Loving to Hate ‘March Madness’

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I know that as an American male I am supposed to love the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, or “March Madness” as it was first termed by legendary sportscaster Brent Musberger. As someone who is interested in the game of basketball to the extent that I occasionally glance the NBA standings, and have attended a handful of Knicks and Nets games, I should, by mere association, have been glued to ESPN on the day the brackets were announced, and I should be plotting my picks and chomping at the bit to join the office pool. But I do not yearn for “March Madness,” and I have come to hate the hype that surrounds it.

Why is this the case? After all, I grew up in a household of Hoosiers, my parents having both graduated from Indiana University, where both of my maternal grandparents taught. I attended a few games at the field house, watched Bobby Knight’s face turn Indiana crimson on the television as he tossed chairs onto the court or whatever. Pretended I was Isiah Thomas as I dribbled around my suburban Chicago driveway even when there was still spring snow and muddy ice crackling underfoot.

Most of all, I recall my father’s contagious excitement when Indiana’s bracket was announced each year. Together, we’d study the steps of the ladder leading to the title, as if no greater diversion had ever been invented. More often than not, it seemed, Indiana would lose in the first round, my father’s face as red as Knight’s. “Turkeys!” he’d yell at the television in disgust.

From then on it was that lame consolation game of rooting for the team that had beat your team. Of course, yes, there were those years when the Hoosiers made us so very proud (I don’t remember the exact years, that’s what Wikipedia is for), and I’d leave the house elated and realize that my neighbors had been rooting for some other college and weren’t looking forward to hearing me or my father gloat.

But things change in life, and though I spent most of my childhood wearing red and white socks or sweatshirts or t-shirts or ski caps with the IU insignia proudly displayed, in my sophomore year of high school my parents were divorced and I moved with my mother away from the sports crazed Chicagoland sprawl. We took off from an airport where the different levels of the parking garage are not designated with ordinary numbers, but by one of city’s sports teams. “Remember, Honey, the car is on Cubs level.” And we landed in San Francisco, or, as some of my Illinois classmates called it, San Fagcisco.

Long story shorter, I ended up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a college with no big time sports programs, unless you counted ultimate frisbee. While attending the school, in protest of the idea of mascots, my fellow students and I voted in the banana slug as our official mascot. We applauded, too, when the university intentionally built a new pool one meter shy of the length it would need to be to qualify to hold N.C.A.A. competitions.

The bond I formed with my college was one of not needing to form a bond with my college, and it suited me just fine. I can’t really tell you what the school colors of Santa Cruz are. Blue and yellow (or is that Cal or UCLA)? Or whether there was a “fight song” or a slogan. Sororities and fraternities were banned at the place until after I left, and that suited me just fine. Never did I run into other students who had painted their chests in support this or that athletic team. Body paint was for acid trips and performance art, not synchronized cheering in a stadium.

So, from this evolution, I have come to view those who, long after having graduated, still cheer for their college sports teams with a bit of suspicion. Yes, like most people, I hold some nostalgia for my college years, but since I never rooted for a team there, I didn’t take that experience on as part of my nostalgia. And frankly, people like my own father, who do obsess over the performance of their college teams decades after they attended the school strike me as a tad odd. Glory days are all well and fine, but that’s why Vishnu created Facebook.

The past six years of my life have not helped my disdain for college sports fandom. Blame Jacksonville, Florida, that crossroads of college boosterism. It seems like every other lawn there is adorned with either an orange and blue alligator (mascot for the University of Florida)  the gold, red and black head of Indian chief (mascot for Florida State University), or a red black and white bulldog’s mug (mascot for the University of Georgia). People in Florida pick colleges to root for despite the fact that no one in their family has ever attended the school in question. And for the people who have, look out. The bond, for instance, between a Florida Gator fan and his or her orange and blue wardrobe is something to behold. Grateful Dead fans truly have nothing on Gator heads in terms of loyalty.

And for what? I know the games can be exciting, but college is still a time when athletes perform on an inferior level than they do in the pros, and I’m not sure there are enough hours in the day to spend on sports to watch anything but the highest quality that the world can deliver. True, everyone is shaped by past experiences, as my own antipathy for March Madness is shaped by my own, but, in the end, the buzzer beaters and brackets of the N.C.A.A. tournament seem too fleeting, too steeped in a need to relive the past. Cue Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.”  The annual excitement has a Pavlovian edge to it. Here we go again! It’s gonna be crazy!

Well, if you’re into the Madness, I hope you enjoy it. Send me an e-mail and let me know how it works out for you.