Hoops

I’m not a flag-waving American type; in fact I find nationalism to be an almost purely awful inspiration for anything. It’s tribal, it’s an expression of not even “us”, but of the desire to fear “them”. Inevitably it degrades into irrational hatred. It’s not good.

But it’s March in the United States, and the country – after a Covid break in 2020 – is watching college basketball, and I am enormously happy about it.

College sports, I’ve found in my travels, are an almost exclusively American obsession. People go to post-secondary schools everywhere, many of them as good or better than American schools – especially our underfunded state colleges and universities, and more recently, our struggling private universities, caught in the vise of changing delivery of university training methods only accelerated by the Zoom-based imperatives of teaching during a pandemic. But only in America, it seems, do we also create incredibly deep sports programs which then create enormously powerful sub-tribal loyalties. It’s actually one of the most endearing parts of America, I’ve found – again traveling around quite a bit to test the theory.

In Britain – to the extent Britain even exists as a distinct entity any more – people are devoted to their football teams but their devotion is, really, primal. People will get into fistfights about football rivalries, including very rich people on bank trading floors who really should know better. In Canada, everything’s pretty much okay, eh, and if something bad happens to the junior hockey league team over the way, then we’ll all come together and do a 50/50 and raise some money for them, right? My experiences in Africa lead me to believe that people actually do have real tribal loyalties, and sports are only kind of sidelines, more interesting for betting than anything. Ditto for India. And I don’t know enough of Japan, or Korea, or China, sad to say – maybe at some point I’ll have some time to learn.

But in America, if you’re even vaguely middle class – and especially if you’re lower middle class or lower class and can score some scholarship money or put yourself into permanent student loan debt – you go to a school and they have a sports program, which recruits other kids who are not that high up on the tuition food chain and they play one of three sports. There’s football, but that’s in the big schools – there are multiple divisions in the US, and the smaller or less capable schools end up in something called “Division Three” or the “Football Championship Subdivision”, which no one really cares about but it’s good for generating scholarship opportunities so, well, fine. There’s also hockey, for about fifty universities in places which get really, really cold in the winter – so most of the country doesn’t care, although in the parts of the country that do get really, really cold (such as Maine), people do really, really care. Also football, for the time being, is purely played by young men; while hockey is played by both men and women, again, it’s still just in places that are really, really cold.

But then there’s college basketball.

There are roughly 400 or so colleges and universities that field teams which are pretty good. That’s both men and women’s teams – not totally overlapping – but think about that: most countries, even large countries, barely have a couple hundred universities. America has 400 or 500 schools large enough to field decent basketball teams and each of those schools also has anywhere from a couple thousand to a hundred thousand other students who are trying to get a degree in business or English literature or philosophy or “interdisciplinary studies” or art. That’s a kind of beautiful thing right there: America does believe in having late teen and early twenties kids learn and grow. They also believe in allowing them to continue to play competitive sports, and basketball is one of them.

So you’ve got 400 or so universities around the country, and they field basketball teams, and they play for a few months starting around late November, and in mid March every year, 68 of the men’s teams and 64 of the women’s teams are selected to play in a single elimination tournament over the course of four weeks to determine the NCAA men’s and women’s championship teams. It’s called March Madness, and it is glorious. There’s a forty eight hour period where the starting brackets are available, and most Americans will fill out who they think will win at each stage of the process, most of them with almost no knowledge of who really is any good (I count myself among those). Each school has a large alumni group but importantly, every school in the tournament also has rivals who didn’t make the tournament, and therefore almost everyone with any link – student, alumni, local resident, you name it – can have a low-energy stake in the process. We all try to figure out who will win the (respectively) 65 or 63 games for the men’s and women’s tourneys, and for four weeks, we have something to argue about, at work or over social media or whatever depending on how much social distancing we’re supposed to enforce this year.

Personally, I’m a Georgetown fan, having spent two formative years as a Hoya and also having spent those years as a trombone player in the band that played at Hoya basketball games. Georgetown was absolutely annihilated by Colorado in the first round of the NCAA tournament this year, but that’s okay. It’s been a rough couple of decades for my team, so I’ve learned the art of transferring my loyalty to any team that isn’t supposed to win, and since this is a single elimination tournament – much like, say, the FA Cup in England – quite a few low ranked teams can pick off a tougher opponent. This year the “Cindarella story” is a school called Oral Roberts University, a ridiculously right-wing evangelical Christian school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which normally I’d have nothing to do with. But they’ve won their games in the first two rounds, which no one – literally, among 15 million bracket predictions filed at ESPN.com, no bracket expected them to win the first two rounds – so heck, let’s hope they go all the way. They won’t – Gonzaga, if no one else, will stomp them – but it’s a fun story.

And that’s just it. Gonzaga is the favourite this year, but that’s new, and unlike in college football – where there are only maybe ten competitive schools period, not just in any given year but more or less permanently – that will change next year, and was different two years ago. The college basketball tournament is almost completely random, everyone can engineer a reason to root for a given team, and therefore is always interesting.

A few more things about it: college basketball players almost without exception will not make it as pros. That’s a little controversial but not really, because unlike in football – where they run the risk of permanent injury – or in hockey – where frankly quite a few folks might go pro, again because there aren’t that many schools – in basketball, it’s obvious that most of the players, the vast majority of them, are actually getting a good education in exchange for playing high quality basketball as entertainment for others. There is nothing gladiatorial about it; nearly all players are playing in exchange for a more or less free education and for an enormous amount of late teen pride. If they do well, they’ll likely never pay for a beer again in their life; if they do poorly, they’ll still have a BA in communications from Ball State University and can probably get a pretty good job at P&G in product development.

America kinds of loses it for March Madness in a way which the rest of the world can only understand for the World Cup in soccer. I don’t watch much television – basically reruns of “Have Gun Will Travel” and “Perry Mason” – but for the past three days, it’s been on nonstop, switching between eight channels for the two tournaments, from noon til midnight. I’m not alone. I can text with friends about the fun games – the 15 seeds blowing up the 2 seeds – and the not fun games – Georgetown – and I know my texting partners will get it.

But here’s the important bit: over the next few weeks, almost everyone I know will have their favourite team lose, and it’ll be okay. No one will get really upset, no one will really care. It’ll be a bad day, but then the affected individual will look at who’s left, decide who they’re going to root for in the next round, and move on. Most of us, in fact, by the time it’s down to the Final Four, will have so little investment in the process left that we’ll probably not bother to watch the championship game. Because it was never about who won – unless we had, in fact, gone to Gonzaga, or Villanova, or we really hate Villanova because we went to Georgetown and therefore by definition we must hate Villanova, and even then, it won’t be that mind blowing if Gonzaga or Villanova wins, because it took four weeks to get there and besides, it’s spring, so let’s get outside and hike or play golf.

Every now and again, I do love my country, not in a nationalistic way or even a patriotic way, but in a way which says yes, we got some things right. We are diverse – we’ve got a huge number of schools, and some of the best are historically black, and some of the best are historically racist but trying to move forward. We’ve got a tournament with enough diversity to allow all of us to have some skin in the game, but so much diversity we all have to accept the fact that we’ll probably have our loyalties crap out at some point. We have an educational system with so much diversity we can put together something like this, which implicitly means we’ve got a society that really values the idea of young adults growing and stretching themselves, however they try to do, with as much support, originality, rigidity, dogma, openness, or whatever that a country like us can provide. And we acknowledge the idea that athletic achievement is still a good thing, and not just for making money for billionaire football club owners. I can barely shoot a basketball, and I can barely throw a football. But I admire those to devote themselves to it in the same way that I hope – and have discovered to be in fact true – that they admire me for my devotion to philosophy, and economics, and design, and planning. I made it through college solely on the virtue of that, but I was lucky to go to university with kids who had a passion for hoops and that gave them access to my class on Dante, and my economics sections, and my history seminars.

March is, in the United States, a wonderful month of celebration – of basketball, yes, but also of shared and benign competition, and of shared ambition in learning and growing as a society. I have a sense that part of why the country erupted into the violence of 2020 was the fact that we didn’t have March Madness. Every spring – when our hormones start to go a bit screwy, when the birds and the bees are starting to get frisky – for whatever reason, we’ve had for the past sixty years basketball to act as an outlet. A healthy, vaguely tribal but without any of the real attachments pursuit, where you enter into it knowing you’re going to lose, where black kids and white kids play hard against one another but they all hug and shake hands at the end. It wasn’t engineered as an opiate for the tribalisms which otherwise run the risk of consuming us, but it does provide an outlet, and the fact that black kids are relatively better than white kids at the sport – and thus are more prominent there than in other arenas, but not so much better that there aren’t a ton of freakishly tall white kids who can rebound like monsters – probably doesn’t hurt.

America is deeply flawed in many ways, but unlike a lot of other places, it still retains a basic diversity – of geography, of people, of interests, and importantly there’s still a lot of fragmentation in its institutions like in education and in government – that enables us to find ways forward, at least when we don’t all have to stay indoors and deal with technical issues on Microsoft Teams. That diversity continues to serve us well.

But in the interim – go Zags! I went to a Jesuit school, and lived in Washington State, so that’s enough to root for them. Also go Abilene Christian but just because they’re playing UCLA and it’s always good karma to root against Los Angeles teams. Mostly, though, pass me another Miller Lite – we’ve got eight games tomorrow and I’m ready for some action…