March Hoopsteria: A(kron) Zips To Gonzaga Z(ags)

The Beach Boys once sang, "Catch a wave, and you're sittin' on top of the world." Eags captures March Madness with a comparable riff: "Win six in a row, and you're King of the World." However, Eags hits a rare clinker with the braggadocio that Gonzaga has become "the Duke of the West." Puh-leeze. If you're going to play the elitist card, go the whole way. This blogger's alma mater, in a fit of madness during its centennial celebration, referred to itself as "the Harvard of the West." In the other March April collegiate championship: men's hockey, the Univesrity of Denver (currently 4th in the nation) ranks second with 7 national championships. (Michigan has 9 banners.) Harvard has one banner (1989; the first national championship of any kind in Cambridge) and, as Charles (Casey) Stengel (and James Thurber) said, "You could look it up." Truth be known, in Cambridge — when it comes to men's hockey — they ought to say that Harvard is the "DU of the East." Or, they can just get the puck out of there. If this is (fair & balanced) March bombast, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Case for Hoopsteria
By Timothy Egan

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akron basketball beat better bowl college company congress course cramer danced devils diversion duke final game give gonzaga greatest hilltoppers home house jobs lost madness map meetings national north outcome people picked re school seed simply six state team thrill times tournament upset versus week win wobbly world zags zips

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At a time when more than 4 million Americans have lost their jobs and a wobbly nuclear Pakistan is acting like a drunk with the car keys, why should anyone care whether the Zags beat the Zips on Thursday? Or, for that matter, why should the fate of Robert Morris and Stephen F. Austin — colleges? or WASP fashion labels? — concern a country at the depth of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?

The answer: in troubled times, more than ever, our nation turns its lonely eyes to the best national diversion we have – the annual men’s college basketball tournament. All cultures have something like this: the Irish and their hurling, the Italians and soccer, the Aztecs and ritual sacrifice.

March Madness is our greatest sideshow, mood-lifter and time-suck all in one. It’s sports at its most thrilling, more so than the slow choreography of baseball’s World Series, the bloated spectacle of the Super Bowl or the go-through-the-motions slog of professional basketball playoffs.

And forget about college football, now facing the possibility of its championship system being determined by Congress. There, a mythical “national title” is conferred on a team that gets the highest ratings in a bowl sponsored by a company now in receivership.

Give me the clean, no-excuse trials of the young hoopsters. Hilltoppers and Huskies, Owls and Orangemen, Sun Devils and Blue Devils (the Satan subset) — starting today, one of 64 teams will emerge champion, with no dispute. Lose a game, you’re gone. Win six in a row, you’re King of the World.

Of course it’s a fantasy. Of course the highest-seeded teams, the interchangeable Louisvilles and UConns, are likely to end up in the Final Four. And of course we should continue to be outraged over those A.I.G. bonuses, through every game. In fact, we should suspend the national anthem for one round and just send a collective boo in the direction of the insurance company’s headquarters.

Then, back to the dream. We can imagine those Hilltoppers of Western Kentucky doing what no 12th-seeded team has ever done: advancing beyond the regional final to the big one. Or we can wonder if the Bison of North Dakota State will at least force people to a map.

Geography lessons, by the way, are among the many side benefits of the tournament. Who knew Morgan was a State? Or where it’s located?

And yes, I know there are people who say that precious New York Times digital space should never be given up to … this! But those people probably didn’t watch Syracuse beat Connecticut last week in six overtimes, or have not seen sufficient replays of the greatest upset of them all: 8th-seeded Villanova’s stunner against Georgetown in 1985.

It makes sense that there’s an increase in the number of men who schedule their vasectomies at tournament time, giving them an excuse to lay around the house in mid-afternoon on a work week, or another chance to use the word seed. At least that’s what the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, so it has to be true.

In life, there are so few certainties. We muddle through wars, campaigns, jobs and attempts to make compost bins. In college basketball we have (1) an unknown outcome at tipoff and two hours later (2) an outcome! No appeals. No Bush versus Gore. No Franken versus Coleman. No Cramer versus Stewart (O.K., so Jim Cramer was more like Chattanooga playing Duke, a first-round slaughter).

But what about all the lost productivity, you say? All that time that could have been spent in meetings, and more meetings talking about how we feel about the previous meeting?

I bow to Jack Shafer, the media columnist for Slate, for nicely debunking the myth that March Madness cost employers nearly $4 billion. We simply replace one diversion with a far more focused one.

Do you think President Obama would have been shown filling out his bracket on ESPN this week in the White House Map Room if this was some frivolous waste of presidential oxygen? Hardly. He picked the Tar Heels of North Carolina to win it all — an easy choice. Always with the caution.

As any sane Bracketologist or reader of Malcolm Gladwell books will tell you: simply picking the better seeds can guarantee a high finish in the office pool. But why go safe? The thrill is in the upset.

Finally, a word about the Zags of Gonzaga and the Zips of Akron. For years, the little Jesuit school in Spokane was known primarily as the one-time home of Bing Crosby, a classmate of my grandfather’s, by the way. Then came basketball, and 11 straight tournament appearances by the Bulldogs.

Applications at the school have soared, as have donations and overall academic standards. Gonzaga has become, as one priest told me, the Duke of the West. You Zips of Akron could do the same thing except, I’m sorry to say, you’ll be going home after the Zags have their way with you on Thursday.

But better to have danced and lost, than never danced at all. ♥

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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