Searching for meaning in "March Madness'

As if infected by the self-righteousness and entitlement mentality of gamblers, most everyone— from credentialed expert to self-styled guru— had his share of complaints (like the dearth of Cinderella teams advancing past the first two rounds) about the 2009 NCAA men's basketball tournament. But how can you not be impressed with the tournament's much-maligned Selection Committee when all four Number One seeds reach the Elite Eight, and three teams (including party-crashing Number Three seed Villanova) exceed a hundred points in the Sweet Sixteen, the gateway games to the four regional finals now universally known as the Elite Eight?

Slothful and inconsistently motivated though I may have been for the early rounds, whose task it is to winnow a 65-team field to 16, I was ready for action the second weekend. For those of us left when you subtract the gamblers and the junkies, things get most interesting in the second weekend, when there is both a future and a past for every one of those Sweet Sixteen. By the time the action has gone that far, the buzz of coaching changes and rules infractions has provided a kind of sordid noir ambiance for the swirl of action and the search for wider meanings and analogues in the world at large. What was it to mean, the seemingly Big East-dominated event, with North Carolina seemingly the only likely party-spoiler for those who imagined a repeat of 1985, when the Big East had three of four semi-finalists?

The Big East is the conference whose hegemony ESPN birthed. Bestriding the basketball world like a colossus, the Big East has developed an expansionist reach that shows so little respect for the natural geography that its name would imply that it appears it may stop at nothing short of ultimately annexing UCLA.

Suffering from stress, and rules infractions

The first of the Regional Finals featured Connecticut, whose Coach Jim Calhoun had sat out his team's first round game, instead checking into a hospital for two nights as he was suffering from "undefined stress." Part of the stress he was feeling may have been attributable to the NCAA's investigation of his recruiting practices, but, having already defeated three cancers, genial Jim handled the matter with the same characteristically dismissive aplomb as he did a reporter's recent provocative question about whether he thought he should continue to collect his full salary during these hard economic times.

Calhoun allowed that the NCAA's rule-book, being 508 pages long, was easy to rule afoul of inadvertently, and that, while the coming investigation might go either way, the coach's conscience remained clear. After all, he might have added, he is the state's highest paid employee. Interviewed before the Elite Eight, Calhoun showed that he wasn't going to let a little stress interfere with his routines, telling us that he was awake and preparing at 6:30 a.m. for his next game, after the excitement of his last win had kept him up until 5.

Hospitalized, investigated, interviewed and 66, Calhoun had 23 years of doing this behind him, and had just passed the 800-win mark that his rival/crony Jim Boeheim of Syracuse was denied by Oklahoma in the Round of 16, ridding at least one regional bracket (North Carolina's) of a Big East contender. Calhoun's confidence level must have been further bolstered by his knowledge that, both times his team had reached the Final Four, they had come away as national champions. There was also the astounding statistic that his giftedly athletic charges were enjoying a differential of plus 8.5 free throws per game.

The coach as celebrity

Only Louisville's (for now) Rick Pitino was arguably as big a media star as Calhoun. Tom Izzo of Michigan State was still around, but Izzo manages to blend in with his team more than most other celebrity coaches. Roy Williams of North Carolina was there too, but he too has a self-effacing lack of glamour, perhaps because of his long-term earlier identity as an assistant to Dean Smith. Both Izzo and Williams are giants, but lack the charisma and sleaze needed to sell Toyotas in 2009.

The frenetic breakneck style that Missouri represents makes players almost faceless, interchangeable parts, leaving the coaches as the personalities we most recognize. This is a style that goes with the lack of continuity of personnel that franchise programs have had to learn to adapt to, and maybe been smart enough to learn to embrace, perhaps even to love. Most of the top teams are one- or two-year finishing schools for high school phenoms prevented by the new rules from going directly to the NBA. More significantly, though, it represents what appears to be the game's future and perhaps ultimate stage of development, within the current rule structure, which has changed far less than the abilities of its players.

David's tool against Goliath

The collegiate game has changed radically but gradually since the introduction in 1986 of the three-point shot, which at first was seen as a desperation shot, and was originally employed mainly by bad teams that hoped a hot hand would keep them in games they otherwise couldn't possibly win. It was Pitino, taking an undermanned Providence team to the 1987 Final Four, who first fully understood and demonstrated its value, showing the conservative basketball world that the three-point shot could be just the slingshot David needed to battle Goliath.

The speed of the college game accelerated through the 1990s; but the new millennium has continued to see accelerated change, with ever-increasing speed of play. Since then, there been a tremendous advance in merging athleticism with the spacing-conscious greater deployment of the three-point shot.

So, as always, tradition and innovation shared the great stage, with the Big East, known for its overall toughness and physicality, now in the unusual position of representing the past. It put four contestants into the last eight, with one Regional Final being an all- Big East affair.

Unnerved by Missouri's swarm

UConn, going first, seemed in danger of being superseded by the swarming style of Missouri. Weathering a 13-2 UConn start, Missouri generated its characteristic chaos, forcing the usually unflappable UConn Huskies into a full game's worth of turnovers (11) in a first half that they nonetheless managed to escape with a lead of 44-38. Missouri capitalized on Connecticut's uncharacteristically poor decisions to capture its only lead at 50-49 but could not convert again after Calhoun's rattled charges hoisted up a second straight shot that hit nothing at all. Then, as if suddenly shocked into exhaustion by the accelerated pace of the future, both teams went suddenly cold.

Deservedly qualifying as a great game because of the way it held its tension throughout, the Connecticut-Missouri contest wound down dramatically, with tradition finally holding off the blood-dimmed tide of swarming futuristic Missouri, with plenty of help from the 23 points supplied by a freshman from the Bronx, Kemba Walker.

UConn finished with 17 turnovers, but only six in the second half. Trailing 80 to 72 with half a minute left, in a final act of surrender, Missouri coach Michael Anderson sent in his son, a loyal practice player. The game ended with UConn advancing, 82-75, but with a sense that the Missouri style represented the game's future.

Villanova's best-dressed coach

The Big East, it now appeared, was dominating three regional tournaments— all but the South, which would be the last to crown its champion. The East Regional was guaranteed to supply a second Big East Region champ: this was an all-Big East affair, played in Boston's Fleet Center. Tradition would be served, as Rollie Massimino watched impassively. His Villanova successor Jay Wright was respectfully decked out not only in a three-piece suit but also a blue pocket handkerchief, while Pitt's Jaime Dixon patrolled the sidelines with his hair combed in best Doug Collins look-a-like style.

The teams had met before, with Villanova victorious 67-57, in Philadelphia's Spectrum. Villanova had the better athletes, while Pitt had the bigger bodies. These conference brethren cruised into halftime with Pitt leading, 34-32— a dubious advantage, it now appears, from a recent study showing that teams behind by just one point win more than 50% of the time!

Atypically, the second half pace picked up, along with the overall scoring: Nova's uncanny ability to hang in tough games made them successful crashers of the 2009 Final Four, as they had been when they won it all as an eighth seed in the Big East-dominated Final Four of 1985.

A coach with wanderlust

The next day featured Louisville's game first, with Pitino, a charismatic wanderlust/genius similar in many ways to peripatetic fellow New Yorker Larry Brown, bidding to take his third team to the Final Four, and to put a third Big East team in this one. The Ville was heavily favored to overwhelm Michigan State with a swarming style similar to (but people imagined even more effective than ) the one Missouri had tried.

The Spartans, of course, were no upstarts themselves, and certainly didn't emerge from an upstart conference either. Plus, Earvin Johnson was in the house.

It seemed destined that the Ville would be playing in Detroit, but the ordinarily high scoring Cardinals were out of synch from the outset. Despite numerous open looks, they took almost four minutes to score their first basket. Six foot-ten inch Goran Suton's 17 first-half points gave Michigan State a 30-27 half, and they held tight, as Louisville stayed cold, inexplicably cold, however much Michigan State's defense was given the credit.

Finally free of the Big East's long shadow, CBS moved to Memphis for its fourth and last regional Final, where second-seed Oklahoma, even with the marvelous six foot-ten inch Player of the Year Blake Griffin, was no match for the North Carolina Tar Heels, who countered not only with last year's winner of that award, Tyler Hansbrough, but point guard Ty Lawson, who was selected for the Bob Cousy Award, given to the nation's top backcourt player, and several other players clearly destined for the NBA.

A final four without Billy Packer

Disappointingly lopsided semi-finals games eliminated both Big East teams, leaving us with a rematch of a North Carolina early season rout over a Michigan State team, a game that the desperate announcers and writers were assuring us would be closer this time.

With the last of the three "weekends" remaining, fans were facing the prospect of a Final Four without the erudite TV commentator Billy Packer, whom too many others had decided was more abrasive than authoritative. Many fans think college basketball began in 1979 when Magic Johnson matched up against Larry Bird, and the three-point field goal came to the NBA. We depend upon the announcers to supply the links to the great beyond. Clark Kellogg could give us little hope of Packeresque enlightenment. By this time, with the lack of an emerging story line becoming problematic, we needed Packer to make things sizzle, even if pedantically.

Looking for meaning from the game of basketball became a sport of its own in the 1980s, when the game's popularity and financial opportunity took off on the wings of Bird and Johnson, soaring to unprecedented heights, and sweeping in hordes of gamblers in its wake. T-shirts announced: "Basketball is Life." The luminaries were such wonderful accessible people that it was easy to make them heroes, and possible to resurrect the vantage point of seeing basketball as a microcosm of life itself.

Obama's shadow

With the game's burgeoning popularity, announcers too became national figures: Al McGuire and Billy Packer formed a perfect duo, both knowledgeable but projecting opposite personality images. To McGuire, success meant not deciding until he left his driveway whether to make a left or a right turn that day. For Packer, worship at the Temple of the ACC and the NCAA Guide was life's bloodstream. McGuire died at 72, an age Packer still has years before he attains. McGuire was comfortable retired, as Packer must be too, but disseminating his knowledge to us— even with increasing numbers of viewers disaffected and wishing he were gone— was so much a part of who he was.

With Obama building a court in the now ironically named White House, and increasing numbers of teams adopting the style of full-court pressure and dribble/drive/motion offenses, the game is generating history at an accelerated pace. How would Billy have explained all this to us, and still paid attention to the minutiae of a championship game that turned out to be the rout everyone had feared?

Those Detroit socio-political analogies

Yes, of course, the game had been amply hyped: the setting of Ford Field, in bedraggled Detroit, meant that one wouldn't have to strain to bring in analogies and parallels to the social and the political.

Surrounding Ford Field, the outside world was indeed creeping in, the hordes of newly homeless people swarming like Missouri defenders, as if there were as many of them as the anti-American Pakistani demonstrators depicted with increasing regularity by the New York Times. You want upsets? In Pakistan, a group of militants outdid any pressing defense that even Missouri could bring, and brazenly shot up a police training academy.

Heading into the Finals rematch in Ford Field (holding over 72, 000, thus giving Calhoun the chance to quip that he was of an age that called every place the game was played a "gym"), just 90 miles from Michigan State, Izzo was milking his friendly populist spirit for perhaps more than it was worth. He called his underdog team's presence in the Final at Ford Field "an emotional stimulus package," whatever that might mean to the 22% of unemployed Detroit residents.

Luckiest coach, indeed

But it didn't take long to figure this one out. It was 24-9 North Carolina after just over seven minutes. Clark Kellogg was plenty excited when the Spartans, as Obama must aspire to do, had cut the deficit in half, but anyone watching closely could tell what the simple difference was: talent. Carolina had a roster of NBA players. Later, Carolina's unassuming coach Williams called himself "the luckiest coach in America." He was right: he had a group of talented, seasoned, intelligent players who had chosen to stay in college another year to atone for their loss last year.

The season was over, sentimentality was heightened, and I was missing Billy Packer at this perfect moment, made for him, North Carolina's display of true talent and the affirmation of college basketball connoted by staying in school for a title. Perhaps this was Packer's severance pay: His beloved Atlantic Coast Conference was there and ready to represent tradition and play the heavyweight role, even among today's modern crop of one-and-done stars. Talent merged with story line. What was "tradition" after all? Recruiting some guys from New York? Dominant big men like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain? Being associated with a venerable conference? It's a very small gamble to bet that Billy Packer would know.


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