Endless debate

 Caitlin Clark became women's college basketball's all-time leading scorer the other night -- with a logo three, of course, the hell did you think? -- and now Shaquille O'Neal has gone on record saying she's the greatest women's player ever.

Oh, Big Aristotle. Why'd you have to go and open that can of worms?

Because whenever you use the words "best ever", people are going to commence pounding their fists on tables and saying Ah, that's bull**** and, Yeah? Name someone better, and it's all ultimately pointless, because "best ever" is ultimately a subjective judgment. Hell, it virtually marinates in subjectivity.

To be sure, you can run the numbers and analytics until Bill Nye the Science Guy says knock it off already, but there's no real satisfaction in that, either. If Player A did this and Player B didn't, it's because Player B did it in a different day with different styles of play and emphasis. And if Player B did this, and also this, back in that different day ...

Well. Let's just say memory is imperfect. 

Which is my way of saying Michael Jordan missed far more potential game-winning shots than he made back in the day, no matter how we choose to remember it. You can look it up -- and at this point, you probably need to.

But back to Clark.

I don't know if she's better at Iowa than Diana Taurasi or Rebecca Lobo or Breanna Stewart was at UConn, or Cheryl Miller at USC, or Candace Parker at Tennessee. Is she even better than some of her contemporaries, like Sabrina Ionescu at Oregon or Aliyah Boston at South Carolina -- the latter of whom plays for the Indiana Fever now, and who could well be Clark's teammate next season?

Impossible to say, at least in this precinct. My totally rational, carefully science-ed up judgment is only that she's damn good.

I also know Caitlin Mania is a real thing, because she's selling out arenas wherever she goes and tickets to Iowa's game against Michigan the other night -- the game when Clark broke Kelsey Plum's scoring record -- were going for $500 a pop on the street. And of course that's controversial, too, because we live in a country and a time where everything is controversial, and eventually devolves into some sort of fevered zero-sum game.

See, Caitlin Clark is white. And she's also straight.

And so when a black coach or player says anything improperly worshipful about Clark, or even mildly suggests part of Caitlin Mania may have something to do with her pigmentation, the usual brigade of social media yahoos start yowling about "reverse racism" and "they're just hatin' on her 'cause she's not a lesbian, and especially a BLACK LESBIAN." 

No, really. People are saying all that out loud now. Which of course reveals their own bigotry, because why else would you bring up both race and sexual orientation in a discussion where both should objectively be irrelevant? 

Unless you had a problem with it, that is. Or some political agenda.

At any rate, the whole business just makes me shake my head, which I'm finding to be an increasingly chronic affliction. As the legendary songwriter John Prine once put it, it's a big old goofy world out there these days. 

A big old goofy world in which we can't even appreciate a young woman's excellence without making it a thing. Lord have mercy.