Magic Carpet Ride

There are subjects, like preservation of forests, saving the whales, heck, saving endangered species, that seem to get very little play from the mainstream media. Almost always, coverage of those topics are negative. They're mostly negative because they protest the status quo. They say that the way we're doing things is wrong. And they say this about things that many people don't think are necessarily wrong.

For example, while there's a strong case to be made that humans are stewards of the earth and owe protection to the species that can't fend for themselves, there's also a feeling that if it's us or them, then we should win. When forest land is set aside so that clearcutting can't be done, people fret their jobs are taken away by tree huggers who love nature more than they love one another. Never is it mentioned that maybe, just maybe, these guys can be retrained to do something else that isn't clearcutting.

And really, are the workers the ones protesting, or is it the companies that really make the profit that are engineering this support for the little guy.

One topic that rarely makes it to the national media is college sports. Of course, I don't mean that college sports doesn't make press. We're in the middle of March Madness, and there's quite a bit of press on the underdog, George Mason, which I'll get to soon enough. What I'm talking about are folks who believe that there should be no scholarships given to athletes, and that universities should use that money to pay for people who need the money to have academic success. A university, after all, is a place of learning.

There are some arguments against people who are against college athletics, and so I'll go through them. Coaches will argue that successful programs generate revenue for the university. This can be difficult to assess, because successful programs, especially football programs require a great deal of money. A typical football team has some 70 students on scholarship, and there may be more walk-ons. These days, players take chartered flights to their games. Think about the cost of your latest flight and multiply that by about 100. The band, needless to say, must often travel by bus, or not travel at all. And the wealthiest teams can probably send those kids too (to play that annoying FSU fight song).

African American coaches claim they are taking kids that are on the margins, kids who would never have any chance at college, and showing them a better life, a way out. These are coaches like John Thompson, John Chaney, and Nolan Richardson, coaches that have blazened a path for African American coaches everywhere, but not without some controversy.

This argument has always struck me as somewhat strange. The reasons these kids are being shown life in college is because they show talent in basketball. Thompson's words would ring far truer if he could find kids that lacked any basketball skill, and try as hard as he could to make them succeed academically. In fact, joining a basketball team rarely has to do with academics. There are simpler issues at hand. Many kids joining teams are from single parent households and coaches serve as father figures. They also get to see a world outside of inner city life. The academic thing? Well, that's really too much to hope for. These kids weren't even high school material, let alone college material.

The kind of "education" that these coaches talk about could operate just fine outside a college environment. If college basketball could viable succeed without being part of a college, all of this "education" would be just fine and dandy. It would serve exactly the purpose that Thompson and others want, without the sham of saying that these kids are getting a college experience. What is true, I'd say, is that their kids might be more inclined to go to college, only because the dad realized it was important, even if he wasn't good at it.

This is certainly true of John Thompson's son, John Thompson, the 3rd, whose kid went to Princeton to play basketball, then became an assistant coach, then a head coach, before coming back to Georgetown and becoming their head coach.

But that's like taking an Asian teen who's never played basketball, and having him hang around the basketball team, and meanwhile he does, whatever, academics or play chess. He's getting "exposure" to basketball, only in the hopes that he might instill the thrill of basketball for his kids.

Where sports teams do help, and this is rather strange, is that successful teams often increase the reputation of the university. March Madness brings a lot of coverage to universities and colleges that no one has ever heard of. I remember, many years ago, that College of Charleston had success in the tournament. They knocked out Maryland one year. Two years of success lead to an increase in applicants.

And let's not forget the granddaddy of them all, Notre Dame. Ask anyone in the midwest about whether Notre Dame is a good school or not, and they'll tell you it's a powerhouse. For engineering in the midwest, that school is Purdue. Outside the midwest, well, no one much cares. But let me rattle off universities that have successful teams: Michigan, Texas, Illinois, UCLA, Berkeley. Some of these are also the best state universities in areas such as engineering and computer science. UCLA is heavily Asian American, something you don't get a sense of watching their basketball team.

Sports teams also provide a sense of unity. Alumnis of a university can always look back at their college experience, but nothing ties alumnis more than a successful sports team. Perhaps you or I don't have this experience, but many a college fan, years and years after their graduation, go to watch college football. I see couples that are retired, who have likely been attending games, attending tailgate parties, for the last 40 years of their lives. Even folks who've never gone to college find it's their way to root for the state.

Until the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee and became the Titans did Tennessee have a professional sports team. Before that, and even now, the team was Tennessee football, at their main campus in Knoxville (surprisingly yes, it's not in Nashville). Tennessee competes with Michigan for the largest capacity stadium (Michigan has probably won this) with each able to seat over 100,000 fans. Surely, many of those fans did not go to UT, but are still avid fans. They can dream of their kids heading to UT. Most universities can't buy this kind of support.

Well, actually, they can. And do.

This kind of enthusiasm for a university seems like it's worth gold, and universities pay gold to have this enthusiasm. A head coach can make anywhere from one to two million dollars a year. For a public university, the head coach is often the highest paid employee. Since when did a university or a state think that this was a perfectly legitimate way to spend taxpayers money?

Since the taxpayers cared far more about the health of their team than they cared about the quality of their university. One film that explores this issue is Friday Night Lights, about a high school football team that is seen as a bit of an underdog, and feels the pressure of its successful history. Players who won championships at their high school, but have otherwise never had much of a life afterwards place a great stress on the coach to be successful, to provide the kind of inspiration to an otherwise economically depressed region. When an emphasis on education with this kind of fervor would do so much more to raise poor counties, it is depresseing to see that this enthusiasm placed on sports.

But the media is awfully good at what they do. We're now in the middle of the sweetest ride that Coach Jim Larranaga of George Mason has ever had. This is the furthest any mid-major has ever made it in the tournament. Before then, you'd have to go back to 1979, when the University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League champ, made it to the final four, before bowing out tamely against Magic Johnson, then playing for Michigan State.

Larranaga has charmed an entire coterie of sportswriters nationwide. He seems like the favorite uncle or granddad that most of us don't really have. He's a genuinely nice guy, and he's been soaking this all up. When they beat University of Connecticut, the number one team in the tournament, he was asked, in his earpiece to ask a question to one of his players, and asked him what he thought about going to Indianapolis. Larranaga has been interviewing all week long. He knows this is the best exposure he'll ever get.

He opened up practice to the media, a practice that's nearly unheard of, because he said if they couldn't play in front of media, how were they going to play in front of a nationwide audience (basketball, unlike football, doesn't rely on trick plays and so seeing practice is often not that surprising---it's often more a game of executing the plays you do already, not inventing some flea flicker or hook and ladder at the last moment).

At the end of their Tuesday practice, Larranaga again held a baseball game for the team, so they could be relaxed. He had done this at the end of practice the last two weeks and wanted to do it again this week, except this week, a bevy of media were filming it all. Larranaga has learned how to keep his players relaxed. He was telling his players that the CAA (which normally stands for the Colonial Athletic Association) was now the Connecticut Assasin Association. He kept yelling "CAA", "CAA", and this cracked his players up.

Larranaga is perhaps in the best position as coach. Unless he pulls a Gonzaga, which now perenially gets into the tournament and garners a mid-to-high seed, it's likely that Mason will fade into some obscurity, so he must, as the cliche goes, strike while the iron is hot. He doesn't have high expectations placed on him. He must recruit strategically, trying to find players that the major teams pass on; kids who are a little too short, a little too big, and try to mold them to winning. Unlike a Duke, which almost always rolls to the sweet 16, Mason's chances are once every few years. He doesn't have to deal with pressures like Mike Davis, where fans expect Indiana to contend for a national championship all the time.

This is not to say that Larranaga doesn't feel pressure to succeed. He's been quite successful at George Mason, but they're just at the level where they may or may not get in the tournament (they had not won their conference's championship--UNCW did that, and so they had to get an at-large bid, a bid that didn't go to Maryland, Michigan, Cincinatti, Louisville, and several other powerhouse teams that were relegated to the NIT this year).

You see how happy his players are. You discover that Lamar Butler, whose been the face of the team, has been involved in recruiting, telling new guys about what it's like to play for George Mason, how they built they team they have now.

There's almost nothing like this experience for academics. If you're making straight As in computer science, well, that's great, but it's only for yourself that it matters. There are programming competitions, but it's not aired on television. True, the thrills of competing can be nearly as giddy, but the rest of the campus doesn't care.

I'm always torn when a team like George Mason does well. The media knows that there are no other number 1 seeds around, and they really want George Mason to pull the magic upset. Even one more win, a defeat of Florida with their behemoth, Joachim Noah, son of Yannick Noah, the 1983 French Open winner (Noah was seen as a tall guy in tennis at 6'4". His son is 6'11".), would send everyone over the top. Florida, however, has been the only team that has won all their games comfortably.

The media has found a relationship too, between Larranaga and Billy Donovan. Both had attended Providence College. Both are originally from New York City. Donovan played under Rick Pitino. This was a while ago, before Pitino went to Kentucky, won a national championship with them, then went pro to coach the Celtics, then after that fiasco, returned back to the state of Kentucky to coach Louisville. Donovan's been hear before. He made it to the final four a few years back, where his pressing style had knocked out a highly favored Duke, but since then has struggled to reach his previous lofty standards.

Now, think about what the media wants to do. Does it want to promote good guy Larranaga and his band of overachieving underdogs, who's been happy to accomodate every media request, who gives hope to all the small teams struggling to compete against the big boys, or does it want to have an expose about the way colleges care more about their athletics than it does about its academics.

In fact, as this story is brewing, there's another story too. Duke recently suspended its entire lacrosse team. Seems like a few members hosted a party where some strippers (of color) where brought to entertain the crowd. When racial epithets were heard, the strippers were going to leave the party. Apparently, one person convinced one to return back, where it was alleged that she was held down by three folks and raped.

This news took a bit of time to percolate up. It wasn't until the police brought this information to the public and then the university finally responded that the team was suspended. The reason for the suspension (even though it was clear the whole team could not have participated) was because the guilty party or parties or even witnesses would not come forward.

Tony Kornheiser felt, for sure, no one would come forward, even as women's advocacy groups have called these players cowards for not stepping forward. ESPN recently had a made-for-ESPN film about one of the military academies facing a huge cheating scandal that affected the athletes. In it, they show loyalty to each other, although the guilty party eventually said so, not wanting the rest of the team to be affected by his behavior. This is the kind of loyalty that teams like to have, even if it means, in this case, that they are doing the "wrong" thing.

From time to time, sports controversies like this pop up, and people begin to wonder about all of this. Remember that crazy story about Baylor's player, Patrick Dennehy, (despite his Irish name, he's black). Initially, it was found that he was missing, and people wondered where we was. His car was spotted far from Baylor. Then, there were accusations that his teammate Carlton Dotson was the culprit. The two were teammates on Baylor.

It was worse than that. A murder would make it awful on recruiting and the reputation of Baylor. Dave Bliss, the coach, tried to make it sound like Dennehy was a drug dealer, and that this caused his death (presumably a deal gone wrong). His assistant coaches were not at all in favor of this cover-up. In the end, Bliss had to resign when his scheming was discovered, and it had become the topic of sports columnists and sports show announcers (which sprouted in the last few years, so that sports commentary is far bigger than it used to be).

That was considered a low point in college basketball. When it comes to March Madness, the media would rather not see a team like Baylor. They like George Mason. And when you read it and watch it and see it, you begin to fall under the cast of this spell.

They remind you, once in a while, even in the age of big sports and big money and the pressures to succeed, that sometimes the game's still fun.

And in those times, you sit and let the fairy tale take hold, and let yourself be transported on this magic carpet ride.