Spending time with daughter: Priceless

From Las Vegas — 

Life is good.

In the last three days, I have spent 33 hours with the daughter watching 41 basketball games in the Mandalay Bay sports book.

I’d like to think the daughter would spend 33 hours with her old man if there wasn’t available alcohol, gambling and hundreds of guys looking for a good time, but whatever, we’ve been doing this together now for a decade.

How many parents out there would give anything to spend any time with their kid long after their kid is no longer a kid? How many kids want to spend time later with their parents?

I’d almost go so far as saying there’s nothing like it, although to be honest one more point from Tennessee, which would have made the winning difference on a three-team parlay, would probably be right there.

Life is so good when you a know a teaching administrator from Iowa, Cary Justmann, a Dodgers fan who likes to donate money to children’s hospitals just because, who is always here in Las Vegas for this opening week of the tournament, but this year is with the family on spring break in Florida.

And now his very own school, Northern Iowa, has everyone on their feet here, noise like the Clippers have never heard, and why this really is madness, the team from the sticks about to knock off No. 1. Good things happening to good people, now if only his wife let him watch.

Life is very good when Ann Meyers Drysdale is a great friend. She takes time away from her job with women’s basketball, like anyone is going notice, to fill out an NCAA tournament bracket.

She calls on D.J. for help, mother and son together, and she loves it, the two of them talking sports as they always do, one of them failing to save the other, though, when it comes to sticking Notre Dame into the Final Four.

She e-mails to remind everyone, “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” but that’s after Notre Dame has already lost. They must allow do-overs in the women’s game.

Life is good, all right, and I realize I’m beginning to write like Plaschke. But that’s OK, Maree Hoeger stopping by to introduce her parents.

Never met Maree before, but her parents are the only two readers in the greater L.A. area who enjoy Page 2, and she wants to know whether Page 2 would say hello to them.

I would have driven to their home.

Maree is wearing a coon skin hat in honor of Fess Parker’s passing and she’s got her boyfriend with her. The daughter gets her hair styled, and she’s got her father with her.

Anyway, Maree is gushing, “I have the best parents on the planet,” and she’s willing to argue with anyone who says differently. The daughter argues she has a great mother.

Maree has no interest in the NCAA tournament, she says, but here she is because it’s a chance to spend time with her parents, who are a hoot, just like their daughter.

Life is looking up, just 17 years to go before the 7-Eleven Kid makes it a father-daughter-granddaughter annual event, the twins then making it a crowd.

By then there’s a good chance the daughter will be married.

MGM Mirage bookmaker Jay Rood is calculating the odds. He’s also central to the guys’ efforts to remain ahead of the girls in the Bracket Challenge to help out some kids, which is downright scary because he had Villanova in the Final Four.

It’s a good thing he takes bets for a living and doesn’t make them.

“Most importantly,” as Mark Hartney put it on behalf of the beneficiaries, the Boys & Girls Club of Hollywood, “money contributed goes directly to the cost of running our valuable programs, and $1,000 makes a big difference in the lives of some really wonderful kids.”

Is there anything better than making a difference in a kid’s life?

LIFE IS bad, too, and almost inconceivable when life is so good.

Someone in the extended family has a drug problem. Seventeen years old, been using “stuff” since they were 11. Eleven! Am I naive? Yes, I am.

Stops going to school after freshman year, sniffs heroin, and why would anyone do that? Enters a treatment center, released recently to spend some time with Page 2 and the family — now how’s that for treatment?

It doesn’t work out, but in a sober moment our extended family member explains what life was like every day, “everyone getting messed up, just sitting around, bored and out of it but telling each other” we’re going to get clean tomorrow. Sure.

Just a kid. No kid should have such troubles. Am I naive? Yes, I am.

Easy to say, “Where are the parents?” So, where are the parents? But when you’ve never walked in those shoes, well, anyway, thank God.

It’s impossible to grasp what families must go through hour to hour when drugs take a grip of a loved one. You have no idea how many families have been touched by drugs until you start talking to other families about extended family troubles.

I never felt so lucky and here I sit losing most of the daughter’s inheritance on a bunch of college kids running around in their shorts.

Offered a recent preview of what it’s like to watch someone toss their life away, it’s beyond frustrating, exhausting to comprehend and haunting the way it just won’t go away.

The words, “rock bottom” are actually considered good news.

Maybe that’s why these 33 hours this weekend with the daughter, as wonderful as she can be when you fund her parlays, have been as good as any 33 hours spent here the last decade. That and the fact the Lakers were playing Minnesota, giving Minnesota 15½ points and talk about a sure bet — no way the Lakers would play hard enough to win by that much.

The Lakers win by eight, and the daughter wonders why I’m hugging her, knowing I’m never happy when the Lakers win.

Just a father-daughter moment, every father and daughter should share.

t.j.simers@latimes.com