I didn’t really see the point in a Watch, Monitor, Don’t for this week. If you like college basketball, you are watching college basketball games right now. If you don’t, well, thanks for the support first of all but I’m afraid at this point in the year going long on the merits of a UCLA-Arizona matchup is an exercise in failure.
If you care deeply, you have money or bragging rights riding on this and specific opinions on referees in your conference who won’t give your team a whistle if it meant saving an orphanage from destruction.
If you care like I care—the team that I care about more than is healthy didn’t make its conference field, so rooting interests are different—you love high-level basketball with win-or-go home stakes, pageantry, history and rivalry all colliding into a miasma of machismo, schadenfreude, unforgettable failure and testicles the size of Saturn needed to take a season-defining, program-changing shot.
If you don’t usually care at all and are just now checking in because it’s March, you’re still paying attention because there’s a bracket coming out in nine days that you’ll need to have firm opinions on.
Either way, you don’t need me to tell you to watch college basketball or what to watch this weekend. Watch a team that’s trying to cut down the nets, or watch Texas and Kansas battle it out among the titans. Makes no nevermind to me.
But what you can do—what you should do—during this time is introduce a young person to the Madness of March. Not the concept of basketball itself, but the very specific twists and turns the plot can take in March. No easy advancement. No guarantee of tomorrow. Forty minutes for fortune and glory or the pit of despair. Anybody can beat anybody else on a random December afternoon (<3 you Eastern Illinois for turning Fran McCaffrey a shade of red the Crayola people are still working to define), but to do so in March is to become akin to gods among mortals. Ask Doug Edert.
My son is learning. The answer to the question, “What are you watching?” has been replaced by “Which team is our team?” and he’s catching on to the fact that Daddy likes the black team (we watch a lot of Austin Peay, Memphis and Providence in this house, so it’s a pretty decent bet). He doesn’t care a lot—if it isn’t one of the black teams, or the Rocky Tops (his name for all Tennessee sports), he usually doesn’t care at all. But he sees what’s happening and sometimes wants to know more—his first attempts at going between the legs with a dribble have been made difficult by the fact that he’s barely four feet tall, but he’s giving it a go.
I’m bringing him along slowly. I want him to come with the questions rather than be inundated with answers he didn’t ask for. “Why’d he do that?” takes on different forms, depending on what we’re talking about—he took that 35-foot three because it was a good look while my man was on a heater or his team needs a lot of points in a hurry and can’t waste time on a lot of passing is an easy one. He shoved that man and that man shoved him back and then they started using words you, my hale and hearty five-year old, are not allowed to know yet takes more nuance.
I’m taking this cue from how my Uncle Mike handled me during my early days of knowing and caring about what March Madness was. Uncle Mike is one of my favorite family members because when we got together for family events, he would suffer small talk and anecdotes he’d heard 4,200 times for as long as he felt like—usually anywhere from 5-7 minutes—before retreating to the room farthest away from everyone else with a television where he could watch sports.
I, being both a deeply anti-social child and quiet to boot, never had anything to offer during the conversational Olympics taking place around my grandmother’s dining room table, but I could always find Mike, usually alone and always watching a game. What game? It did not matter (unless Kentucky was playing in anything; then, it was Kentucky). And in March, it mattered even less because there were multiple games going on and Mike wanted to catch as much of the action as possible.
The man is a remote control savant, ping-ponging back and forth between games at just the right moment. From years of basketball-watching, he knew when a dagger three was forcing a timeout and usually was already to the next game before the players were up off the bench. He had and has a deep wealth of knowledge about the history of the game (specifically the SEC, which really just doubled as the history of Kentucky I would learn) and an abiding patience for some of the most wretched basketball ever just so he could see a team play that he didn’t get a chance to watch often.
Had he been born later and could better understand the nuances of Hulu Live and ESPN+, the man would have spent six hours a night from November to March watching basketball from Storrs to Honolulu.
Patience, for a man who wanted to watch the basketball game in silence, was probably difficult to come by but he answered or engaged with all my questions and statements. Yes, Pepperdine is a funny name. Yes, Antoine Walker probably shoots too much and he should share more with his teammates. Yes, John Calipari is a crook (it would be deeply funny to watch him walk this back later and I can’t wait until the next time I see him just so we can go circle of life on this thing). I sure would have told me to shut up, but I’m grateful he didn’t.
He didn’t teach me basketball so much as he taught me to appreciate what basketball teaches us about life and love and how success is fleeting and so is failure and at the end all you have are your memories and your love and that you get to decide who earns the right to feature prominently in the former and the things you’ll allow yourself to suffer over for the latter. The things that are special and matter to you, give them the space to blossom and grow. if it’s basketball, amen brother. If it’s sitting around and shooting the bull and telling tired-ass stories with your family, do that. Mike made his choice and reaffirmed it at every Thanksgiving when he disappeared to watch the Lions and every Christmas he spent seeing more of Lebron than my aunt.
As he’s grown older, I’ve continued to assume he’ll eventually shift into a role as story-teller at the family events, given his status as one of the elder statesmen and holder of family lore (whether anyone cares about this or not, passing down ludicrous and likely apocryphal stories is a time-honored tradition in my family that matters way more than things like work or education). My hope is that I’ll take the mantle of crotchety uncle who wishes to be left alone to my ballgames and that the inquiring minds of the future will tire of the same stories I never cared about and want to know what’s up with naming a school Longwood, anyway?
But for now, the king stays the king. He’s getting up there now so his social calendar consists of things much closer to home, but I think I’ll see him this weekend for an extended gathering. If not, I know I’ll hear from him during the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. I always do. And I always hear the same thing:
“Hey, can’t talk long. Watching the game.”
We could all use an Uncle Mike in our lives.