Back in the forties, when I was a boy, I was a Dodgers fan …
A Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Those were the days when there were eight
teams in each league, none of them, for God’s sake, on the West Coast, one
hundred fifty-four games a season, and no need for asterisks next to
records. Football and Basketball meant
nothing to me, I had never heard of soccer, and save for the two occasions on
which I actually went to a game [in one of which I saw Rex Barney pitch a
no-hitter against the Giants at the Polo Grounds], my connection to baseball
was the little radio on which I could listen to the play-by-play after I had
gone to bed.
Well, the Dodgers moved to LA, the Giants moved to San
Francisco, and nobody I knew rooted for the Yankees. That would have been like rooting for General
Motors. In the Sixties, when I was
teaching at Columbia [or, as it calls itself, Columbia University in New York
City], I had a brief fling with the Mets, and rooted for Cleon Jones the year
he hit 340. I even sat in the bleachers
at Fenway and watched Yaz during my years at Harvard. But real serious fandom died in me when the
Dodgers left town.
Nine years ago, after I retired, Susie and I moved to Chapel
Hill. I had dragged her north from here
in ’87 to marry me, and it seemed only fair to return the compliment twenty-one
years later. I knew Chapel Hill was a
college town, so the first thing I did was to go downtown looking for a bookstore. I figured there had to be one, what with UNC
Chapel Hill being a big deal State University and all, but when I found it, it
seemed to be selling nothing but Tar Heels memorabilia in a sickening shade of
light blue. I very quickly learned that
the university and the entire town were basketball crazy. Michael Jordan could have been elected mayor
unopposed if he had not considered it beneath him. Instead he opened a Nissan dealership in the
next town over.
Which brings me to the Sweet Sixteen. Every American, even those consumed by
radical politics, knows that the annual NCAA men’s basketball championship,
known as March Madness, is a six round sixty-four team elimination played over
three weekends. On the first weekend,
the sixty-four are winnowed down to sixteen – the Sweet Sixteen. The next weekend, which begins tonight at
7:30 Eastern Time, reduces the survivors to four, The Final Four. On the final weekend, the semis and finals
are played and a champion is crowned.
UNC Chapel Hill has won five championships, far and away the
greatest boast of this supposedly educational institution. Not even a horrific scandal involving twenty
years of phony grades awarded to basketball players [and frat boys, but nobody
seems to have cared about them] could weaken the loyalty of the entire
town. It tells you pretty much all you
need to know that the coach makes two and a half times as much as the University
Chancellor.
This year, UNC Chapel Hill was seeded first in its bracket,
and having won its first two games, will participate tomorrow evening in the
Round of Sixteen. I have been compelled
by irresistible social pressure to pretend to root for the Tar Heels. My wife, who is a fanatic basketball lover,
actually divides her loyalties between UNC and the Duke Blue Devils, but since
Duke was obliterated last weekend by a lower rated opponent, she is free to put
all her considerable support behind the Tar Heels.
So don’t try to reach me tomorrow evening. I shan’t be picking up the phone.
4 comments:
[or, as it calls itself, Columbia University in New York City]
It's even worse than that, these days at least: "Columbia University in the City of New York."
Don't worry, I wouldn't call you. Pretending to root for the Tar Heels is even worse than actually rooting for them. Yes I am just a bitter UConn fan after a disappointing season.
The great thing about sports is that it really doesn't matter, which liberates us to give voice to our deepest, meanest, most irrational partisanship. I am the worst kind of fan. I rooted for Tiger Woods when he was winning, and said "never mind" when he went south.
That was a rather long-winded way to not admit that you are a real-live Tar Heel now ;)
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