It's college basketball tournament time. Before it was "March Madness" or "The Big Dance" or other marketing lables it was simply "the tournament" at my house.
I did not grow up in a sports family. My dad had a passing knowledge of sports. Some from his days as a HS football player, some from being a casual observer, but no one would have ever called him a sports fan. I cannot recall him ever asking me to watch a game with him on TV, or to go to a sporting event (oops, he did take me to a Yankees White Sox game when I was 6). Nothing wrong with that I suppose, just a little weird. Dads are not perfect. Whatever sports skills we three boys picked up was due to our own interest, as this was simply an activity our parents neither encouraged nor discouraged. I played little league baseball in elementary school and somewhere around the seventh grade put on a team uniform for the last time.
But I always loved sandlot baseball and football, and as I grew older basketball. In college I played intramural football and once landed the job of coaching the intramural basketball squad of our dorm. Somehow we won the school championship. I have a memory of a game when a bounce pass landed sweetly in my hands and I launched a jumpshot that went straight for the rim while I hung motionless in mid-air. The trophy is in our basement, in two or three pieces. My college team was in the NAIA and because admission was free I was at almost every home game, watching us play UMKC, Evangel, William Jewell, or archrival Drury. I also coached a third grade boys basketball team in college. When my wife and I brought our first child home from the hospital, she headed to the bedroom to rest. I laid on the floor with my new daughter and watched an Arkansas Razorbacks game. As a father I spent hundreds of hours playing basketball with my kids, usually my son, on our driveway. How many times did one of us yell, "...from down-town" and throw a bomb from the far side of the driveway? How many cheers did we get from Caroline, playing cheerleader on the sidelines. These and tons of other memories contributed to an interest in college basketball that has stuck.
I am not an expert. I cannot explain team matchups. I cannot argue the merits of a zone defense or under what circumstances you switch from to man-on-man. I cannot remember from one season to the next who the players were on my favorite team (Missouri). I can barely remember the coach. But I love to watch the game.
My interest in this tournament was generated largely by a guy named Rick Pitino. I watched him on late night ESPN reruns as his teams in the mid-80's began exploiting the new three-point shot as full game weapon. Most other coaches were using it only in desperation. He took a little school named Providence to the final four in 1987 and I think and I was hooked from then on. These were the days when you had to tune to ESPN to catch the early rounds as CBS didnt start coverage until the last 16 teams were decided. There are tons of other memories around this game. Going to my first Final Four in 1990 in Denver and watching UNLV school the nation. The fans of the other three teams, Arkansas, Georgia Tech, Duke, were mere sideshows. In 1999 I was getting ready to watch the championship game when I got word that my father had passed away. Duke vs. UConn. Funny that now whenever I see one of those teams on the court I think of the man who probably never attended a basketball game in his life. In 2005 I took my son to the Final Four in St. Louis and it was weird because neither of us lived there anymore. He was in college and I was in Minnesota.
So when the tournament rolls around my bracket seems to fill up my head. By the time of the first tipoff, it is all that is there. I stare at the pairings, drawing on every game I've ever watched to pull some insight into which team will prevail. During March I see the world through a 64 slot diagram. Investment decisions, menu options, routes into work, relationships.... all fit neatly in a bracket. I have dreamed about the tournament bracket. There is a mathematical beauty in the seemingly endless combinations (in a 64 team bracket there are 2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways of completing the bracket). With each game I am either a sports genius or idiot as my bracket looks less and less like actuality with each tick of the time clock.
There is something about that ball and that hoop that set the rest of the world aside. If you have never had a gym all to yourself, just you a ball and the echoing thump of rubber on hardwood, you have missed one of the best treats in all of sports.
I dread someday going to a nursing home. But if it has a small spot where I can throw a baseball to my great grandkids, or better yet some asphalt and a chain net, I'm there.