DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Hoopla 101: Chronicles of higher
education By Robert Lipsyte
1. Opening Shot "Success is a
choice." - Rick Pitino of Louisville (seeded No 6
in the South region for this year's "March
Madness"), first coach to lead three different
teams to the Final Four teams remaining in the
playoff
This is the mud season of the
US sports calendar. While we await blessed
baseball and its promise of renewal, here comes
the National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA) Men's Division I
Basketball Championship - the
Big Dance for sportswriters, the Bracket Racket
for gamblers, a frat-rat party, a racist
entertainment and a subversion of higher
education, perhaps democracy as well.
Calling it March Madness slaps lipstick on
a pig.
But we'll call it March Madness,
too, and get down in the mud.
2. Beyond
a foul line "What do they know of
cricket who only cricket know?" - C L R James
Fifty years in the biz and I can almost
remember the college basketball games I've
covered, there were so few of them. High-school
games seem authentic (although that's changing).
Professional games are performance art. But there
is something so bogus about the selling of
Division I games as the pure passion of an
adolescent school spirit that I begin to think of
sneaker sweatshops and the boy soldiers of Sierra
Leone; and, next thing you know, I'm clicking
around for Law and Order. It's my problem
and I should know better.
After all, I was
born and raised in New York City in the time of
the great scandal - when stars of the 1951 City
College team were indicted for "shaving" points,
taking money from gangster gamblers to win games
by narrower margins than the betting lines. That
they could do it so well was a testament to the
dominant way they controlled their games. They
were that good.
My dad, who had graduated
from City in 1927, felt betrayed. Like many
children of immigrants in New York, City College
had been his launching pad and, at 100, he was
still talking about classes he had taken there.
The City College scandal was one of the
few events that C L R James, the great Trinidadian
historian and social analyst, could not grasp. In
his classic book on cricket and the world,
Beyond a Boundary, he wondered how these
young men could betray their universities unless
"they had no loyalties to anything".
I
found that ingenuous, a word he asked me to delete
from the introduction to his book I wrote years
later. I did, of course. Long after that, I heard
something I wish I could have shared with him. One
of the former City players, Norm Mager, told me:
"You're talking about kids, kids who were busting
their humps while the school was making a ton of
money. And everybody else was doing it. It could
get messy out there when the other team was
shaving, too. We'd know when we purposely threw
away a pass, and we'd get it right back."
I went to Columbia in the 1950s, a school
with a determinedly dowdy sports tradition that
made us proud. One of my classmates, 5-foot-7-inch
(170-centimeter) Chet Forte, was not only a
consensus all-American, but as in his final year
was voted college player of the year, beating out
the 7-foot (213cm) Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas (No
1 Eastern Conference this year). But the best part
for us nerdy sons of Lionel Trilling and Jacques
Barzun had come a year earlier when Chet the Jet
was suspended from the team toward the end of the
season for academic shortcomings. It probably cost
Columbia the Ivy title. But our school's
priorities were clear. Then.
In 2002, when
I finally got to my first Final Four, I was amazed
by the extravaganza. I had expected the usual
painted yobs in the stands and the normal
adolescent excess, not a corporate audience at a
series of networking parties thrown by major
sponsors. The Big Dance was a Super Bowl! [1]
Coaches looked for jobs; university presidents
trolled for sportswriters who looked for drinks.
What's the difference, I wondered, between a
university that pours Pepsi and wears Nike and a
NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto
Racing) team that pumps Bud Lite beer and wears
Drakkar Noir cologne? I wished I hadn't sworn off
the word "hypocrisy" as too easy, too banal.
3. Boy soldier "New York's
most salable human export traditionally has been
its annual crop of ... game-busting black forwards
and centers who could do everything with a
basketball except read its label." - Robert
Lipsyte in SportsWorld: An American Dreamland
The liveliest reading during March Madness
is the stories about players who were homeless or
clinically depressed or delinquent until hoops
saved them; the kid with 18 siblings because his
father is a polygamist, the kid who a dozen years
ago was barefoot in Africa, or just got back from
a Mormon mission. Among the coaches is a former
repo man.
This is not my famous
imagination at work; these are current media
shards. I'm not being snarky. Covering college
basketball is a journalistic problem. Are these
teens at play, future pros, home-town heroes,
betting chips? Fuzzy features or exposes or
straight game details are okay, but you can't
weave the systemic corruption, commercialization,
and racism into every story - and yet once you
stop the stories aren't true anymore.
How
many times can you write that 56% of varsity
basketball players are black compared with 7% of
the student bodies of the schools they represent?
Those numbers are from the last time I wrote it,
in the early 1990s. Watching games now, I often
see eight black players on the floor being cheered
by a sea of white (often painted) faces.
My first exposure to college basketball
took place on May 4, 1965, when Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Ferdinand Lewis
Alcindor Jr, barely 18 years old and slightly
taller than 7 feet, held his first press
conference in the gym of his Catholic high school,
Power Memorial, in Manhattan, New York. Several
hundred journalists were there to hear him
announce his choice of college: [2] University of
California Los Angeles (UCLA; No 2 West).
We didn't know much about Lew. His
high-school coach had never allowed him to be
interviewed. He was just a black goon expected to
dominate in college the way he had in high school.
We didn't know he came from Trinidadian
landowners, that his father, a transit cop, was a
Juilliard graduate who couldn't get work as an
orchestra conductor. It was assumed that part of
Lew's admission package was a job for his young
white coach. It would be years before we learned
that Lew despised him; the coach had used the
racial slur to motivate him in a game.
As
it turned out, he seemed like a sweet, thoughtful
young man. I cringed when a colleague asked, "Are
there any liabilities in being
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