My Relationship with the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament
Posted 07-10-2010 at 10:44 PM by mz.
[CENTER][LEFT]Here's a short piece I wrote a few years ago, and I posting it here 1) for your enjoyment and 2) because I know a lot of you are bored.[/CENTER][/LEFT]
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[CENTER][LEFT]My Relationship with the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament
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I am sitting at my desk, writing this piece, on the afternoon of March 15th, 2007. The date and time are significant insofar as much as it is also the first day of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament (from here on out in this piece, known as simply ‘the tournament’), and there are games going on right now. The first weekend of March Madness. Thirty-two college basketball games in two days (and no, I am not counting that ‘play-in’ game that happens the Tuesday prior). All told, three straight weekends crammed with college basketball, all leading up to a final game played sometime at the end of March/beginning of April where a real champion is crowned, unlike in college football, where a computer picks the champion. And this, the day when it all begins, is my very favorite day of the year.1 I haven’t even mentioned one of my favorite parts of the process yet, which is the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament Selection Show (referred to here on out as simply the ‘selection show’). This show airs the Sunday prior to the beginning of the tournament, and it delineates who has made it in to the tournament, who hasn’t, and who will play who, when and where. The tournament rocks, plain and simple. I love it.2
Anyway, back to me sitting at my desk at RPA, at this very moment. I hate the damn tournament. Everything about it. But why? Not because my MMOD (March Madness on Demand, which I made the conscious decision to sign up early for at cbssportsline.com to achieve “VIP” status) doesn’t seem Mac compatible (which I am slightly peeved about), but because my beloved Syracuse Orange weren’t even invited to participate this year, which pretty much sucks. After all, the Orange is a perennial college basketball powerhouse, so this realization has caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. Plus, it is partially my fault.3 This ‘omission’ of the Orange from the tournament has been a minor controversy in the sports world for the past few days, with Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim appearing on numerous sports radio talk shows, venting his frustration with said ‘oversight’.4 Since I’m pretty much powerless over this situation, I’ve made the gutty decision to persevere. I’m still going to watch as much of the tournament as I can, as it is, in my opinion, the very best sporting event around, even if my boys are on the outside looking in. After everything is said and done, this weekend (Thursday thru Sunday) really is my favorite weekend of my favorite three weeks of the year 5, even if I’m forced to watch as a fan of the University of South Florida or Northwestern University would watch, with nothing personally invested or at stake. No juice.
At some point during my life, I claimed to someone that the first day of the tournament felt just like Christmas morning (even though I am Jewish and have no idea what it feels like…I assume it is pretty cool). So, if this is Christmas morning/day, I didn’t just wake up to find that lump of proverbial coal in my proverbial stocking, I found a chocolate-covered turd waiting there, courtesy of the powers that be.6 They ruined all (sans hyperbole, just some) of my fun, and something this year feels lacking, like it’s not even happening and the outcome won’t matter, whatever it may be. But, as David Lee Roth once sang, “life goes on without me”. 7 I’ll just have to wait until next year when my Syracuse Orange makes its triumphant return to the tournament. In the meantime, I will be looking at scores on the web, taking it all in until I can get home and watch from my sofa in High Definition, all for the love of the game and the tournament itself. And a HUGE Davidson University Wildcats fan.8
______________________
1 And for the record, I am a Syracuse University Orange fan/alumnus (Martin J. Whitman School of Management M.B.A. class of 2002 y’all!).
2 This is the point in this piece where I need to fill you in with some information to help illustrate my point. And as this said illustration, I will tell you what I was up to on this very day in selected years past:
1993: Freshman year at Emory University, my friend Josh F_____ and I, in our Intro to Logic class, stand up and exit the lecture hall after 5 minutes of lecturing to go sit in the sports bar, which was always Chicago’s on Buford Highway. On the way to the campus parking garage, Josh F____ approaches a group of prospective students on a campus tour and tells them to “drop out of school and watch games”.
1994: Sophomore year, I buy a 3-inch portable Watchman or whatever it was called and watch games in my Thursday Art History lecture. I subsequently return the item to Best Buy later that weekend for a full refund. I then go to Chicago’s and spend the better part of the next two days/three years there. College was great.
1998: Spent Thursday thru Sunday in the sports book at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Never, ever again.
2000: Spent the day/better part of three years freezing is Syracuse NY.
2003: Spent the day in a sports bar in Manhattan Beach with other Syracuse fans (whom I had just met) watching our team play Manhattan College (random coincidence). We (Syracuse University) won the tournament that year vs. Kansas thanks to Carmelo Anthony, Hakim Warrick, Gerry McNamara et al., while I watched at Dublin’s in Hollywood.
2004: Watched us lose to the University of Alabama in the third round (Sweet Sixteen round) at the same sports bar in Manhattan Beach. Haven’t returned to that place since.
2005: Was forced to watch the Syracuse tournament game at Hooters in Santa Monica. We lost to Vermont in the first round and I almost got into a fight with some moron who was rooting for Vermont just to spite me. Swore to fellow SU alumnus Scott D_____ that I would never jinx us by going to Hooters ever again.
2006: Watched us lose in the first round to Texas A&M at Hooters in Santa Monica.
3 I have watched this selection show, religiously, for as long as I can remember. It couldn’t be better or more fun (b/c I am a dork, and I am the guy who also loves to watch both days of the NFL Draft in their entirety). Except for this year (this Sunday past). I was in San Francisco with my girlfriend, and this trip has been planned for months. She is a stand-up comic and was on the road in Northern California for a bit, and since I hadn’t seen her for awhile, and since we both love San Francisco, we decided to have a weekend up there before she came back home to Los Angeles. At the time, I figured I could just watch the show up there. WRONG. Unbeknownst to me (well, I kinda knew), she had purchased tickets ($75 dollar ones to boot) to see the A.C.T. Theater’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s [I]Hedda Gabler[/I], which started at 2 PM, and which I had promised to go to before I knew when the selection show was. The selection show was on at 3 PM. Clearly I would miss it. I wasn’t too worried about my Orange not making the tournament, as we ended the year pretty strong and all of the so-called college basketball experts and prognosticators figured we’d make it into the field, no sweat. Just so I knew for sure, and since I am rather impatient and couldn’t wait until the end of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] to find out, I instructed my friend Scott D_____ to send me a text message with our seeding (which is akin to your relative ranking in the field, with 1 being the highest and 16 being the lowest), which I believed would be an 8 or a 9, and our opponent, once he had seen it on the selection show. To my surprise, just as Act II of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] began, I received a text message from Scott D_____ that simply read ‘we are out’. As a side note, my girlfriend, a classically-trained actress and graduate of Northwestern’s Theater program, subsequently told me that the A.C.T.’s production of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] “kind of sucked”.
4 I hate you, ESPN College Basketball ‘Analyst’ Doug Gottlieb. Incidentally, Mr. Gottlieb was kicked out of Notre Dame during his freshman year (and subsequently convicted of fraud) for stealing a roommate’s credit cards and charging $900 worth of whatever to said cards. He then ended up where all basketball-playing criminals eventually end up (Oklahoma State University).
5 On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, my least favorite two days of the year happen to be the two-day, four hour ‘extravaganza’ known as the season premiere of FOX’s [I]24[/I], which my girlfriend loves and I find to be conceptually poor and derivative (even of past incarnations of itself), and embarrassingly poorly written, acted, etc.
6 Otherwise known as the tournament selection committee, the oldest collection of old fogies and homers you can shake a stick at. This committee contains some of the Athletic Directors and other faculty members of the universities and colleges they are assigned to ‘objectively’ choose from.
7 “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”, from the brilliant 1985 EP [I]Crazy From the Heat[/I], Warner Bros. Records Inc. Incidentally, his cover of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” is pretty rad too.
8 They just lost.
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[CENTER][LEFT]My Relationship with the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament
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I am sitting at my desk, writing this piece, on the afternoon of March 15th, 2007. The date and time are significant insofar as much as it is also the first day of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament (from here on out in this piece, known as simply ‘the tournament’), and there are games going on right now. The first weekend of March Madness. Thirty-two college basketball games in two days (and no, I am not counting that ‘play-in’ game that happens the Tuesday prior). All told, three straight weekends crammed with college basketball, all leading up to a final game played sometime at the end of March/beginning of April where a real champion is crowned, unlike in college football, where a computer picks the champion. And this, the day when it all begins, is my very favorite day of the year.1 I haven’t even mentioned one of my favorite parts of the process yet, which is the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament Selection Show (referred to here on out as simply the ‘selection show’). This show airs the Sunday prior to the beginning of the tournament, and it delineates who has made it in to the tournament, who hasn’t, and who will play who, when and where. The tournament rocks, plain and simple. I love it.2
Anyway, back to me sitting at my desk at RPA, at this very moment. I hate the damn tournament. Everything about it. But why? Not because my MMOD (March Madness on Demand, which I made the conscious decision to sign up early for at cbssportsline.com to achieve “VIP” status) doesn’t seem Mac compatible (which I am slightly peeved about), but because my beloved Syracuse Orange weren’t even invited to participate this year, which pretty much sucks. After all, the Orange is a perennial college basketball powerhouse, so this realization has caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. Plus, it is partially my fault.3 This ‘omission’ of the Orange from the tournament has been a minor controversy in the sports world for the past few days, with Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim appearing on numerous sports radio talk shows, venting his frustration with said ‘oversight’.4 Since I’m pretty much powerless over this situation, I’ve made the gutty decision to persevere. I’m still going to watch as much of the tournament as I can, as it is, in my opinion, the very best sporting event around, even if my boys are on the outside looking in. After everything is said and done, this weekend (Thursday thru Sunday) really is my favorite weekend of my favorite three weeks of the year 5, even if I’m forced to watch as a fan of the University of South Florida or Northwestern University would watch, with nothing personally invested or at stake. No juice.
At some point during my life, I claimed to someone that the first day of the tournament felt just like Christmas morning (even though I am Jewish and have no idea what it feels like…I assume it is pretty cool). So, if this is Christmas morning/day, I didn’t just wake up to find that lump of proverbial coal in my proverbial stocking, I found a chocolate-covered turd waiting there, courtesy of the powers that be.6 They ruined all (sans hyperbole, just some) of my fun, and something this year feels lacking, like it’s not even happening and the outcome won’t matter, whatever it may be. But, as David Lee Roth once sang, “life goes on without me”. 7 I’ll just have to wait until next year when my Syracuse Orange makes its triumphant return to the tournament. In the meantime, I will be looking at scores on the web, taking it all in until I can get home and watch from my sofa in High Definition, all for the love of the game and the tournament itself. And a HUGE Davidson University Wildcats fan.8
______________________
1 And for the record, I am a Syracuse University Orange fan/alumnus (Martin J. Whitman School of Management M.B.A. class of 2002 y’all!).
2 This is the point in this piece where I need to fill you in with some information to help illustrate my point. And as this said illustration, I will tell you what I was up to on this very day in selected years past:
1993: Freshman year at Emory University, my friend Josh F_____ and I, in our Intro to Logic class, stand up and exit the lecture hall after 5 minutes of lecturing to go sit in the sports bar, which was always Chicago’s on Buford Highway. On the way to the campus parking garage, Josh F____ approaches a group of prospective students on a campus tour and tells them to “drop out of school and watch games”.
1994: Sophomore year, I buy a 3-inch portable Watchman or whatever it was called and watch games in my Thursday Art History lecture. I subsequently return the item to Best Buy later that weekend for a full refund. I then go to Chicago’s and spend the better part of the next two days/three years there. College was great.
1998: Spent Thursday thru Sunday in the sports book at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Never, ever again.
2000: Spent the day/better part of three years freezing is Syracuse NY.
2003: Spent the day in a sports bar in Manhattan Beach with other Syracuse fans (whom I had just met) watching our team play Manhattan College (random coincidence). We (Syracuse University) won the tournament that year vs. Kansas thanks to Carmelo Anthony, Hakim Warrick, Gerry McNamara et al., while I watched at Dublin’s in Hollywood.
2004: Watched us lose to the University of Alabama in the third round (Sweet Sixteen round) at the same sports bar in Manhattan Beach. Haven’t returned to that place since.
2005: Was forced to watch the Syracuse tournament game at Hooters in Santa Monica. We lost to Vermont in the first round and I almost got into a fight with some moron who was rooting for Vermont just to spite me. Swore to fellow SU alumnus Scott D_____ that I would never jinx us by going to Hooters ever again.
2006: Watched us lose in the first round to Texas A&M at Hooters in Santa Monica.
3 I have watched this selection show, religiously, for as long as I can remember. It couldn’t be better or more fun (b/c I am a dork, and I am the guy who also loves to watch both days of the NFL Draft in their entirety). Except for this year (this Sunday past). I was in San Francisco with my girlfriend, and this trip has been planned for months. She is a stand-up comic and was on the road in Northern California for a bit, and since I hadn’t seen her for awhile, and since we both love San Francisco, we decided to have a weekend up there before she came back home to Los Angeles. At the time, I figured I could just watch the show up there. WRONG. Unbeknownst to me (well, I kinda knew), she had purchased tickets ($75 dollar ones to boot) to see the A.C.T. Theater’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s [I]Hedda Gabler[/I], which started at 2 PM, and which I had promised to go to before I knew when the selection show was. The selection show was on at 3 PM. Clearly I would miss it. I wasn’t too worried about my Orange not making the tournament, as we ended the year pretty strong and all of the so-called college basketball experts and prognosticators figured we’d make it into the field, no sweat. Just so I knew for sure, and since I am rather impatient and couldn’t wait until the end of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] to find out, I instructed my friend Scott D_____ to send me a text message with our seeding (which is akin to your relative ranking in the field, with 1 being the highest and 16 being the lowest), which I believed would be an 8 or a 9, and our opponent, once he had seen it on the selection show. To my surprise, just as Act II of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] began, I received a text message from Scott D_____ that simply read ‘we are out’. As a side note, my girlfriend, a classically-trained actress and graduate of Northwestern’s Theater program, subsequently told me that the A.C.T.’s production of [I]Hedda Gabler[/I] “kind of sucked”.
4 I hate you, ESPN College Basketball ‘Analyst’ Doug Gottlieb. Incidentally, Mr. Gottlieb was kicked out of Notre Dame during his freshman year (and subsequently convicted of fraud) for stealing a roommate’s credit cards and charging $900 worth of whatever to said cards. He then ended up where all basketball-playing criminals eventually end up (Oklahoma State University).
5 On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, my least favorite two days of the year happen to be the two-day, four hour ‘extravaganza’ known as the season premiere of FOX’s [I]24[/I], which my girlfriend loves and I find to be conceptually poor and derivative (even of past incarnations of itself), and embarrassingly poorly written, acted, etc.
6 Otherwise known as the tournament selection committee, the oldest collection of old fogies and homers you can shake a stick at. This committee contains some of the Athletic Directors and other faculty members of the universities and colleges they are assigned to ‘objectively’ choose from.
7 “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”, from the brilliant 1985 EP [I]Crazy From the Heat[/I], Warner Bros. Records Inc. Incidentally, his cover of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” is pretty rad too.
8 They just lost.
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