A marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach shows talent. A marksman who hits a target others cannot see displays genius.

I played basketball all through high school, college and law school. I’ve played pickup games on indoor and outdoor courts from San Diego to San Francisco. I played Open Gym and Park and Rec League basketball on Bainbridge for years with such island legends as Al “Low Post” Phillips and Doug “Iron Hands” Picha. I even coached my daughter and son on their short forays into island youth basketball. In my spare time, I still watch a fair amount of basketball on TV and consider myself a fairly knowledgeable fan.

With all that in mind, perhaps you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I checked my bracket after the first and second rounds of this year’s NCAA March Madness men’s college basketball tournament. In the first two rounds, there were 48 games played. With my superior basketball knowledge, I managed to pick the winner in 27 of those games; that’s just 56 percent, a little better than flipping a coin.

It gets worse.

My wife also filled out a bracket. Wendy, like me, roots for Gonzaga and will watch them play if I happen to be watching the game, but otherwise couldn’t really be called a close follower of college basketball. When she does watch a basketball game with me, she seems to do so primarily as an opportunity to ask me questions about the application of some of the game’s more obscure rules, and then immediately proceeds to explain to me why the particular rule under discussion makes no sense, or is unfair to, say, shorter players.

In filling out her bracket, Wendy followed her usual and infallible game plan: she picks the teams that have the most unusual nickname or team mascot, have the nicest-colored uniforms, or that include any Canadian players on their roster. Using that surefire methodology and entirely rational rating system, Wendy managed to correctly pick 32 winners in the first two rounds of the tournament for a success rate of about 66 percent.

I am trying my best to view this turn of events as an important life lesson in humility, but my success rate in doing so is less than my success rate in picking winning college basketball teams. I’m writing this cautionary domestic tale just as the Sweet 16 round is about to begin. I plan to have my bracket mysteriously “disappear” before the finals so that Wendy and I will never know for sure which one of us would have come out ahead in picking winners over the entire tourney, although we all know the smart money wouldn’t have been on me.

And I guess things could have been even worse. Wendy and I have a friend named Brian who was even more of a basketball fan than I am. Brian once got into an argument with the Dalai Lama over whether the greatest sport in the world was basketball or soccer. The Dalai Lama argued for soccer; Brian for basketball. As the Dalai Lama was led off to give the talk he had come to give before he got dragged into the argument about soccer vs. basketball, he turned to Brian and said he had enjoyed their conversation very much, and that he hoped to be able to continue it someday, “either in this lifetime or the next,” which was followed by his characteristic cackle of a laugh.

I may be a lousy basketball prognosticator, but at least I know enough not to pick a fight with the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism over sports. And by the way, if the Dalai Lama knows so much about sports, why has he never released his World Cup Soccer bracket?

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.