Hard Core Hits Hard Court

Bob McDonough paid a pile for his luxury suite at the Arrowhead Pond, but he doesn’t plan to sit there today when his Georgetown University Hoyas play the University of Maryland.

Instead, the 78-year-old Aliso Viejo businessman will head to the student section and find someone to swap seats. Go upstairs and eat the food and drink the booze, he’ll say. It’s on me.

What drives a man wealthy enough to donate $30 million to Georgetown, rich enough that his alma mater named its business school after him, to leave his castle to sit with the rabble?

March Madness.

The NCAA basketball tournament comes to town today with Georgetown playing Maryland in the West Regional semifinals, followed by Stanford and Cincinnati. The winners meet Saturday, and the winner of that game goes to Minneapolis for the Final Four championship round.

Don’t ask why Georgetown and Maryland, all of 12 miles apart, play in the West Regional unless you want to get into sports jargon like “RPIs” and “strength of schedule.” UCLA and USC, meanwhile, travel 3,000 miles to play in the East, and Penn State and Temple, located in the same state, play one another in the South.

College basketball fans anxiously wait all year for the tournament, which began last week. When it starts with 65 teams, it’s wall-to-wall basketball as the field is winnowed out and CBS flits from game to game. It’s your school against their school, the traditional powers against the upstarts, and boom time for sports bars. ESPN Zone at Downtown Disneyland opened for breakfast during the first round so people wouldn’t miss a basket.

Even non-fans get caught up in the excitement as they watch how they’re doing in the office pool.

Most Southern California hoop fans will be turning their attention East to see how the Bruins and Trojans fare, but in many parts of the country, the scramble has been to get to the Pond.

Students find cheap flights and crash on the couch of a friend of a friend while others spend as much as $2,000 to buy a center court seat at the Pond from a ticket agency. Aging alums fly across country to watch their teams, even though they would get a better view of the game sitting in front of the TV. Graduates of rival schools put friendships on hold.

“I received an e-mail from one of my Georgetown friends saying we’re not friends until Friday,” said Maryland alumnus Mike Howard, who is flying from Baltimore to be at today’s game.

Need more evidence that March Madness takes precedence?

Stanford’s new president was scheduled to speak to Southern California alumni today at the ritzy Century Plaza Hotel. Make nice to the alums and hope they reward the school by opening their checkbooks.

Then John Hennessy realized he had a conflict. A big conflict.

So the Century Plaza meeting was rescheduled for April.

Beyond the hoopla, there is, of course, money.

Each game a team plays in the NCAA tournament brings more money to the school’s conference. Based on a complicated formula, teams in the Pacific-10 Conference, which includes UCLA, USC and Stanford, are expected to receive an average of nearly $600,000 each when the money is divvied up next month. In all, $70 million in basketball revenue will be given to NCAA schools. Add to that the TV contract with CBS, which pays the NCAA $237 million a year.

But none of that matters to fans such as Dick Friedman, assistant to the University of Cincinnati’s president. A former student and current administrator and professor there, he has been at the school for 29 years, and a season ticket holder for most of them.

Without prompting, he rattles off by year not only the tour of the U.S. he has made over the decades to follow the Bearcats in their NCAA quest, but the schools that knocked the university out of contention.

This year he’s flying in for the regional along with 45 other members of the UCats booster club.

Travel agent Herb Reisenfeld, a season ticket holder who arranged their trip, is going along. When Reisenfeld was younger, and East meant East and West meant West, he drove to Kansas and Chicago for Cincinnati’s tournament games. “Guys hop in a car, and one guy drives and the others sleep,” he said.

The problem with being such a rabid fan is that during the tournament you can’t make plans too far in advance. Every tournament there are upsets galore, like this year, when Hampton--who?--beat Iowa State and Kent State beat longtime power Indiana. One loss--sudden death--and your team is out.

And suddenly you don’t want to make that cross-country trip anymore.

Seventy-year-old Cincinnati alum Robert Tragesser and his wife flew to San Diego on March 14 to watch the team play in the first two rounds. They flew back to Ohio on Monday, back to Southern California Wednesday, and they’ll go back home Monday.

If Cincinnati makes it to the Final Four in Minneapolis next week, will they be back on a plane again?

“Of course,” said Elaine Tragesser, sounding surprised anyone would even ask.

Paying the Price to Get There, Get In

Friedman and the Tragessers are the lucky ones. They arrived with tickets. Those who don’t already have them may be out of luck: they’re almost impossible to get. The NCAA controls most of the 18,008 tickets, selling them to sponsors and the teams. CBS also has a chunk.

Another 5,200 game tickets made available to the public were gone as soon as they went on sale through a mail-in lottery in late April. One ticket cost $90, which grants admission to all three games.

The four schools each received 1,250 tickets this week, which they sold to alumni, faculty, boosters and students.

Georgetown grad Gavin McKiernan, who lives in Huntington Beach, began calling the school’s ticket office at 5:45 a.m. Tuesday. He got through an hour later and bought four tickets.

That kind of dedication is nothing for the 26-year-old McKiernan. For the last nine years, he has gone to New York to see the Georgetown play in the Big East conference tournament, which determines who gets the automatic bid to the NCAAs.

“I visit my parents twice a year,” the Brooklyn native said. “Once at Thanksgiving and once at the Big East tournament.”

Even if hometown fans manage to get tickets, they still have to get to the game.

Fans of Stanford, the only school in the West regional that belongs there geographically, can scoot down the coast in less than eight hours. Georgetown, Maryland or Cincinnati? Try finding a reasonably-priced airline ticket at the last minute.

But that’s what Georgetown senior Ryan Dubose did. After he and a friend bought seven game tickets, Dubose went to priceline.com and bought a round-trip ticket from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles for $180. Even though his return flight leaves at 1:30 a.m. Monday with an hour layover in Dallas, it’s OK with him.

All that mattered to Dubose was getting here, since he’s president of the student booster club Hoya Blue. He and his friends couldn’t bring along their mascot, Jack the Bulldog, since he doesn’t travel well, but they’re otherwise prepared.

They’re the guys who will paint their faces and chests blue and gray, the school colors, wear curly wigs and wave their “Go Hoyas” foam paws.

“It’s just going to be crazy,” Dubose said.

They’re just the kind of guys that might catch McDonough’s eye.

“I want to be where the emotion is,” McDonough said, “rather than be with stuffy people my age.”

Told about Dubose and his friends, he quickly asked: “How do you spell their names? I’ll look for them.”