It has come to that wonderful time of year, and we are in the midst of it, when brackets are filled out, brackets are busted, and I'm not referring to installing shelves.
No, it is the NCAA college basketball basketball tournament, once the celebration of team efforts from one's alma mater, then a celebration of the practice of gambling, and now ... I don't seem to care. I filled out a few brackets and paid $20 for the privilege of doing so, like maybe 40 million others, but honestly, I'm not watching the games, and check in each Sunday to see where I stand in the list.
I hope you caught the important part -- I'm not watching the games. The advertisers are not exposing their product pitches to me and I'm not inclined to buy their products.
The simple reason? I don't care about the basketball part any more.
Now, I actually played basketball for my high school (don't laugh) and am still a devoted fan of the Tar Heels of the University of North Carolina, where I attended medical school. I can still recall the "Beat Dook" slogan painted on the water tower in Chapel Hill, noting the private university in Durham a few miles up Rt. 15-501. Forty years have passed, but I'm guessing a version of the slogan is still there if the tower is. The Heels are out of the tournament now, but as they weren't likely to get past a couple rounds, I didn't bother to watch them.
In those days of the early 1970s, when Bobby Jones played for Carolina and David Thompson for NC State along with Monty Towe and Tom Burleson, Duke had Kevin Billerman and Chris Redding; there were teams, real teams. They were teams that appeared to represent the institutions whose names appeared on the front of their tunics. We fervently believed that Tom Burleson attended real classes at State, and that, other than being over seven feet tall, he was somewhat like the other students. And he would be on the team the next year.
In some cases that was true, of course. But whatever the reality of the '70s was, the reality of 2015 is far different. As I write this, Kentucky has made it to the round of eight, the fourth round, without a loss all season. Are we surprised?
John Calipari is the coach at the University of Kentucky, and he has built a "team", if I may use the word, led by a set of talented players we now refer to as "one-and-dones", i.e., they come out of high school, play one year at Kentucky, quit school to declare for the NBA draft, and hope to get drafted to play professionally while their peers at other schools are in their sophomore years.
Why? Because the NBA, in its infinite wisdom, responded a few years ago to the outcry against high school players declaring for the draft and bypassing college entirely. They passed a rule, clearly written by a committee, setting a minimum draft age of 19. In other words, a kid who formerly would have left high school (I won't assume the word "graduated") and declared for the draft, now has to kill a year either by playing in Europe or going to college for a year and then declaring.
Something, in the view of the NBA, had to be done, since far too many kids were coming out of high school thinking they were good enough for the draft, then were not getting drafted at all --there are only two rounds any more -- and since by declaring for the draft they could not play at a college, they had either to find work playing in Europe or find their butts on the street.
The "something" they decided to do was set a draft age. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences kicked in, as it always does, and someone figured out how to game the system. Calipari at Kentucky, with no need to feign loyalty, simply advertised to recruits to come and be part of the '14-'15 team, which will be completely different from the '15-'16 team, et al., and then declare for the NBA draft. Voila! A team of stars, who happen to wear blue and white for a year to remind them of the semester of basket-weaving classes they took in Lexington.
It certainly appears to work; a bunch of talented mostly-freshmen, needing only to push for one season to get their payoff, will respond to the entreaties of a recruiting coach they know won't be begging them to stay after their freshman season -- in fact, after next week no one expects any of them to see the inside of a classroom within 20 miles of Lexington.
What has happened? Loyalty to one's alma mater, as represented by its basketball team, is a chuckle in one's beer anymore. I root for the Tar Heels, but my fandom occupies maybe three minutes a week of my time during the season because I don't need to know the names of the players or get familiar with them; they'll soon be gone. God only knows what Kentucky fans think.
The NBA should have done of two things -- either have no age limit at all to be drafted, or set it at 21. Not, of course, so I could root for a Tar Heel team that would be together a few years, but (partially) to give the players an opportunity to grow up and learn the game and, mostly, to return the college game to a semblance of decency. To return college teams to being "teams" that represent their schools, even a little bit.
I can only say that were there no betting, I suspect there would be little audience for the three-weekend celebration called March Madness. The game itself or, more accurately, the collegiate nature of the game, has long since departed.
I mourn it.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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