Brackets throughout the land pit Louisville against North Carolina. Personally, I would love to see a championship game between Stephen F. Austin and Robert Morris, which sounds more like a couple of retired accountants in a gin rummy tournament at Boca Raton.
Explain this to me. Stephen F. Austin University is named after the man called the Father of Texas and the university is in Texas. That all makes sense. The sports teams there are nicknamed the Lumberjacks. Huh? I looked up Mr. Austin on the internet and couldn’t find a single picture of him holding one of those really long saws with a handle on each end. Was Texas once covered with vast forests requiring hordes of dedicated ax wielding arborists to come in and clear the land in order to create the vast nothingness which is now west Texas? Did the rag tag group of independent thinkers struggle for freedom against Santa Anna or spruce and elms? I’m confused.
As a diploma carrying graduate of the University of Kansas (actually I do not carry my diploma around with me, that would be pathetic, especially since my degree was in Film Studies which means I am qualified to work at any Blockbuster Video in the land) I had a wonderful time watching last year’s NCAA Tournament. For the first time in twenty years my bracket looked decent on the last weekend.
Each year I do my own version of the Dick Vitale/Nostradamus thing by filling out a bracket laying out who will win each and every game of the tournament. There was a time in my life when I spent a lot of time watching college basketball games and watched hour after hour of ESPN talking heads dissecting every team. Telling me statistically which team had the best point guard in regards to assists to turnover ratio, three point shooting percentage and grade point average in one of those useless degree programs many athletes pursue in college (like Film Studies). My home is now a cable free environment so I do not have access to all this information. Ergo my bracket predicts games at the exact same level of success. Go figure.
Growing up in Hutchinson also meant tournament time was happening right down the road. My dad took me to many,many NJCAA games. Looking at the bracket for this year I do not see the usual suspects from my years of going to games. There is no Mercer (didn’t they when like eight championships in a row with a coach named Howie), no Vincennes (they were always here), no Southern Idaho (I seem to remember them having some sharp-shooter kid who shut his hand in a car door and still lit up the joint). I remember Independence winning back-to-back. I remember Spud Webb.
For the uninitiated in the lore of Spud, he was a five feet six inches tall guard. You know how they adjust for inflation and say fifty bucks in 1924 is worth a couple of grand in today’s dollars, well, if you adjust Spud’s height into basketball player inches he is roughly the height of a fire hydrant. He was a hero of the common man. He looked like one of the mere mortals sitting in the stands. That was until he got ahead of the pack and had a breakaway lay-up opportunity. Little dude could dunk.
Every regular guy sports fan on the planet has a dream that he can turn on a Nolan Ryan fastball, do a Barry Sanders spin move juking a linebacker out of his cleats, or rise up off the floor like a pogo stick powered with nitrous oxide and jam a basketball through a hoop. Spud Webb gave us regular guy sports fans hope.
That hope was ludicrous. Sure he was shorter than every basketball player we’d seen. Sure he was shorter than the average guy on the street. Sure he had a 42 inch vertical leap. (Sound of tires squealing as the brakes are applied with force) This is where the regular guy sports fan’s hope comes crashing down, like a Darryl Dawkins influenced backboard. A 42 inch vertical leap! That is jumping three and half feet into the air. Sure, I can jump three and half feet into the air, but only under certain circumstances. Circumstance One: You allow me to jump eleven times and add up the inches jumped each time. Circumstance Two: You suddenly reveal a large snake directly below me.
Christopher Pyle hopes you enjoy whatever tournament you watch and would like to start a petition to have Cape Fear Community College change their nickname from the Sea Devils to the Fightin’ DeNiros. You can sign the petition by contacting Chris at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
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I don't know who Dick Vitale is and am too lazy to look him up, but I know Nostradamus made his predictions appear correct by making a few thousand of them, and all intentionally vague. Now, if you can get a hold of fifty of those bracket papers and fill each of them out with a different winner and ambiguous handwriting, you'll look extremely impressive in a few weeks, or days, or however long it takes for one of these tournaments to be over. I have no idea.
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