A Note From My Doctor

Now this is the truth. I was sick. I was not faking it. I had been prepared to spend the day hard at work, analyzing the rabid excitement that grips Californians as they anticipate a visit from . . . Bob Dole! Alas, I was confined to bed. Sore throat. Chills. Aches. Pains. The works. Honest.

As luck would have it--now there’s a phrase that reeks of influenza--the day I happened to be sick also happened to be what has become, arguably, the one good day in the land for watching sports on television. This was last Thursday, opening day of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Millions of Americans schedule days off or, yes, feign illnesses in order to watch this seamless, daylong parade of basketball games.

Myself, I just got lucky. In fact, I was surprised when I flicked on the set in the morning and spotted the San Jose State Spartans at play against the mighty Wildcats of Kentucky. I was more surprised when the score flashed across the screen. San Jose--the only squad in the 64-team tournament with a losing record, a team distinguished mainly by the fact that one of its forwards speaks French--actually was ahead, 26-24.

“Would someone please tell the Spartans they are playing Kentucky?” CBS commentator George Raveling, the former USC coach, screamed into the microphone.

“Can this really be happening?”

I muted the volume and telephoned my editor.

“Sick,” I rasped.

“Sore throat.”

*

For the uninitiated, the allure of the opening round of the NCAA tournament needs to be explained. This is an event that demonstrates by exception just about everything wrong with big-time American sports. It is not bulletin material that the sports world has fallen into gaudy disrepair: “Sports are over,” sportswriter Robert Lipsyte declared in a New York Times Magazine essay last April, “because they no longer have any moral resonance. They are merely entertainment, the bread and circuses of a New Rome.” Talent follows money--in college as well as the pros--and this produces predictable results, and predictable results are boring. As Charles Barkley, the Phoenix Sun star, recently advised a 4-year-old: “Why not go to Auburn? It’s a good school, and they pay well.”

In whimsy, like wine, truth.

Many people I know now look elsewhere for whatever it was sports once gave them. They trek each year to Arizona for spring training, hoping that there, at least, ballplayers will exhibit a sense of joy for the game. Or they flick off the tube and take up participatory activities; sandlot leagues for older baseball and basketball players are thriving. One friend has become a devotee of women’s college basketball, saying it offers a sports purity no longer in evidence on the other side of the Title IX divide.

And then there are the NCAA tournament junkies, the people who carve away two weekdays every March to watch the opening round. (Not me. I just happened to be sick. Did I mention my throat was sore?) This is where slender Davids are thrown up against hordes of Goliaths. It is where the moneyedpowerhouses like Kentucky and Duke and UCLA do battle with the Monmouths and Drexels and, yes, you poor Bruin fans, the Princetons.

“Could this be,” Raveling bawled as San Jose scored another basket against top-seeded Kentucky, “. . . 12 ants beating the elephant?”

*

No, that would come later, when Princeton upset UCLA. San Jose kept up with Kentucky for one half, and then got clobbered. Still, that one half of basketball was more memorable than a season of standard-issue NBA games. The chance to watch small college teams scare squadrons of sky-leapers explains much of the early tournament’s attraction. It does not cover it all.

That many games are played in the daytime hours of a workday also adds appeal--reminiscent of those golden times before the World Series went prime time, when school hallways rattled with the announcer-chatter of a hundred covert transistor radios. Also, the emotions run uncommonly high. After one upset Thursday, the cameras caught tears flowing from two players, one coach--and untold gamblers. There is pleasure, too, in rooting against the unseen experts of the NCAA tournament committee, which seeds the teams. As Steve Forbes proved in Arizona, if nowhere else, nothing beats proving experts wrong.

Indeed, it occurred to me, in my fevered state (I was sick; that’s why I was home) that the tournament appeal in a way mirrors that of the early presidential primaries. They are the time of the small towns, not the big cities. They are the lone moment of opportunity for mavericks and un-moneyed candidates, the ones The Experts never see coming. I suspect that this will prove to be a problem for Dole. His candidacy is one that was supposed to happen. He is Kentucky and Duke. Give us Gonzaga, the people cry, now as always. Give us Monmouth.