Behind the Ironic Column

Maybe brackets were made to be broken.  Or maybe I just should have known better – after all, I’ve never been in the habit of drawing up bracket forecasts.  For those who are oblivious to “March madness” or didn’t grow up in a basketball-obsessed state, what I’m talking about is the tournament brackets for the annual NCAA Men’s College Basketball championship.  It used to be a more restricted obsession but now it’s everywhere and the games are on regular TV during prime hours.  I’m still somewhat amazed at that, even many years after it started.  When I first moved away from N.C., I was disappointed to find that I could no longer see my basketball games.  Now, even living on the west coast, I can get almost all of them if I have the time to devote to watching.  The only drawback out here is that the feeds will show west coast teams if they’re playing, not my cherished ACC teams. 

People who grew up in Indiana and Kentucky understand that basketball obsession – I know they have it just as much as North Carolinians.  When I was in junior high, we had mandatory physical education and the teacher happened to be the high school basketball coach.  So our classes were basketball drills – not shooting but passing, dribbling, and, in my case, stealing the ball.  No one expected me to actually play basketball – I’m just under five feet tall now and I don’t think I was even that tall back in junior high.  The one place where being short is an advantage is taking the ball away from a player that’s quite a bit taller and not as good a ball-handler as she thinks she is.  When we moved on to high school, most of my classmates were on the basketball team.  I was in charge of fund-raising for some trip we wanted to take, so I sold snacks and hotdogs at the ball games to help raise money.  It was fun, we did make quite a bit of money, and I got in free to all the home ball games.  Most of those activities have now been outlawed by one regulation or another – if I remember this correctly, they let us make hotdogs and chili in the school kitchen.  Now we have soccer even in that small town, so things are different.  But my nieces play basketball – and I go watch them when I’m there for a visit.  And att his time of year my sister and I have to discuss whether “our” team is going to shape up and play its best during the tournaments.  Luckily we root for the same team. 

But none of that explains why I filled out a bracket scenario this year when I’ve resisted such things in the past.  I once worked at a law firm where it was almost mandatory to participate in the annual office pool – mostly related to the obsessions of a couple of senior partners.  I held out – my interest was in the game itself and in how ‘my’ teams fared – not so much in handicapping and picking an overall winner.  That probably all boils down to emotion and not logic – so it was definitely a money-saving tactic to refuse to bet. 

This year I have the luxury of being able to watch as many hours of basketball as there are – and I got off to a good start by watching almost every game of the ACC tournament which was the week before the start of the NCAA.  I also have the luxury of reading the newspaper more attentively than I have the last couple of years, so I noticed the huge bracket chart and the invitation to enter the contest.  So I tried to be logical – and I didn’t pick teams to win just because I’d like for them to win.  But by the middle of the first round, it’s obvious to me that I should go back to my former policy on brackets – they’re there to be watched, not to be run.  Now that my bracket choices won’t win me anything, I can relax and just watch the games – if it’s  possible to do that while still chewing my fingernails as a game comes down to a last second shot or goes into overtime.  My investment in these games is all from the heart – where it’s always been.

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