Other Existential Setbacks

I’M GONNA kill the NCAA here after some more dust settles, because it’s a piece of shit and the exploding scandal in college basketball – which has seen indictments, arrests of assistant coaches and shoe company execs, and the firing of Hall of Fame Coach/Master Tactician and Motivator/All Around Sleazebag Rick Pitino at Louisville – looks as if it might have ramifications for years to come. We’ll deal with that soon as we have more time and the scandal further unfurls.

But let’s post something beautiful right now. We need more beauty in this life.

I’m in a literary mood today, and since I had college basketball on the brain, I thought I would pull out a college basketball poem, yes, poem, which is written in couplets, of course, because the 3-point shot hadn’t been invented in college basketball in the 1970s when it was penned. (Nowadays the stanzas would be tercets a third of the time.) This comes from a basketball anthology published in 1980 called Take it to the Hoop, which my dad gave to me in 1982 as a gift for my 13th birthday. It was my favorite book, a cherished book which was lost when a storage shed of mine got broken into. Getting another copy took forever, as the book went out of print years ago, and I finally got ahold of one last year in exchange for joining a library in Kansas and contributing to their fundraiser for building a new library, a cause which I wholeheartedly support.

I think about my dad a lot these days, because he has new challenges that we as a family will likely struggle to deal with and come to terms with. He introduced me to basketball: I went to my first game with in 1975, when I was six years old and Washington State defeated Jacksonville 82:77. (Go ahead and look it up. I told you that I remember everything.) But it was when he gave me this book about the game, and when I read this poem, that I realized I wanted to write, a realization of what would become a lifelong pursuit for which I’m grateful, even though I hate it a lot of the time.

And it’s a perfect poem for this blog, because the bad guys win in the end, and we’re left to learn to handle disappointment. Sounds almost perfect.

And the Long Beach State teams in the poem were coached by Jerry Tarkanian, whom I met once, as his daughter went to the same school as I and he came for a speaking engagement. He was always in the NCAA crosshairs for improprieties, and yet, in retrospect, and somewhat paradoxically, he was arguably the most honest coach the sport has ever seen, much more so than the sleazebags who are about to taken down by the feds.

-- -- --

The NCAA Mideast Regionals,
and Other Existential Setbacks

It was #1 ranked Indiana
against #2 ranked Marquette

and the announcer announced
that the Indiana coach Bobby Knight

had his office wall papered with uplifting slogans,
in particular one from general Patton

about having one goal and driving toward it
singlemindedly, and that people will try to stand between

you and your pinnacle, and the closer you come to it
the more furious shall be their resistance,

but in the hall of the Marquette coach, Al McGuire,
there are pictures of clowns

and he is reputed to have said,
“All of us in public life are clowns.”

I had also read an article about McGuire,
about how all his players are crazy about him

and how he’ll get pissed off and end up
wrestling with them on the locker room floor

and five minutes later all animosities are forgotten.
Once he told the reporters that one of his players

couldn’t throw the ball in Lake Michigan,
and the next day the player called his own press conference

and drove the press out to the lake
where he proceeded to toss a basketball

off the end of the pier. I also remembered
when he brought his team into the Long Beach Arena

back when he had our greatest team
and had never been beaten at home

and nobody in the top twenty (UCLA and USC most noticeably)
would schedule us even at their places

and no coach in his right mind
brought his kids to the Arena,

so naturally Long Beach beat Marquette
but it was a close game in which our guys

spent the whole night at the foul line,
and afterwards McGuire didn’t bitch

or temporize or alibi,
and so I now said,

“Right on, Al McGuire;
I hope you kick those goose-step Hoosiers’ asses,”

but he drew two technicals
and Marquette lost by nine big points.

– Gerald Locklin