Sports I Love: College Basketball Tournament Time

It's March, which means it's time for college basketball tournaments. I'm not nearly as invested in bracketology or "being right" about likely winners as I am in watching good games and finding someone to root for. Because of its single-elimination format and the difficulty of seeding 64 (or more) teams, every game has a potential for surprise and upset. Players appear in the limelight who have never graced the national stage before. Dynasties are toppled and legends made. Announcers throw stats around. Cameras zero in on people's parents in the crowd. In terms of thematic appeal, March Madness gets a bit closer to the fuzzy-focus backstories of the Olympics than NBA games typically do. Another appeal of the tournaments (both men's and women's) is their finite nature. They're not a season-long commitment. If you want to, you can tune in and out, and pretty soon it's baseball season.

Last week, my father and I watched NCAA tournament games in the same room for the first time since . . . 1995, probably, since that was the year I graduated from high school. We watched, we rooted, we stayed up too late, we said nearly identical things at the same time. He proved remarkably accurate when guessing the home town of various corn-fed-looking Indiana University players. For me, the real appeal of March Madness is the narrative, both the one being created each year and the one that we, as fans, bring to the table. As a family policy, we root for the University of Kansas because my mother went to undergrad there, and we root for Indiana University because my parents went to grad school there and first met there and after enough years of rooting for IU you start to feel like you've always rooted for IU, although now it's easier to root for IU without reservations, since Bobby Knight has nothing to do with the team. I remember the excitement of the 1987 championship, even though I was ten at the time. I remember (more bitterly) the fact that I was under anesthesia for surgery for my broken elbow the next year and missed the 1988 title game, which Kansas won.

After years of watching, I've developed a patchwork quilt of teams that I root for (I do my best to try not to root against teams, with the exception of BYU and Duke and North Carolina), both on the men's and women's sides:

Women's:
Utah: I root for all University of Utah teams and have since I was a wee lass.
Tennessee: I love Pat Summitt. I hope that last night was not her last game as a coach, but if it was, she's created a fabulous legacy.
Connecticut: I don't love Geno Auriemma so much, but his teams play solid basketball, and where I live you can see them on regular TV.
Notre Dame: Their coach is named Muffet McGraw. Plus my relationship to Knute Rockne has somehow translated into rooting for all ND teams?
Rutgers: Coach C. Vivian Stringer is kick-ass.
Stanford: Coached by out lesbian Tara VanDerveer, consistently excellent team.

Men's:
Utah: See above.
IU and KU: See farther above.
Gonzaga: John Stockton went to school there (and his son goes there now).
Wisconsin: I went to graduate school there, and somehow that translates to me rooting for the men's basketball team and the football team, but that's it.

Further Breakdown:
After these options are exhausted, I will root for:

• Anyone from the Big 10 playing someone not from the Big 10
• The underdog
• Whoever has better uniforms
• Someone playing BYU or Duke or UNC
• Whoever has a better mascot
• Both teams

As I look at this list, I realize that it's usually more about the coaches than the kids on the team; they're likely to be consistent year after year, even if they end up moving to a different school at some point. I enjoy seeing tournament standouts in the NBA or WNBA, but I think of the teams as belonging to their coaches rather than their players. In any case, I never have any trouble finding something to root for, because that's how I thread myself into the narrative. And if I can do it with my father groaning and cheering at my side, so much the better.

Other sports I love: badminton, football, baseball, figure skating, tennis, and soccer. Consider this post an addendum to my earlier post on basketball, since that one gives a better picture of my history with the sport.

Sports I Love: Basketball

While figure skating was a sport that I shared with my mother, basketball is the sport that I share with my father. For me, more than any other sport, basketball means home. It seems like it has always been a part of my life. We had a hoop attached to our garage, and although I have perhaps only beaten him one-on-one a handful of times, it is always enjoyable to play against my father. In addition to watching great teams like the University of Utah and the Utah Jazz, I also played competitively for most of my childhood. Well, "competitively" on a relative scale, considering I started in fourth grade, where games sometimes resembled the stereotypical bee-clustering of juvenile soccer games.

When I first started playing, I was the only girl on the team. I was small and had to shoot my free-throws underhand from between my legs in order to get the ball to the rim. I was also not very assertive. I remember my coach (his son was the star of the team, but that's another story) always made it a team goal for me to score at least one basket a season. This meant that the last game of the season usually consisted of my teammates trying to make me take the ball, and me trying to make a basket. Luckily, his ploy was usually successful, as well as being a huge confidence-booster for me. Once in a while, another girl would join the team, taking a little of the pressure (and sense of uniqueness) away.

I continued playing in that league through junior high, with a brief moment of stardom during Spirit Week at school, in which all the classes (grades 7-12) competed against each other at various things. To this day, judging by my yearbook scrawls, I'm pretty sure there are some people who would only know me as that girl who won the three-point shooting competition as a seventh-grader. Or was it eighth grade? It was junior high, anyway. They let me shoot from closer-up for some reason, which has always made me feel a little bit like a cheater, but hell, I was a pretty good shooter anyway. In fact, that has always been a problem with me and playing basketball: I love to shoot, but I hate running. And you kind of have to run a little bit if you want to actually play. So although I made the team each of my high school years, I spent most of my time on the bench due to my bone-deep laziness. When I participated in a high school basketball camp over the summer with U of U Women's Coach Elliott, she basically told me that I needed to move my ass if I wanted to play well. These were words I cherished (since they came from Coach E), but never actually put to practical use. If there were a version of basketball that involved mostly shooting and guarding people and somehow very little running, I would be all over it.

Since I don't really play, I currently turn all of my existing basketball energies, such as they are, to fandom. In my imagination, I was a Utah Jazz fan before I started to walk. This may not be true, but it certainly feels that way when I get misty-eyed at the thought of John Stockton's Hall of Fame induction or the great (and not-so-great) names of Jazz players past: Karl Malone, Mark Eaton, Thurl Bailey, Darrell Griffith, Adrian Dantley, Felton Spencer and Greg Ostertag (for some reason they are always together in my mind, as centers should be), Jeff Hornacek, Bryon Russell, Antoine Carr, Adam Keefe . . . sadly, I could continue, but I will spare those few still awake to read the end of this post. My passion for the Jazz is matched only by my passion for the Utah women's basketball team. Since there is only about a .01% chance that the Lady Utes will be on television here in a given year (if they get in the tournament and if they are part of wrap-around coverage and if the UConn women or some other regionally interesting team isn't playing at the same time), I usually watch their games online when I get the chance. That is what being a fan of western basketball teams on the East Coast entails.

Other teams I root for: Kansas; most Big 10 teams; anyone playing Duke, BYU, or North Carolina; UConn women; Tennessee women (I realize this is somewhat contradictory but I don't care); the Celtics, since they're on TV out here; the underdog.

When forced to choose a favorite sport, I will generally choose basketball, but not for any of the reasons above. Unlike baseball (post forthcoming) or football (ditto), there is more gender parity to be found in basketball. There are female referees in the NBA. There are female coaches at various professional and amateur levels, most recently the NBDL. Of course there is room for improvement, but there is a lot more room for improvement in most of the other sports I like. I'd be willing to stake the current UConn women's team against many men's college teams out there. And basketball seems to be a sport that most people can play for fun, even people in wheelchairs. You can play nerf basketball indoors, you can play it with people you don't know, and you can play it all by yourself in the driveway. Yeah, it's a pretty cool sport.