March Madness proves anyone can be a winner

So this is what all the fuss is about...Image via Wikipedia

Though things might have changed by the time you read this, right now I am ranked among the Top 10 in True/Slant’s March Madness competition. Indeed, my team, Suburban Smackdown, is in 9th place among 53 fierce competitors.

I’d like to tell you that I am an NCAA basketball genius prognosticator or some statistics whiz but the truth is that I know very little about the sport, other than people apparently run back and forth across the field court trying to shoot the puck ball into the net, and that Michael Jordan played it. I’d watch him do just about anything.

I also know very little about the teams competing in the tournament, did no research before making my picks and in fact, have to Google the correct spelling of Gonzaga every time I write it. I choose that team to go all the way just because I thought the name was kooky. Oh hang on, turns out this school is a Catholic university in Spokane, Wash. Who knew? Okay, if nothing else, joining the basketball pool has forced me to learn at least one new thing. Who says gambling can’t be educational?

I selected my teams, or my brackets, or whatever, in about five minutes simply by looking at the various teams and randomly clicking on the ones that I’d heard of/were in the Midwest/had funny names. When it came time to put down my tie-breaker score, I didn’t even know what typical scores were — in the 70s? 100s? 150s? — and admit that I did look up last year’s winning score to get at least some idea of what to put down. I’m not sure what this means about the other people’s methods of selection or my own dumb luck — I know, I know, we’re still early into this thing — but I am getting some weird thrill out of being in the Top 10.

Hey, I like office camaraderie as much as the next person so if this is the way to connect with my far-flung and virtual colleagues, then I’m in, even though I truly don’t understand the banter and what I think is trash talking amongst my fellow T/Sers. I also wouldn’t mind winning the $100 top prize, or even the $25 third place money, and since Michael Roston (who currently is in first place. Coincidence? I think not.) said his mother didn’t know anything about basketball either, yet still won some cash in her office pool, I decided to give it a try.

I hope this turns out better than the time I didn’t know anything about a banya either and blithely visited one while visiting a friend in Moscow. To my horror, I was made to strip naked and enter what essentially was a giant oven and be flogged with wet birch leaves. In my rush to get out of this most hottest of boxes, I slipped and scorched by arm, leaving a scar that only now seems to be fading, three years after the fact.

Even if I come in last place, it won’t be as bad as the subsequent oozing scab that I had after that banya mishap. So if there’s something new to try, count me in. Just no more birch leaves, please.