Before Caitlin Clark

Kudos to The Athletic for its detailed origin story relative to the Caitlin Clark must-see entertainment frenzy: “Iowa’s sizzling popularity in women’s basketball was born in the state’s 6-on-6 tradition.”

As Scott Dochterman reported in the piece, “six-player basketball was more than just a sport in Iowa. It was the game of the winter, and its legacy flourishes through this Hawkeyes women’s basketball team” that features Clark’s binocular-range shooting, nifty passing and the enthralled sellout crowds celebrating her.

For long before Clark’s assault on virtually every college scoring record — by both women and men — long before Clark, 22, was born, high school girls in Iowa were starring in their unique brand of the sport that dates to the early 1920s and which, by the 1950s, was front-page news throughout Iowa. Their championship tournament was carried by radio and television stations in up to nine Midwestern states. There can be a strong argument that, for decades, nowhere else was the high school girl accepted as an athlete as she was in Iowa.

Susan Edge was a University of Missouri Journalism School colleague in the late 1960s who clued me in to the phenomenon. She had been a scoring machine for her Iowa high school’s six-on-six team, and her tales of community involvement were so compelling that I eventually convinced my editors at Newsday, 10 years later, to cover the season-ending event.

The whole business was a revelation. The six-on-six format — each team required to keep three defenders on one half of the court while three offensive teammates worked the other half — was a relic of Paleolithic times when females were thought incapable of extensive running. Yet it fit nicely into Iowa’s rural aesthetic: maximum possibilities for the few.

Six-on-six rules — a two-dribble limit before passing or shooting — rendered a crisp, fast-paced game of passing, moving without the ball, back-door cuts. That produced astounding offensive numbers, shooting percentages by the best players in the 60s and 70s, point totals such as Denise Long’s 70.5 average in the 1968 tournament. Long, whose small community high school north of Des Moines had just 120 students and a senior class of 34, once scored 111 points in a 32-minute game. She was such a headliner that she appeared on the Johnny Carson show and was drafted by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors — though the commissioner at the time, Walter Kennedy, considered that a publicity stunt and negated the pick.

That was in 1969, three years before Title IX of the Education Amendments Act decreed that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But when Title IX administrators attempted to outlaw Iowa’s six-on-six play, arguing in the early 1980s that those girls restricted to defense-only were at a disadvantage for scholarship opportunities, Iowa officials and the Iowa public rebelled. Still the only state with separate bodies governing boys’ and girls’ sports, Iowa cited the popularity of the girls’ game — consistently outdrawing the boys’ state tournament and, even 45 years ago, generating rights fees for its own tournament in excess of six figures.

Not until 1993 did Iowa reluctantly abandon six-on-six for the standard five-per-team arrangement. And not without widespread regret among those who had reveled in the celebrity of being a six-on-six high school player. When 2019 state legislation to force the merger of Iowa boys’ and girls’ high school athletic associations failed, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, who had played six-on-six high school basketball in the mid-1970s, told the Des Moines Register, “I’m still trying to get over the fact that we left six-on-six and went to five.”

There is a 2004 book, “The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six-Player Girls’ Basketball.” There was a 2008 Iowa Public Television special, “More Than a Game: Six-on-Six Basketball in Iowa.” There even was a 2009 stage show in Des Moines, “Six-on-Six: The Musical.” It had 18 original songs and a cast of 30. Iowa has a Granny Basketball League, formed in 2005, for women 50 and older who play by the 1920s rules and wear 1920s-style uniforms.

So the fuse was lit long ago for the current University of Iowa success and attendant spectator passion, with women from several generations drawn to the Caitlin Clark magic show — including Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder — fondly reminded of their six-on-six playing days.

Clark, for all her unprecedented feats, undeniably is being carried by the tides. “I’ve had so many people come up to me, like, ‘I played six-on-six basketball, and I just can’t believe the crowd you draw and how much fun you guys have playing,’” Clark told The Athletic. “These women who played 30, 40 years ago are just so mesmerized by our team and what we’re doing for women’s basketball. That never gets old. That’s super cool. A lot of those people are some of our biggest fans.”

Does the Mark Twain line from “The Gilded Age” fit here? “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”