On Basketball Tournaments...
I’ve certainly dug myself a hole with my ill advised promises of blog fidelity for the week. I don’t know why I feel like I have to fulfill that particular vow. It’s not like the blog and I stood in front of some clergy type and proclaimed a sort of matrimony. Yet nevertheless, my pappy always told me to make good on my word, so here I be…
I have never had much use for this thing that you call basketball. It’s not because of any height issues either. I stand a respectable six feet vertically and can sometimes actually see over people’s heads. Besides, I love to play volleyball…a sport where height does make some sort of positive difference. My athleticism, while never astounding, did exist as my peewee days of baseball and soccer will attest. I dabbled with tennis and played a mean game of two-hand touch. Sometimes there were even flags... A respectable amount of the wiffle balls I hit did land over the fence, although I was a bit of a line drive specialist.
So I’m not sure what happened between basketball and me, but we just never hit it off. Don’t get me wrong. If you gave me a basketball, it’s not like I have no idea what to do with it. There may be a high percentage chance that I’d never get it to actually go through the hoop, but I would at least get it in the area. There was even a time in college that I ran around the courts making a fool of myself on a daily basis. My two roommates were known to “ball”…they may have even had a certain amount of “game”. I guess I figured it was exercise and why not… Because I’m terrible at it is why…but I was in denial at the time. I guess it’s really about the only experimentation I did in college. I experimented with basketball…and I am ashamed.
I think the real reason I didn’t much care for that kind of activity was because I had no desire to watch pro basketball. To this day the NBA seems to me to be a total waste of time. We do have the Washington Wizards, and I do recognize that much of the total idiocy that plagued that team from the past two decades or more is finally over, I'm not exactly glued to the TV...or the stats line in the paper. No, I am not immune to the feats that Michael Jordan apparently performed on the court, but I can promise you that I may have missed some of his more amazing moments behind the yawn I was currently engaged in.
The only time I’ve ever enjoyed watching basketball was in attending the games at JMU. For the first two years of college, we actually had what passed for a team, and even made it to the NCAA Tournament in 1994. You may have heard of this tournament. It’s going on right now…well, maybe not at this moment, but it will resume again at the end of this week. I’m not sure why I caught the bug then. I guess there is something about being in attendance that always makes you feel more into it. I bet I'd feel the same way about a Monster Truck rally.
For my roommates and many of their group of friends, March Madness was something special. Just like most offices around the country we had our “pools” where we meticulously calculated each and every bracket. One of my roommates who eschewed the finer things, like Shakespeare, even created a replica of the brackets that took up an entire wall. He had a lot of free time. Hotel/Restaurant Management wasn't exactly taxing him. And of course, I was one of the lemmings… I even put down my parents hard earned tuition money on this idiocy.
You may think that I bring this up now because, as stated, the tournament is at hand. Well, sort of… But something even worse has happened. Let me provide some warning beforehand though, for those of you who are members of my family. We are about to talk about Virginia things here. Things that are way out of your comfort zone…if not above your head.
I am, of course, talking about George Mason University making the Sweet 16. How this happened, I’m not sure. I mean, GMU, as all Virginians know, is a commuter school. Of the tens of thousands of people who claim this as their institute of higher education, about a dozen of them have ever lived on campus. I’m not saying they don’t have dorms…I’ve seen actual evidence of them, I’m just saying they aren’t all that…used. I'm just saying, you don't think GMU when you are trying to get the normal college experience. You think commute...and traffic...and parking authorities...
GMU has been whooping my alma mater for the past few years in the unsweet science of basketball. They are in the same Conference, the CAA. For years, the CAA, which I believe is one of the automatic bids for the NCAA Tournament, was synonymous with low seed…and an easy win for the big schools. It's not like the CAA ever really proved otherwise, although JMU did almost take down Florida (a 4 seed) in 1994. That GMU is the team that is giving the CAA cred…that’s incredibley embarassing to me. I mean, they don’t even have a football team. No American school can really be considered accredited unless they have a football team. And one of my good friends is a GMU grad…he’s going to be insufferable now.
The worst thing about this whole fiasco is not simply that it’s GMU's accomplishment. It’s that I’m actually rooting for them…in a basketball tournament. I've done some pretty unforgivable things in my life, but this one goes further than I've ever been. I'm in uncharted waters here...and I'm digging it...
I have never had much use for this thing that you call basketball. It’s not because of any height issues either. I stand a respectable six feet vertically and can sometimes actually see over people’s heads. Besides, I love to play volleyball…a sport where height does make some sort of positive difference. My athleticism, while never astounding, did exist as my peewee days of baseball and soccer will attest. I dabbled with tennis and played a mean game of two-hand touch. Sometimes there were even flags... A respectable amount of the wiffle balls I hit did land over the fence, although I was a bit of a line drive specialist.
So I’m not sure what happened between basketball and me, but we just never hit it off. Don’t get me wrong. If you gave me a basketball, it’s not like I have no idea what to do with it. There may be a high percentage chance that I’d never get it to actually go through the hoop, but I would at least get it in the area. There was even a time in college that I ran around the courts making a fool of myself on a daily basis. My two roommates were known to “ball”…they may have even had a certain amount of “game”. I guess I figured it was exercise and why not… Because I’m terrible at it is why…but I was in denial at the time. I guess it’s really about the only experimentation I did in college. I experimented with basketball…and I am ashamed.
I think the real reason I didn’t much care for that kind of activity was because I had no desire to watch pro basketball. To this day the NBA seems to me to be a total waste of time. We do have the Washington Wizards, and I do recognize that much of the total idiocy that plagued that team from the past two decades or more is finally over, I'm not exactly glued to the TV...or the stats line in the paper. No, I am not immune to the feats that Michael Jordan apparently performed on the court, but I can promise you that I may have missed some of his more amazing moments behind the yawn I was currently engaged in.
The only time I’ve ever enjoyed watching basketball was in attending the games at JMU. For the first two years of college, we actually had what passed for a team, and even made it to the NCAA Tournament in 1994. You may have heard of this tournament. It’s going on right now…well, maybe not at this moment, but it will resume again at the end of this week. I’m not sure why I caught the bug then. I guess there is something about being in attendance that always makes you feel more into it. I bet I'd feel the same way about a Monster Truck rally.
For my roommates and many of their group of friends, March Madness was something special. Just like most offices around the country we had our “pools” where we meticulously calculated each and every bracket. One of my roommates who eschewed the finer things, like Shakespeare, even created a replica of the brackets that took up an entire wall. He had a lot of free time. Hotel/Restaurant Management wasn't exactly taxing him. And of course, I was one of the lemmings… I even put down my parents hard earned tuition money on this idiocy.
You may think that I bring this up now because, as stated, the tournament is at hand. Well, sort of… But something even worse has happened. Let me provide some warning beforehand though, for those of you who are members of my family. We are about to talk about Virginia things here. Things that are way out of your comfort zone…if not above your head.
I am, of course, talking about George Mason University making the Sweet 16. How this happened, I’m not sure. I mean, GMU, as all Virginians know, is a commuter school. Of the tens of thousands of people who claim this as their institute of higher education, about a dozen of them have ever lived on campus. I’m not saying they don’t have dorms…I’ve seen actual evidence of them, I’m just saying they aren’t all that…used. I'm just saying, you don't think GMU when you are trying to get the normal college experience. You think commute...and traffic...and parking authorities...
GMU has been whooping my alma mater for the past few years in the unsweet science of basketball. They are in the same Conference, the CAA. For years, the CAA, which I believe is one of the automatic bids for the NCAA Tournament, was synonymous with low seed…and an easy win for the big schools. It's not like the CAA ever really proved otherwise, although JMU did almost take down Florida (a 4 seed) in 1994. That GMU is the team that is giving the CAA cred…that’s incredibley embarassing to me. I mean, they don’t even have a football team. No American school can really be considered accredited unless they have a football team. And one of my good friends is a GMU grad…he’s going to be insufferable now.
The worst thing about this whole fiasco is not simply that it’s GMU's accomplishment. It’s that I’m actually rooting for them…in a basketball tournament. I've done some pretty unforgivable things in my life, but this one goes further than I've ever been. I'm in uncharted waters here...and I'm digging it...
posted by Beeley at 1:45 PM
2 Comments:
Basketball....yaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwn.
Sorry, dude. I didn't even read the blog because basketball is THAT boring. But if it will make you feel better, The Citadel's basketball team is set to take on the Mrs. Manner's School for Young Women's JV basketball team in the next week. The Citadel players are pretty hopeful of a victory since there is always the chance that the MMSYM team's bus may get a flat tire on the way to the game and have to forfeit.
In other news, Strongbad has answered a new email earlier this week....
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail149.html
Buh-bye now.
Just so you know... you have more than one friend that graduated from GMU and some of us even lived on campus! Not only have we seen the dorms, we lived in them… what’s more we survived them. We still had to battle the parking authorities, but at least we got the "college experience".
Of course, none of us GMUers can forget, nor can we stand the purple thing we call a mascot... I'm actually surprised you didn't mention him being that he jumps along the sidelines trying to inspire school spirit, and failing at his task miserably... oh, well, another day another blogg.
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