Basketball: Reflections on the Final Four

Everyone can be her own NCAA basketball expert these days, as expectations of pleasure and surprise flavor the hours before the unveiling of the tournament brackets that send millions into frenzies of wagering and pontificating. The gamblers, those who simply love the college game, and enthusiasts of all kinds of "spectaculars" combine to make March Madness everyone's business. Until this year's championship game at least, it seemed like everyone loved college basketball.

But what is college basketball these days, this way station between the AAU-inflected (yes, infected too) world of high school basketball and the bizarre and spectacular circus of player movement and high finance understanding (the salary cap challenges even those who have mastered the notions of derivatives, short sales and foreclosures) that has become the National Basketball Association?

Bracket creep

The tournament comes at us in waves, and we can't tell what it is except through the media prism that filters the action our way. First the brackets are presented, as everyone awaits, while arguing the virtues and vicissitudes of 64 versus 68 teams against the onrush of certitude that 96-128 teams lie inevitably in all our futures, with the Taliban reasonably certain to remain disenfranchised, of course, but perhaps not Harvard.

And just who supplies all this entertainment? That's changed too: The recent contract between CBS and Turner Sports created what turned out to be a conglomerate that was not only too big to fail, but viewer-friendly as well. College basketball aficionados could watch each game in its entirety and hear not only Charles Barkley, but other high-priced employees of the various networks on the big stage, further blurring the now archaic distinction between professional and amateur.

Four network stations were involved: CBS, TBS, ESPN, and truTV. TruTV? Aptly named. It signals the oligopolic nature of the NCAA version of Yeats's rough beast.

Meaningless geography

Geography having been rendered meaningless for several years now (Duke got the #1 seed in the West, as its reward for dominating ACC rival North Carolina, which stayed far closer to home), the numbers have quickly followed. This is the first year that the tourney has dispersed itself to a variety of networks, in keeping with the expansion of the field to the arbitrary (and therefore way-station/place-holder) number of 68 teams. Having grown up loving the tourney before it was known as March Madness, I marvel at how natural it seemed— when East meant East— that the field consisted of just 25 teams, with a first-round triple-header at Madison Square Garden kicking things off for the Eastern Regionals.

As if to underline the degree to which the tourney is beholden to corporate business interests, each bracket had a corporate sponsor, to go along with the nominal meanings of the geographic regions. "Denver hosts the SBC Southeast Regional." Must be that the business involved had its corporate office headquarters in Denver.

Even discrete aspects of the game are now, seamlessly to most inured viewers, brought to us by high-bidding sponsors: "Geico brings you the opening tip." Compliant without being aware, announcers typically follow, slipping into the use of corporate metaphors, thus distancing the experience from its intrinsic nature and substituting commercial values. Commodification grows like crabgrass.

At last, the games

The first full day of play featured an unprecedented number of thrilling finishes, with three games in the tourney's first four hours decided by last-second shots.

In the second semi-final, Connecticut faced Kentucky's group of hard amazing athletes, long tall guards, counterpointed by the beefy Josh Harrelson, who had come of age in the several earlier contests. Kentucky's John Calipari ("Coach Cal") was taking his third program to the Final Four, and Kentucky there for the first time since 1998. Generally unmentioned is that both of Calipari's previous Final four teams had their "appearances" "vacated" because of "infractions."

Calhoun's unique appeal

Meanwhile, Calipari's opponent was another Coach Cal: the proud but embattled Jim Calhoun, who had battled back from serious health problems at age 68 to shepherd his young seemingly also-ran Big East team that finished all the way to the Final Four in Houston. Calhoun had also suffered NCAA scrutiny and sanction, but always stayed put at UConn. His signature New England personality exuded toughness and reveled in stability.

I know all about Calhoun's shady recruiting of Nate Miles, but I'm a Calhoun fan. He loves his kids in the way another NCAA whipping boy, Jerry Tarkanian of University of Nevada-Las Vegas, did. Somewhat uncannily to me, Calhoun possesses a unique capacity to evoke calm and hopefulness in me when he invokes— in his words— "My god."

I've attended Nike coaching clinics, with their all-star coaching rosters, and it's Calhoun who works the hardest and makes the most personal contact. His pitch is that a coach must decide what three things he's going to drill his team into doing well, and that will constitute that team's identity: "We're going to block shots, outrebound you, and guard the paint." Simple— but unforgettable because of Calhoun's way of presenting it.

A clunker followed by a clunker

The fantastical run of five wins by play-in Virginia Commonwealth, which many thought didn't deserve inclusion at all, was finally ended by the equally compelling Butler, the two teams coached, respectively, by the marvelous newcomers Shaka Smart and Brad Stevens, whose collective age (33 and 34) fell one short of Jim Calhoun's. Smart and Stevens had been like book-ends, holding together the magic story. Perhaps fittingly, when one of them exited, the fabric swiftly unravelled.

The Butler-UConn final shaped up as perhaps the quintessential college game of our time; a game you would have ignored in January, but bloomed perfectly in March-turning-April: two good teams turning mediocre regular seasons into perfect gold.

There was a guaranteed great story line: Either a Number Eight seed (Butler) would match Villanova's singular 1985 championship, or UConn would win its 11th straight elimination game.

By the time of the opening tip, fans were already saturated with introductory hype. Tip time, once set at 6:08, has become 6:23— thank you, Geico!

Turning ugly

After only three minutes, it had turned ugly: incredibly point-blank shots missed by Butler's Shelvin Mack, Connecticut's Kemba Walker and others. Butler, though, likes to let other team stay close, in the interests of pace; the uglier and more grind-it-out, the better off they are— just as in Butler's semifinal overtime period against Virginia Commonwealth, when Butler was the only team that could score. Butler's marvelous 34-year-old coach, Brad Stevens, seemed always able to keep from making it about him, a student-observer whose passion is reserved for his actual work.

The score was tied at 13-13 after 12 minutes. Butler's high-scoring Shelvin Mack first scored after 16 minutes to tie matters at 19: an agonizing brickfest to be sure, but an emotional ride, all the more searing because of the constant feeling of tension morphing toward agony of watching those errant firings.

After watching Mack play several times, I really love him, want him to do it, but he keeps firing bricks! It's like a football game: No one scores for minutes, until the last few seconds of the half, when Mack pops a 25-footer, as if to match Walker, who had begun to erupt with seven straight points. Did Walker's seven beget Mack's six? Was this the Butler magic?

No. Mack didn't hit another until there were two minutes left in the game and Butler trailed by 13, when— at this maddeningly late point— he hit two straight again.

Exercise in futility

It just kept getting worse, when it seemed it couldn't. This incredibly commodified tournament that had brought so many thrills just continued to wind down in ugliness and futility. After leading 25-19 just 20 seconds into the second half, the Butler Bulldogs shot 1-for-23 over the next 13-plus minutes, fuelling a 22-3 UConn run. The two teams shot a combined 26%. Butler shot under 10% on two-pointers, making only two regular old two-point baskets the entire game.

By a throwback score of 53-41, Calhoun claimed his third title, becoming only the fifth coach in history to achieve that number, and the oldest coach ever to win one. His god is good enough for me.

What was proven was obvious, but at the same time barely credible:
At the end of a tournament full of magnificent games, the tourney madness is capable of producing a dud of a final between teams that only a diehard would care to watch in the regular season.

In the end, all these games are Manichean struggles between good and evil. March Madness? April Fool. The game has become over-popularized anyway. Sixty-eight teams, a 68-year-old coach. Let's not expand to 96!