The 2024

Most Improved Gunslinger

Caitlin Clark

With Covid waning, infectious disease specialists have a new pandemic on their hand: the Indiana Fever.

It’s hard to believe that until recently this was a little known regional Midwestern ailment that liked to keep its attendance low and its win total even lower—limboing its back-to-back 6-win 2020 and 2021 seasons with an even more-impressively-low 5-win 2022 season that paired with 31 losses for .139 winning percentage that made the Mendoza Line seem like a distant 19-win Atlanta Dream* away and a misappropriation of another sport’s jargon.

But wow could a gunslinging franchise like the Indiana Fever ever dream better than Atlanta! Playing the long game of taking tanking prolonged tanking, the Indiana Fever managed back-to-back No. 1 overall picks despite the WNBA using a draft lottery system featuring a 2-year aggregate to generate its odds that deters tanking for less forward-thinking, non-pandemic-minded gunslinging diseases not named the Indiana Fever.

But now, thanks to gunslinger Caitlin Clark, you have epidemiologists running wild trying to figure out how to contain the once docile Indiana Fever.

And this is not just a public health issue, but rather it is affecting the whole economy. It is no laughing matter when half of your employees call in sick with the Indiana Fever and the country is left with a massive labor shortage.

This whole issue can be traced to the #10 Gunslinger in the world in the Year of Our Gunslinger, 2024: Shoeless Joe Jackson. It is ironic that Shoeless Joe, a staunch anti-footwear industry advocate whose strong stance did not cause labor shortages but instead job shortages and eventually the Great Depression, would be the root cause of the most recent labor shortage resulting from the Indiana Fever pandemic.

It happened like this. Shoeless Joe is a 20th century American gunslinging hero. Everybody knows that. Unfortunately, that includes the anti-gunslinger crowd. And so anti-gunslinger advocate and overall terrible person MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned Shoeless Joe from baseball following a little misunderstanding about how one should conduct financial transactions with mobsters in the pre-PayPal era when the distinction between transferring money for social versus business reasons was less clear because there was not a button on your money app to press. Like is bound to happen with non-gunslingers, this backfired on Landis and instead of being banished from the public consciousness, Shoeless Joe’s legend increased not only in folklore, but he literary walked right out of the Iowa cornfields and into our TV sets and hearts in 1989 (citation: Dreams, Fields of).

But now its the 21st century. And Iowa being the true center of the universe seems to be lost on millennials.

Or at least that was the case.

But rather than crying foul and degrading the new generation and their love of TikTok, Instagram, hashtags ,half-watched YouTube videos, and text message acronyms, the Iowa cornfields used the powerful tool of their own FOMO and birthed Caitlin Clark (with the help of Anne Nizzi-Clark). So on January 22, 2002, the 2024 Most Improved Gunslinger and 21st Century Shoeless Joe walked (in the arms of a parent) right out of an Iowa cornfield (a Des Moines hospital) and right into our TV sets, hearts, and eventually Gunslinger Special Awards. And like Shoeless Joe, Clark was not wearing shoes on that decisive Iowa wintry day.

Rather than going through the whole boring biography like less-trustworthy sources such as Wikipedia, we’ll skip right through adolescence in the tradition of more influential texts (citation: Bible, The) and jump right to the important stuff.

Gunslinging.

Three pointers.

Cailin Clark went to Iowa, a place that wouldn’t know an offense if it walked right into Kinnick Stadium and tried to enroll at the University of Iowa, and started slinging three pointers like no one has ever done before.

Not Stephen Curry or names of lesser-known college players that appear on all-time 3 pointers lists.

Not anyone else.

It was becoming obvious that she was going to be drafted by the Indiana Fever, who had the upcoming draft’s #1 overall pick. But rather than developing a vaccine for the upcoming Indiana Fever pandemic, scientists sat on the their couches and watch Caitlin Clark play as women’s college basketball ratings skyrocketed, reaching its peak in the College Championship game where Iowa’s loss to South Carolina was a win for ESPN as it was the most watched basketball game—men’s or women’s; college or pro—in the network’s history.

That’s the power of gunslinging. Even when it loses, it wins.

And the Indiana Fever continue to lose games, but win the ratings.

That just proves what everyone already knows: Caitlin Clark has done a lot to improve the popularity of gunslinging.

*The only WNBA team with worse attendance in 2023 than the Fever.