic Johnson entered the league. Like Clark, Bird and Magic became national sensations in college. When Magic’s Michigan State Spartans bested Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores in the championship game that year, a record TV audience watched. The college game was bigger than the NBA at that point, but Bird and Magic ushered in a new golden era for the struggling professional league.

The WNBA is embracing the Bird-Magic comparison. “I think it’s a great analogy,” Engelbert said on ESPN last week. A former CEO at Deloitte, Engelbert became the WNBA’s first-ever commissioner in 2019, and has been talking bullishly about the league’s outlook ever since. Last year’s WNBA finals between the Aces and New York Liberty drew the largest finals television audience for the league in 20 years. Earlier this month, Engelbert said she is looking to “at least double” the WNBA’s next media rights deal (the league is currently paid around $60 million annually in its current deals with Disney, Amazon and Ion, which will expire after the 2025 season). The league is also moving aggressively toward expansion. Next season, a new team in the Bay Area will join the WNBA, and at her pre-draft press conference on Monday, Engelbert said the league plans to add three more teams “in the next few years” to bring the total number to 16. She named Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Denver, Nashville, and South Florida as potential landing spots.

But for all its momentum, the WNBA still has plenty of room to grow. Despite being the most-watched finals in two decades, the Aces-Liberty series last year still averaged just 728,000 viewers across four games––decidedly smaller than the audience for some of Clark’s regular season games with Iowa. Then there is the matter of player salaries. Clark has already earned millions through endorsements with Nike, State Farm and Gatorade, among others. But under the WNBA’s pay scale, she will make a roughly $76,500 salary this season with the Fever.

After leading LSU to the national title over Clark and the Hawkeyes last year, Reese said she was in “no rush to go to the league,” in part because she said there was little financial incentive.

“The money I’m making is more than some of the people that are in the league that might be top players,” Reese said at the time. (She declared for the draft earlier this month, opting against returning to LSU for another year.)

Clark could have returned for one more season at Iowa, where she was a legend and life was lucrative. But at the hotel following the Empire State Building event, Clark told me the decision to declare for the WNBA was “not that close.” She was ready for “something new, a new challenge, a new part of my life.” The Fever landing the top pick in December’s draft lottery also played a role in her decision. McCaffery is already based there, having joined the Indiana Pacers as a team assistant last year.

“I think it definitely has some implications,” she said, glancing at McCaffery.

There is also a regional affinity.

“I love the Midwest,” Clark said. “It’s close to home.”

Playing DJ from his spot on the bed, McCaffery cued up Ice Cube’s exultant classic, “It Was a Good Day.”

The rapper brought more attention to the WNBA’s relatively low salary structure last month when he said that he had extended a $5 million offer to Clark to play in the Big3, the three-on-three basketball league he founded in 2017.

“Shout out to Big3,” McCaffery joked as the song played from a portable speaker. “Ice Cube!”

Clark said she learned of the offer from her older brother, who shared the details of Ice Cube’s comments in a family group text.

“I found out when everyone else found out,” she said. (Clark doesn’t appear to be seriously considering the offer.)

It likely won’t be the last time she is confronted with questions about the inequities that have long plagued the WNBA and other women’s leagues. I asked Clark if she considered herself an ambassador for women’s basketball as much as a player, if her career would be defined as much by the growth of the game as the accolades she receives.

“I don’t think it’s anything I try to do. I think it just comes along with how I carry myself. The way I play the game. The way I go about life,” she said. “I definitely know there’s eyeballs on me.”