An Alternative View at Tournament Time

Because it’s March Madness, because it’s a national office pool obsession, because it’s a spectacle that dances with joy and because it’s happening even as bombs fall on Baghdad, I mentioned the NCAA basketball tournament to a dear friend.

She said, “What’s a basketball?”

She’s paying no attention to basketball because her heart and mind have important business. Her oldest son is at war. Where, she doesn’t know. Maybe moving in Afghanistan’s mountains or arriving in Kuwait or crossing the Iraqi desert toward Baghdad. Wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, he’s in harm’s way -- and she’s his mother, waiting.

Basketball?

What’s a basketball?

Yet we come to the dance and we see the gloriously doofus duck mascot from Oregon lift an orange webbed foot to show the message, “Support Our Troops.” Better, we see Matt Crenshaw standing at attention for the national anthem. Six years in U.S. Navy whites, now he’s in a basketball uniform. We see him rub his chest, there above the heart. At song’s end, he snaps off a military salute. He’s thinking of an old buddy, a Marine, another young man at peril.

“We’d work out together,” says Crenshaw, a 6-foot-4 junior guard at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. “We’d play ball together.”

How tall is he?

“Five-nine.”

Post him up a lot?

Laughing now: “Oh, he’s strong, you know. A Marine. Those guys, strong.”

IUPUI made it to the NCAA dance on Crenshaw’s game-winning shot in the Mid-Continent Conference tournament. Former vice president Dan Quayle’s alma mater, the alphabet-soup commuter school with 29,000 students came to the tournament as a 16th seed -- meaning it would play a No. 1.

Crenshaw liked the idea of going against Kentucky.

But now?

Now, when bombs fell on Baghdad?

At the brightest moment in IUPUI basketball history, Matt Crenshaw wasn’t sure he wanted to play at all.

He’s 27 years old. His Navy ports of call included California, Virginia, Cuba, Egypt and Washington, D.C. A military brat from Fort Hood in Texas, he knows that service means danger even in peacetime training exercises, let alone when somebody wants you dead.

He’d known another Navy man, Kevin Wayne Yokum, an information systems technician who worked in the Pentagon and was there the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Yokum was one of 184 killed at the Pentagon on that last morning of peace in America.

And now, play a kid’s game in a time of war?

Sometimes Crenshaw feels guilty about having left the Navy, not being in this war. But he’s a father now, of Michael, 5, and Mikayla, 4. If ever he were to play college basketball, it was time. An All-Navy and All-Armed Forces player, Crenshaw had three Division I scholarship offers, from George Mason, Tennessee-Martin and IUPUI.

Life had brought him to this basketball place.

And then he heard from his buddy, the Marine, the short and strong Gabori Partee, who sent an e-mail from Kuwait.

“He told me, ‘Go out and play, hard,’ ” Crenshaw said. “He said he’d pray for me, and I wrote him back saying I’d pray for him. So I got peace of mind from him. If I hadn’t gotten that, my heart and mind would have been somewhere else other than basketball. I wanted it to be a special game.”

So when they finished the national anthem, and when even those who oppose this war cheered the men and women fighting it, Matt Crenshaw thought of Gabori Partee and rubbed his chest, there above the heart.

Then, in IUPUI’s locker room before the game, Coach Ron Hunter asked Crenshaw to address the team. It’s a thing coaches do.

They ask veteran players to put a frame on the night’s game, tell the kids what’s important about it, why it’s important, how to handle what’s going to happen under pressure. After all, Hunter had cracked wise with reporters, “They’ve got guys who’ve played in the McDonald’s All-Star games, and we’ve got guys who eat at McDonald’s.”

But now the coach had more in mind than basketball.

What’s a basketball?

There were bombs in Baghdad.

So the coach asked the old boatswain’s mate to say a few words to his teammates, most of whom were in the fifth or sixth grade when Matt Crenshaw joined the Navy in 1994.

“I told them the simple truth,” Crenshaw said. The truth is, he cared much less about Kentucky star Keith Bogans than about Marine Sgt. Gabori Partee. “I told them, ‘This game is nothing compared to what those guys in Iraq are facing.’ ”

When Crenshaw checked his e-mail a day or two after the game, he saw a note from Gabori Partee that had arrived late.

“He said, ‘I’m hoping for an upset,’ ” Crenshaw said.

Alas, IUPUI lost, 95-64. But for 25 minutes, with Crenshaw controlling the ball against Kentucky’s unrelenting pressure, IUPUI stayed near enough to say it conducted itself honorably.

In the two weeks since, Matt Crenshaw has been catching up with book work in preparation for tests. He has seen enough of the happy NCAA dance on television to keep up with Kentucky. Mostly when he watches television, he’s watching the war.

What, after all, is a basketball?