Nerds on Sports

On Saturday night, the Boston College men’s hockey team beat Notre Dame to capture the national championship.  As an alumni, obsessed fan and former mascot, this pleases me greatly.  But I wasn’t as absolutely thrilled as I thought I’d be.  For the past two years, the BC team had their season ended with a championship game loss.  Accordingly, for the past two years, I was crushed.  Just flat out crushed.  Hockey is our sport.  We own hockey.  Yes, BC has a perennial Top 25 football team and a basketball team that makes the tournament most years, but hockey is our thing.  We pull the best recruits in and usually win three times as many games as we lose.  And so getting to the finals of the Frozen Four and losing is agony.

And that got me thinking.  When you love a team, losing hurts far more than winning heals.  When the Yankees won the World Series a few times in the 90s, I was thrilled each time.  But since, each early playoff exit hurts me like having an old wound throb.  When they won, I celebrated for a nighta and woke up the next day feeling good.  But when they lost, I was out of commission for a whole weekend.  It seems hardly fair.  Why is the human mind so geared towards wallowing in heartache and so ill-prepared for good fortune?

I was focusing on this so much that the taste of victory started losing its zest.  I began to dwell on how bad it would’ve been to lose.  If Notre Dame beat us, it would’ve been entirely unacceptable to BC diehards.  They would be calling for Coach Jerry York’s head.  Their message boards would be alive with lamentations over the end of hockey dominance in Chestnut Hill.  I began feeling as if I had just survived a plane crash instead of feeling like I witnessed my alma mater win a championship.

What a terrible way to live.  Happiness is fleeting and the default mode of the sports fan is crushing disappointment.  Why do we do this to ourselves?  I wish I had an answer but I don’t.  Though I suppose it beats staying home alone.

Bounce, bounce, bounce.

Twirl the ball backwards from fingertips to palm.

Bend your knees, make the T with your fingertips.

Aim just over the front rim. Release and follow-thru towards the hoop, not back.

You gotta hit your free throws.

Some purists, George Will types mostly, claim baseball to be the greatest of our sports, because it is untimed. Therefore, a team can and will trail but can never be counted out by the clock. They get their three outs to keep themselves alive. Yet in basketball the clock does stop and allow for free throws, the shots that salt away leads or chip away at deficits, and the game is reduced to its similarly pure form: one player, one ball, one basket. It’s both beautifully basic and terrifyingly naked. There’s no defense, quite literally, for a miss.

And tonight in San Antonio, there were plenty of misses and no defense. In the most tense, exciting, and dramatic NCAA Championship of the decade, the overtime spectacle really lasted only 40 minutes. For once the Final Four orphans Memphis and Kansas tipped off their five minute curtain call re-knotted at 63, the game was over before it began again. The look on the sidelines said more than enough. Kansas players pushed each other and fidgeted in their seats, eventually standing up and hopping with anticipation. On the other sideline, the Tigers sat stonefaced, occasionally glancing up at the scoreboard like they were looking for a stolen wallet. Derrick Rose cramped up at the end of regulation and had to be helped off the court, only to be shoved back out there to save the season. It could have all been over with, if.

Carolina Blue and Westwood Gold suffered spankings on Saturday night, but their fates now seem much more preferable to the public gutwrenching of the Memphis Tigers and their two leaders, the All-America Chris Douglas-Roberts and the All-But-Gone Rose. The four missed free throws between them in the final 1:15, especially CDR’s no-for-two with 16 seconds left, opened the door on an improbable 9 point, 2 minute Jayhawk comeback a sliver of an inch. And, once Coach John Calipari’s goal of fouling to prevent chaos went down the drain (”We didn’t foul hard enough,” he offered), Mario Chalmers snuck around a high screen and launched a three point dagger (”Like I was in my own backyard,” he said to FOX Radio) that dropped through the net, the net of Jordan, Lorenzo Charles, Keith Smart, Scotty Thurman, and the other faded memories of NCAA titles long past. Memphis sleptwalked through the overtime, an eventual 75-68 final, and is now left to daydream about the nets they didn’t cut down.

The NCAA runners-up cap off the winningest season in college basketball history with the most painful loss in title game history. No team has ever blown such a large lead in a small frame of time. It takes a great deal to wipe Darius Washington’s agony off the list of the most painful charity stripe moments in a school’s history, but even as we speak these free throws are joining Bill Buckner at Shea, Jean van de Velde in the wee burn at Carnoustie, and Gene Mauch and the Phightin’ Phils, taking their seat on Scott Norwood’s 38 yard line. Memphis has had a fairly nondescript basketball past, with a couple of Final Fours and the receiving end of Bill Walton’s biggest day. Tonight they had their best chance to date to unfurl a banner, and oh, once you get one, they can’t take it away. The worst part is that no one–not Bill Self, not Mario Chalmers, not Billy Packer–no one took it away, either. In gagging on the sport’s most basic play, the Tigers simply failed to take what was rightfully theirs. It’s a sharp gouge to the basketball fan’s soul.

But it’s a hurt with blame attached to it. Even the aforementioned Rumeal Robinson, a Michigan man with the 64% touch, nailed down the 1989 championship (in overtime, no less) with two straight swishes to give interim coach Steve Fisher an interim one-point title victory. The free throw comes down to focus and mechanics; some kids have ‘em, some kids don’t. And the two players that didn’t were the architects of this whole empire; everything this team had built rested on their shoulders. It was their right to go up to that line and cinch the glory. And they couldn’t do it. One more make and the story of the 2008 Memphis Tigers is of a breakneck, athletic, speedy and utterly dominating (nearly 19 ppg average margin) force, one of the great teams of the decade and maybe of all time (a win would have ended them at 39-1). But the result is what it is, and now the late-game woes will be seen as a microcosm of their season, a slow pendulum swinging all year long and waiting to rear its ugly head at an inevitably climactic moment. And it did, and so shall it be.

Now Memphis has hit its head on the top of the curve, and away they go from grand pomp to dire circumstances. Rose and Douglas-Roberts are likely gone; Calipari’s road won’t get much easier anytime soon, and everywhere they go, the team will be hounded by the airing of their own hideous baggage. Teams from the non-power conferences don’t get many chances at the top; check out where Cincinnati or UNLV are right now, far removed from past glories. For 6 months, 38 minutes, and 9 seconds, the University of Memphis had just about the best basketball team in the country. Sometimes, though, you only get one shot to stand alone.

You’d better hit it.

Tennessee coach Pat Summitt and UConn coach Geno Auriemma are baffled over new developments.

TAMPA, FL–The UConn Women’s Huskies and Tennessee Lady Volunteers’ NCAA Women’s Championship basketball game has been hijacked this month by sixty-two additional games played by some 60+ additional teams. The championship, previously scheduled for March 12, will be pushed all the way to April 8. Some of these charlatan universities inexplicably challenged the two schools to matchups themselves.

“It’s just rude, quite frankly,” said UConn coach Geno Auriemma. “Our girls were looking forward to our annual preordained slugfest when I got a call from Erica (Naughton, NCAA “Selection Committee”) ordering me to face off against this Cornell school, or something. Never heard of them. Then we had to keep playing more until she was satisfied. I told her, ‘Yeah, sure I’ll play Rutgers, and beat them in the friggin’ regular season finale a month ago’, but she had none of it. Politics, maybe.”

Less understanding were the players themselves. All-American freshman Maya Moore wondered aloud why so many other teams faced off across the country. “I don’t understand what these ‘Regional Tournaments’ are. Is this like, for charity?” Moore said, flipping through the scouting reports of Tennessee offenses as she has each day since mid-October. “It’s very weird.”

“What the hell’s a Texas A&M?” asked Tennessee forward Candace Parker. Read more »

As of Wednesday they remain at seventeen wins and zero losses. Their woefully overmatched opponents cower in fear, thankful they won’t run into such awesome force again. The offense is nearly unstoppable, running up the score with speed and long-range outbursts. The talent disparity is ungodly, separating them from…the rest. They are on an inexorable march to the southwest, where they will be heavy favorites to take their crown. Some players still show flashes of youthful exuberance, but they are well cautioned to avoid revealing it to their stoic coach, a surefire Hall of Famer now fully moved out of his mentor’s grand shadow. On Sunday, February 3, they will likely be striding confidently as undefeated, but today they still face the enormous pressure of history. The mythical unbeaten heroes of over thirty years ago refuse to go quietly; each passing year grows their legend. But there is little doubt in my mind that this team will quiet any doubters and run the table to 19 and 0.

Of course, North Carolina will still be 21 wins away from a perfect season. Read more »

First SoCal and Geaux Tigers had their toes in the door
Then Stanford shocked SoCal, the doormats no more!
So Just Cal moved to 2nd in all football land
(Thanks a ton, Cardinal, and again for the band!)

But Just Cal stumbled when Kevin Riley slipped
On a junior high brainfart when his legs took a trip
Now Just Cal is gone and what the hell? LSU?
Kentucky in three OTs leaves them feeling blue Read more »

Recently the internet pipe trucks have been full of mascot news and stories, and I’m not one to buck the trend. But before I get into the links I have a story. Back in my college days, I had a terrible job. (Well, maybe job isn’t the right word because the only “payment” I received was a pair of pants. And not good pants, maroon warm-ups — like the athletes that are sitting on the bench wear.) So, back in college I had this terrible work-like activity I did.

I didn’t gain any recognition for what I did, but everyone got to see me (sometimes even on TV). I had to work at random hours. I was punched by kids of all ages, but I also got my picture taken with even more kids. I did get to wear cool credentials that gave me access to the secret underground tunnels. Sometimes there was even some free food. I had to ride in a bus with either the cheerleaders or the band. It was my choice, but how do you make that choice? On one hand, you have some decent looking women who are completely vapid and only want to talk about which members of the football team they’ve slept with. On the other hand, you have a group who barely dates outside the group and have limited social skills. (I usually went with the band — a nerd really can’t fault someone too much for their social skills.)

I was Baldwin, The Boston College eagle. Read more »

Thanksgiving has, over the years, evolved into the perfect storm of sloth and gluttony.  The trip home is usually exhausting enough that you want to spend Thanksgiving Eve half asleep on an old high school buddy’s couch.  The gut-busting feast on Thanksgiving Proper is filling enough to make you remain sedentary for all of that night, most of Black Friday, and at least half of that Saturday.  The World of Sports has developed a symbiotic relationship with the World of Holiday Over-Indulgence, so as America digests, they can also watch early season NBA games, the final regular season college football games and the Packers take on the Lions.  Not a bad way to spent time otherwise spent reconnecting with family.  Anyway, all of this eating and sports watching put me in a position to make some pretty interesting observations:

- Jon Kitna has quietly evolved from a perfectly average, oft-overlooked quarterback into an insufferable douchebag over the past year.  Read more »

A week or so back, the NCAA amended college football’s (and as well as the other sports’) recruiting policy to forbid coaches and recruiters from text messaging high school players. This may not seem like a particularly big deal. But for someone like me, an avid fan of college football, this development is meaningful, significant, and a reflection of how terrifying the machinery of collegiate athletics.

Those that know me well know that I have a near psychotic obsession with Boston College sports. I’m a football season ticket holder, belong to two B.C. sports message boards and donate to my alma mater’s athletic fund with regularity. I’ve got a lot of pride in the school that educated me, and I cheer like a madman for my Eagles.

I am, of course, no different than the millions of other red-blooded college sports fans that live and die by their teams. I know Notre Dame alums that travel to South Bend every year to give a nod to Touchdown Jesus and watch a game. I know folks from Harvard and Yale that describe their times in school as simply “we were 3-1 during my tenure.” I know families in Florida that fiercely argue over where you could get a better show: in The Swamp or at The U. Heck, I know that 92,000 people went to Alabama’s spring scrimmage. Their spring scrimmage. This kind of pride (and the rivalries that it spawns) create brotherhoods rooted in cultish devotion. And while I love being part of a community that exhibits such passion, I realize that this passion manifests itself in peculiar and often disturbing ways. Folks want success so bad that their love becomes a destructive force, driving coaches out of a job and tearing up the lives of the kids that play. Read more »