Ivy Pochoda on Caitlin Clark and Women Athletes

Following a record-smashing performance by University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark, now the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I basketball, novelist and former professional squash player Ivy Pochoda joins host V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about portrayals of women athletes in media, literature, and film. Pochoda considers the gender binary that continues to divide most sports and how athletes from Serena Williams to Lynette Woodard to Clark have been treated differently due to systemic bias. She discusses the lack of adult literary fiction featuring women athletes, as well as her new favorite novel in this category, the Booker-nominated Western Lane. Pochoda also reflects on how her athletic training helps her as a writer and reads an excerpt from a middle grade fantasy book she wrote with Kobe Bryant, Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof, in which sports play a central role.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: You recently reviewed Western Lane for The New York Times. It’s about a young squash player. Do you have a favorite literary novel about women athletes or any kind of theories in this direction?

Ivy Pochoda: It’s funny. A few years ago, The Guardian asked me to write a round-up of books about female athletes, and I was just completely at a loss. There are just not a lot. There are biographies, there are just not a lot… Western Lane would definitely be my favorite. I think that the way Chetna Maroo captures what is going on in an athlete’s mind on a squash court is incredible. And just the idea of a young girl playing a sport for escapist reasons and to come to terms with their mother’s death. I think the best novels about sports aren’t really about sports, but use sports as a microcosm to examine a larger anxiety in the world. And that book shows such a great version of that. That is my favorite. I don’t know if I read too many books about female athletes! Let me think.

VVG: I just got Western Lane on audiobook, and I’m super excited to listen. And it was nominated for the Booker. It’s been nominated for, I think, several other things. It’s a debut. I was a little South Asian girl who played racquet sports. I certainly wasn’t as good as the protagonist of Western Lane, but it’s already so immersive. And I was so thrilled to look at the New York Times review; I really appreciated your review. And I also was like, “What a great assignment. They found the squash player to review Western Lane!” I love that. I love that.

IP: I pitched it to them.

VVG: Ah! Okay, perfect.

IP: I don’t think they were going to cover that book.

VVG: Okay, well, I’m glad that you pitched it to them, because look at how well it’s doing. The other thing that I noticed, last year Chain-Gang All Stars came out, and of course that’s also a fabulous book—a sportswriter reviewed that book!

IP: They did?

VVG: Yeah, they had a sportswriter review that book. But that was interesting because, of course, that book has all these—it has a sports league in it. And it is a violent sports league, but it’s using all of those narrative structures. And so that reviewer spent a lot of time talking about the descriptions essentially of this violent, sensationalized, racialized sport that is kind of invented for this particular novel and that has to do with incarcerated sports stars. And so it just was really interesting to read you on Western Lane and also to read that writer whose name is slipping my mind at the moment, but on Chain-Gang All Stars. Do you have favorite sportswriters?

IP:  Like journalists? I love reading David Foster Wallace on tennis. I just like it when somebody who is not necessarily a sportswriter has a passion for sports and can bring a literary spin on it. I mean, I read Jon Wertheim. I read a lot of tennis journalism. I do want to mention something about novels about female athletes. I was just thinking, I think we still have this idea—we love stuff like Million Dollar Baby, you know, where a woman is doing a sport that’s a man’s sport, you know. We’re less interested in a woman playing squash or tennis or gymnastics, because that’s what women are supposed to do. But when we get a woman who is a boxer or wrestler, people like that juxtaposition. I think those things are sort of overshadowed by traditional women participating in sports. 

Do I have a favorite sports journalist? Not really, I mean, I tend to read mostly tennis stuff. And it feels very insider-y to talk about it. I love reading about tennis because reading about individual athletes is fascinating to me because it’s a totally different mentality than being on a team. It’s sort of like American politics: we infuse these individual athletes with all this personality to stand in for something. We have these identity politics that we associate with individual athletes. We don’t do that as much as when someone’s on a team. And it’s really interesting. We make all these inferences about individual stars. And that’s why I think, like, tennis journalism is really interesting because sometimes it debunks, like, the myth of Roger Federer being the consummate gentleman or whatever, and he is, but also that’s what we decided because that’s the way he looks on court.

VVG: Right, like I remember watching… There was that Bjorn Borg / McEnroe movie with Shia LeBeouf as McEnroe. And then I was like, “Oh, my God, Borg had a temper as a kid,” which I had read about but hadn’t pictured in quite the way that it is in that movie. But going back to the YA thing, I read a massive amount of sports fiction as a kid. And a lot of it was fiction with a feminist bent to it, like a girl overcoming sexism to perform really well. I’m thinking of Chris Crutcher novels or R.R. Knudson novels. R.R Knudson had this series where there was a sort of like… Looking back now I kind of understand, I think she was coded as a quite queer kid or sort of a butch-presenting girl who played on the boys’ basketball team because they didn’t have a girls’ one. And then in a different book she trained for the 1984 L.A. Marathon and ran it, and that series was really fun to read. In every book she would train for a different sport, and she was such a generally excellent jock. And so I was always kind of looking on the page for the equivalent of the sports montage. I love a sports montage. 

And these books are so great, but they also come in the wake of like… There was another series by a sportswriter named John Tunis. And each book was about a different sport, but it was mostly male athletes. And finally, there was a book that was about a woman athlete, it was a tennis book, and I was so excited. I’m gonna spoil this book for everyone listening to this episode. At the end of the book, she leaves the Wimbledon final, which she’s poised to win, to go and get married to someone who basically is like, “You can’t play tennis and be with me.” I’ve never been so mad. Like, it’s probably the book that I was maddest at as a kid. I was like, “This is outrageous. What?” 

The book was so old, and there’s this legacy of children’s books about sports, where it’s like, “Well, young women, you can’t have it all. You can’t pursue your dream of being an athlete and get married.” And now we have Serena Williams in six finals after having had a child. It’s nice to see some of these tropes and stereotypes get busted both in fiction and by the athletes themselves. 

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.

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Ivy Pochoda

Sing Her Down • These Women • Wonder Valley • Visitation Street • Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof (with Kobe Bryant)

Others:

“Caitlin Clark’s record-setting night fuels No. 6 Iowa in 108-60 win at Minnesota,” by Marielle Mohs |CBS News • “Fox Sports to Feature Caitlin Clark Solo Camera on Tiktok for Iowa-Maryland Game,” by Tim Capurso | Sports Illustrated • “We did not help build women’s tennis for it to be exploited by Saudi Arabia,” by Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova |The Washington Post • “Caitlin Clark passes Lynette Woodard for major-college record,” by Michael Voepel | ESPN • Nyad |Official Trailer • A League of Their Own | Official Trailer • “‘Western Lane’ Finds Solace From Grief on the Squash Court,” by Ivy Pochoda |The New York Times • Western Lane by Chetna Maroo • “In This Satire, Televised Blood Baths Offer Prisoners a Path to Freedom|You can’t applaud Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s thrilling debut novel, ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars,’ without getting blood on your hands.” by Giri Nathan, April 28, 2023 | The New York Times • Borg vs. McEnroe | Official Trailer • “R. R. Knudson, a Writer Whose Subject Was Sports, Dies at 75,” by Dennis Hevesi, May 10, 2008 | The New York Times • Ghost by Jason Reynolds • The President’s Daughter by Ellen Emerson White