March Madness more like March Sadness
Published 1:30 am Friday, April 1, 2022
Like most Americans, I’ve been glued to my TV for the past week, taking in the grotesque and surreal images of one of the largest, most-spectacular disasters of modern times, a cataclysmic event of unparalleled savageness and destruction that came almost literally from out of nowhere and exploded on the scene like the first thunderclap of the Apocalypse, a shocking series of largely incomprehensible events captured live on camera, events that demand the focused attention of our unbelieving hearts and numbed minds in order to bear full witness to the horrors of an uncontrolled force of nature rampaging across the landscape on an unalterable course toward final catastrophic meltdown.
Of course, I’m talking about the dismal performance of my bracket in this year’s Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament. It’s been more March Sadness than March Madness for me this year. I don’t have a team in the Final Four, and had only two in the Elite Eight. I do still have a mathematical chance of winning both my office and home pools, but it would take the ex-post facto disqualification of several teams, the reinstatement of several teams that lost dramatically in the First Round of the tournament, and some radical changes to the eligibility rules for student-athletes at select colleges.
In hindsight, it was a rash decision for me to pick No. 15 seed Cal State Fullerton to knock off No. 2-seed Duke in the First Round just because the woman who is my wife graduated from Fullerton. Wendy didn’t even pick the Titans over Duke. Likewise, I was unwise to pick Longwood as a Cinderella team to beat Tennessee. Longwood rewarded by foolhardy support by playing like a bunch of Cinderellas all wearing the same glass slipper.
Perhaps most painful of all was having my own alma mater, USC, lose its First Round contest to the lower-seeded Miami. USC has just never been the same in sports since they adopted admission standards and began to require that student-athletes actually enroll in the school and attend a class.
For the record, I picked my son’s alma mater, Gonzaga, to win the championship as did many better-informed basketball fans than I. I’m checking the paperwork now to see what the process is for getting a partial refund of Adam’s tuition from Gonzaga.
And if you are interested in buying a couple dozen Gonzaga 2022 National Championship T-shirts that I ordered in a fog of optimism, give me a call. If you’ll take all 200 of them, I’ll call you. Fortunately for me, my poor basketball tournament prognostication skills only cost me a couple of dollars. I’m not a person who bets on sporting events, with the exception of betting on golf when playing with my friends, which is really less like betting than it is like taking candy from a baby, a baby who also has a terrible short game.
On the plus side, I had planned on setting aside some serious time on Thursdays and Fridays these past weeks to watch lots of college basketball. In past years, to remain productive at work, I’ve limited myself to watching weekday games only during my coffee breaks, my lunch hour, while on conference calls, during staff meetings and whenever I hear someone mention anything about a strategic plan. Given how quickly my bracket unraveled this year, I was able to devote my near-full attention to my day job.
When I mentioned this fortuitous turn of events to my supervisor, she failed to exhibit the level of gratitude and appreciation I was expecting, which seemed odd until I learned that she had three of the four teams in the Final Four in her bracket, at which point her response began to smell of smugness.
There was a lot of other stuff in the news this week in addition to basketball, of course. Spring training began for Major League Baseball, bringing back the smell of leather, freshly cut grass and pine tar. And that’s just in the hot dogs. There was evidently some sort of a brawl at the Academy Award ceremonies on Sunday night. And there’s a continuing, inspiring story of a small European nation standing up and fighting for its freedom against overwhelming odds.
It’s so nice to see brave men and women fighting for democracy rather than against it.
In my Real World bracket, I’ve got Ukraine going all the way, and I like my odds.
Tom Tyner is back writing his weekly “Latte Guy” humor column for this newspaper.
