Listen closely. You can hear it in the distance. The din, the
commotion, the hullabaloo that can mean only one thing. March
Madness is back.
Listen closely. You can hear it in the distance. The din, the commotion, the hullabaloo that can mean only one thing. March Madness is back.
For the basketball un-aficionado, this is when big sports sages resolve to bump up the number of televised hoops games seen on a daily basis in America until the standard 24-hour day can no longer hold them all.
In the not-too-distant future, expect to see Congress debating proposed legislation to lengthen the span of a typical day to 30 hours during basketball season, thus allowing mass televising of the total crop of NCAA tournament games, also known as “March Madness.”
Basketball has never held the fascination for me that it has for my husband and countless other hoops fans. If you ask me (and I realize you haven’t), you can watch the last three minutes of any given game and know you’ve pretty much seen it all.
But my spouse lives for basketball season, and he has an uncanny ability to locate each and every game ever televised. Send him into the bowels of Uzbekistan riding a yak, and somewhere in a remote village or on a distant mountain top, he’ll stumble upon a lonely old goat herder with a satellite dish in his front yard.
“Yo!” the goat herder will call out. “I’ve got high-def, wide screen with Bose surround sound, and the Savannah Slugs are taking on Tijuana Tech. Come on in.”
And my husband will happily while away the afternoon watching grown men in baggy shorts race incessantly back and forth with no single purpose on Earth at that moment save the sole intent of dropping a stippled brown ball through a hoop.
If you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the name “March Madness,” you have only to look as far as our living room. Come March 31, I am about as “mad” as I’m ever going to get, and for this I thank the inventors of the female spouses’ bane, the remote control.
Sitting down to watch “Desperate Housewives,” I understand that I must be extra vigilant this time of year. If my attention is diverted in any way, such as when I blink, my spouse has surreptitiously activated the remote and zeroed in on one of the inexhaustible numbers of games that are televised at any given moment in March.
Before I know it, I’m bombarded with, “Oh, man! Fred, did you see that slam dunk? I could be wrong, but most of us here at XYZ Sports believe that this young Stretch Kirby fellow is destined for greatness!”
“You’re right, Frank, but don’t forget that the capable Slim Slokum managed to go one-on-one with Kirby last quarter and now that we’re in quadruple overtime, we…”
“What are you doing?” I shriek at my spouse. “You changed the channel right in the middle of Brie getting drunk and passing out in her flower bed and getting soaked by the sprinkler system! You know that this is my favorite show!”
“You weren’t even watching it,” my husband retorts.
“I was tying my shoe!” I hiss back.
And so it goes through the rest of the month as I long for the stillness of televised chess tournaments, the hush of the World Series of Poker or the quietude of filmed-bass fishing expeditions.
But basketball is my husband’s passion. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Hoosier raised in Indiana where it’s a law that you play basketball, and a lifelong affinity for the game is bred permanently into genes. In fact, I think it’s religion.
Maybe March Madness is the pay back I deserve for all those weeks I made him watch “Dancing with the Stars.”
