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Shocking. Routine.

[A day late and a 1000 words short, so it’s barely a 4-minute read; you can finish it in one Olympic sell-you-stuff competition, but there are HOT LINKS to extend the pleasure!]   
Guess they were. Shouldn't have been.

Guess they were. Shouldn’t have been.

And yes, you’re safe. This is NOT more hand-wringing about American gun violence. It’s not even about my bride’s violent dismay at a quick tour of the TV landscape last night, though her horror at what passes for normalcy was real enough. (Our brief fling with hotel television – mainly Olympic coverage – was a side benefit of our one-night stand anniversary getaway.) This was in another sporting arena, a modest one and far from Rio, where a team known as the Shockers¹ were in for a surprise.

¹And I do know, the Wichita State team name is not about horror movie results or bad interactions with electricity. It’s a Kansas thing. It’s a wheat thing.

No shock for me, though, especially once I knew that Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker from last year’s NCAA Tournament “Sweet 16” team had indeed completed their eligibility² at Wichita State, a strong fixture in recent bouts of March Madness. Surely, too, Coach Gregg Marshall was better prepared than he let on in a pre-trip press conference in Wichita, before heading off to Canada for a four-game pre-season tour. He must have known about the reputation of Ottawa’s Carleton University Ravens, not only their twelve Canadian Interuniversity Sport titles in fourteen years, but their tendency to beat NCAA teams when they come north.

²I wish I could more confidently write “graduated” rather than “completed their [athletic] eligibility”.

The Shockers’ first game was in Montreal, and they dismantled the UQAM Citadins – ostensibly a peer to the Ravens, a CIS squad competing for national honours – 54-18 in the first half on the way to a 50-point win. But surely they’d heard about Wisconsin or Memphis or Indiana (and many others) coming into Ottawa and losing in prior summer junkets by top-drawer Division 1 teams? Of course they had. They weren’t driving blind, but it didn’t matter a bit. As my buddy Seb grinned as the game got out of hand, “I always like to look at the bench of the D1 teams as it sinks in what’s happening to them. Getting rocked by Canadians?” Meanwhile, a less-heralded Stetson University (Fla.) Hatters team had been on the verge of being blown out by the Ravens the previous Friday evening, but managed to keep the score respectable, losing by 9.

Beating the Americans is actually fairly routine for the Ravens. They’re used to this WINNING thing – but don’t tell me those non-scholarship lads don’t take sky-high pleasure in schooling the Americans at the game they’ve dominated for so long. (They do get financial aid, many of them, but it’s no “full-ride” athletic scholarship. And yes, that’s an oxymoron, but nobody notices anymore.) And longtime readers of this site will know that I’ve written this story before. Most recently, the twin killings of Josh Pastner’s Memphis Tigers two summers ago made me wonder. Incredible. I watched it. You should read this and then this – they show how the systematic dismantling of a bigger, more “athletic” team by a bunch of Canucks was done. They also tell most of the story, if I do say so myself, about CU’s rising dominance of incoming NCAA teams.

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NCAA Hoops Lookback: The Fatal Four

Due to, in no particular order, the following factors –

  • a super-concentrated acidic splash by John Oliver, indicting and ridiculing the entire NCAA basketball enterprise (can’t hyperlink right now, but it’s here: http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/john-oliver-ncaa-rant-players/2015/03/18/id/630823/ ),
  • my own manic attention to the CIS version of March Madness, spent watching the games of the (Ontario University Athletics) Wilson Cup and the following week’s Final 8 in Toronto (and a blizzard of hoops-related words that can be accessed just down there),
  • we don’t have a television hook-up, and apparently one of Howdy’s Current Foundational Principles (HCFP) is the refusal to pay for live-streaming of games on my laptop,
  • I don’t have many basketball friends,
  • increasing miles on the spectator-sport odometer, games-related grumpiness, impatience with commercials, crankiness over announcers’ clichés, and
  • (possibly?) growing good sense –

I didn’t watch any of the opening weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. (HCFP No. 2: the “play-in games” earlier in the week to decide the last four Cinderellas invited to the Big Dance of 64 do not count. Round 1 of the tournament starts Thursday, not Tuesday. Lines must be drawn. <cough> Ahem. Right. It’s not climate-change denial or global terrorism, but from tiny seeds does a mighty apocalypse grow.)

(None of which explains why I’m writing about it so late. I plead lethargy, sloth, intermittent apathy and mild existential angst. And books. I was tired of writing there for a bit — well, my own, anyway. Glad that’s all over now!)

Okay, and since truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, and I do aspire to virtuosity of some kind or another, I clarify: I did invite myself to Bernie and Wendy’s living room for the second Gonzaga game in the opening weekend, in case they failed again to make it to the Sweet 16. The Zags did, though CBS had switched to Oklahoma/Dayton, which had very little interest for me even though Dyshawn Pierre is an Ontario kid I liked reading about from China last March, during the Flyers’ stirring run ascent to the Sweet 16, to national jock consciousness and, lest we forget, to millions of new dollars flowing to a previously obscure Ohio school. (Well, obscure from an athletic point of view, that is. To me. I know nothing of its standing in biomedical research or the teaching of the humanities.  And who would care about THAT?)

Yes, and I waited ‘til the actual weekend of the second weekend — also known as The Elite Eight — jimmied the rear door at Wendy and Bernie’s (twice), and lingered like an especially blue-cheesy smell in their otherwise pleasant back kitchen. Here’s what I saw:

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A Canuck Man’s March Madness

WARNING: Contains basketball. And other things.

But lots of basketball.

The man would be me, and the madness — well, it may be terminal. As an international man of leisure, housework aside, I took in the all-Ontario AA (OFSAA) boys basketball championships Wednesday evening. (Lots to say about that, but not today.) An overnight bus trip and a Holiday Inn morning nap later, I was ragged but ready for Day 1 of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) men’s basketball Final 8. Play started at 11 a.m. in the reconfigured shell of dear old Maple Leaf Gardens, now called the Mattamy Centre and enclosing the Ryerson University athletic centre (and a Loblaws grocery store).I look up at the inner

I look up at the inner dome during games and remember the Leafs -- and the NBA Buffalo Braves! Bob McAdoo, Randy Smith, Ernie DiGregorio...

I look up at the inner dome during games and remember the Leafs — and the NBA Buffalo Braves! Bob McAdoo, Randy Smith, Ernie DiGregorio…

I am here because hoops has a hold on me, and especially because of my fascination with the (again!) top-seeded Carleton Ravens. They’re pursuing their fifth straight title (for the second time), and looking for their 11th win in 13 seasons. (This has been astounding for years, and too few notice. I notice. Yes, I do feel lonely at times. What makes you ask?)

I took notes. I noted things like this:

Game 1: Carleton Ravens vs. Saskatchewan Huskies

The Mattamy Centre is a great place to watch ball.  It’s tiny by NCAA standards, seating about 5000, and it’s not close to full. There may be 2000 to 2500 here now, and at least a third, maybe half, are school children — judging by the waving “thunderstix” (who is the genius that we thank for this invention?) all around the bowl bopping along to “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth…”. (I wasn’t among them, but they made me smile.) The floor is laid over a hockey rink, though it’s three storeys above the old MLG’s sacred surface. There are four rows of courtside seats opposite the scoring table and team benches.

And Philip Scrubb, the only man ever to be named national Player of the Year three times — and many Ravens faithful are furious he didn’t get it this year (what, did he get worse?) — is OFF and running and dealing. It’s already 28-10 over the Huskies by quarter time, with Phil driving and firing four three-pointers, including a 4-pt play at the buzzer. Sheesh. Normally impassive on the floor, he’s showing emotion early. Nice to see, actually; it’s genuine exuberance that he’s releasing in his last hurrah, and not Made4TV Emotion. (Heck, this game’s on local cable.)

Big brother Thomas hasn’t scored much yet as of 31-13, but he’s getting the shots he wants.

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Some Poor Sap in a Big-Box Store (on mis-education & fear)

So there I was, looking for a little brainless recreation, a (slightly) guilty pleasure that doesn’t expand the horizons of my waistline. It was the latest edition of Sports Illustrated, which is about sports (and has lots of photos). I thought I’d be reading about football and basketball, and I was, but I wasn’t far into a profile on an NCAA hoopster I’d never heard of before I got slapped in the face with a frozen sociocultural mackerel.

Honest, I wasn’t planning on extracting any Higher Meaning from this piece. Luke Winn tells the story of Alan Williams, a master of one of the less glamourous aspects of basketball, rebounding. Snaring missed shots is deeply important to successful teams (and even more to unsuccessful ones, like the one I’m trying to coach these days), not to mention under-valued. I thought maybe I’d try to convince a few of my players to read his story and learn from his approach, with no great expectations or hopes even on that lukewarm front.

But then this chunk of backstory happened: Williams, as a nine-year-old, offers himself as a translator for a Hispanic man in a Toys “R” Us. (Deep prejudices leapt forward from the shadows: I used to call the place Toys “R” Satan when my kids were young, because it was a hellish place to take little boys. I swore I’d never enter one again, and so far I’m good, something like 23 straight years.) Alan Williams is black, and his parents are prominent in the legal and law enforcement communities of Phoenix, Arizona.

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Ravens Back Tigers Into Corner and Peck Them Into Slump-Shouldered Helplessness

They only hit one three-point shot in the first quarter this time, unlike the six bombs they dropped on the startled heads of the young Memphis Tigers last Saturday night, but the Carleton Ravens still led by 11 after a quarter. Memphis, after overwhelming the UOttawa Gee-Gees (and their sad-sack practice jerseys) in the second half Sunday and blitzing the McGill Redmen Monday in Montreal, were back in the Ravens Nest to show that their fourth quarter against Carleton in game one represented the Real Tigers, not the 32 they were down late in the third of their 86-76 loss in the first game of their Canadian tour.

They couldn’t do it.

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Somebody Won: NCAA Basketball, UConn & Me(aning)

Shed that dolorous duvet of despair! The world is your oyster! said the Dread Voice of Unrelenting Pomposity. I’ve heard that voice before.

Me: Umm. What. Where’s the. What? I don’t even, like, like oysters.

Dread Voice: It’s a metaphor. Rise from thy couch, o scribe of the never-ending playground.

Me: I have a bad feeling about this.

DVUP: It is The Tuesday After. Evening has fallen in a hemisphere hungry for wisdom. Awake! Toll the bell! Ease their pain! And so on.

Me: Okay. Go on. I think I know what you’re going to say.

DVUP: The Madness has ended. The light is fading on the many Shining Moments. They need your strength and your vision and many, many words.

Me: How about a thousand? And while you’re here, why do they still call it March Madness when the Final Four is in April?

DVUP: Marketing. “April Antics” doesn’t scan. But enough of your irreverent frippery and procrastinative verbal flatulence, o bleary exile of the hardcourt heavens! Speak, for by Wednesday the Final Four is a dead letter. Speak, for the Madness cannot be said to have ended, truly, without your closing pronouncements. Speak, for the roundball world cannot rest easily, absent the soothing balm of your counsel and insight. And yes, 1000 of your words will nearly give them a picture. Go forth and type-ify.

Me: Dread Voice, I think you’re making fun of me again. Alright. I’m going. Do I have to use all those big words?

DVUP: Whatever. Get at it, worm.

The Dread Voice is always so encouraging.

***

For those of you keeping score, I picked none of the Final Four, but neither did you. I only got one right after the NCAA men’s basketball tourney got down to sixteen teams, and then went oh-fer again in picking the semifinal winners. I had Wisconsin, whom I’d configured as the Purehearted Badgers of the Right Student-Athlete Way, slaying the Evil Wildcats, they of the temporary study-vacation in Lexington, Kentucky and by the way what in the world were they majoring in, anyway? Billy Donovan, whom I’m old enough to remember as the dogged, over-achieving, once-was-chubby, sweaty Providence College whippet in an early VHS coaching video by Rick Pitino – c’mon Billy, that’s right, Billy, quickquickquickBilly, attaboyBilly! – was going to lead a plucky crew of talented (but not disgustingly so) Florida Gators over the 10%-graduating, barred-from-the-2013-tournament-due-to-academic-under-achieving, beat-my-Blue-Devils-in-the-’99-title-game Connecticut Huskies. Wrong again, and usually.

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More (NCAA) Canada: 16 Teams, 8 Maple-Sweet Predictions

A rough day, and he was so honest/heartbroken/humble afterward. Barely 19, and the hype’s not his fault. (Stay, Andrew. Stay, my idealism urges, but it ain’t happenin’.) That’s Dwight Powell with the block.

So, okay. It’s not called the Nearly Canadian Athletic Association, but the 2014 men’s HoopMadness tournament has been unusually big news way north of Kentucky. We’re down to the Sweet 16, the semi-finals of the four regions. There will be no Wiggins tale of the family tape looming in the finals, because Andrew peed the bed and scored all of four points against Stanford; mind you, the Cardinal started two Canadians, so you can understand his anxiety. (Older, nearly anonymous Nick outshone – or at least, didn’t so notoriously wilt in front of the basketball world – his kid brother, hitting five points off the bench in Wichita State’s gripping loss to Kentucky. Well, I read that it was gripping; I’ll try to download it and other notable games from the opening rounds, as there’s no live watching from Dalian.) There’s also no Tyler Ennis, the rising star who’d formerly played in Wiggins’s shadow on that killer AAU team from Toronto (CIA Bounce) and Canada’s national youth teams, as Syracuse was knocked out by Dyshawn Pierre and Dayton, a still-less heralded Canuck player and small-time school. The Perfect Little PG, Kevin Pangos, didn’t have enough help to lead Gonzaga past a loaded Arizona team. Yeah. So, my fairytale – Once upon a time there were two big Wigginses, and one lived high in a basketball palace, while the other lived in the basement of a modest apartment building in Wichita, Kansas…— didn’t end the way it was meant to, and Cinderella and her slippers had nothing to do with it.

(Hey, enough about me – how’s your bracket?)

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Never Mind Obama’s Bracket: MINE’s Got More Canada!

Happy Spring, lovers of green and newness and absurd levels of attention to American college sports! That’s me, and maybe you, too.) My mind has been mainly not thinking much about Madness south of the border – or way way west of the West Regional, in Dalian, China – what with jobs and obligations of spirit and a sweet little community that thinks March is a heavenuva good time to celebrate New Year’s. (Happy to you!) The Thursday night games of the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament are all in the books, and I accidentally know a couple of results. I also know that I (again) won’t likely be able to watch anything on-line. But I’m in.

The True North, deep and talented.

My bracket is done. (Like yours, it’s likely already wrecked, but I’m not sure yet.) It’s an impulsive, ill-informed, laundry-biased, ancient-loyalty-skewed and tremendously Canuck-friendly set of predictions. I’ll spare you the details, but I do have a shocking winner, a fair slew of upsets, and a quality of analysis you’ll not likely see anywhere else. So let’s get right to it!

In round one, I have mild upsets: Stanford (10) gets through because its players really are students who play great ball (in many sports), and I know nothing about New Mexico except for gorgeous sunsets and the Navajo.

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Madness, Seen and Read

I didn’t watch a single regular-season NCAA basketball game this year. Some college hoops purists would snort that this puts me in the same category as (Sir) Charles Barkley, the NBA opinionator who parachutes down to see what higher (basketball) education has to offer to the pros, when national tournament frenzy grips the upper Americas. It puts me in the same boat as lots of people, actually, who join me in filling out a bracket — after ignoring the game all year — for all the unpredictable agony and ecstasy that reduce 64 hopeful squads to four, in two four-day weekends.

Sometimes, I can get some good video from here in Dalian. Often, though, madness takes its toll…

Unlike most late-March bandwagon-jumpers, though, I care about the college game, though I can’t watch any of it here in China. (I suppose I could try to stream games on my computer, but that’s not a hassle I volunteer for easily. It reminds me of my youth, when college games were hard to find on Canadian TVs, when even The Tournament was only partly available in the early rounds. That was before March Madness became a Brand.) I did see the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels live, minus their likely one-and-done Canadian star, Anthony Bennett, when they edged the Carleton Ravens in Ottawa last summer on a northern exhibition tour.

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It’s Been Quiet, but JH Lives

Actually, it’s been a little wild: I’ve been suddenly getting lots of supply teaching dates, and in between that and busy family-ness and travel and keeping up with other writing, I’ve been neglectful of my floating blue CyberPresence. I’m grabbing a quick scribble on a hotel lobby machine in Halifax, where I am taking in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championship. The pleasure is all mine; I’m travelling with eldest son Ben, the Itinerant Artist, and it has been great so far. You’ll start finding my notes on the trip to the CIS with the IA, where we also take in the NCAA tournament on TV, in the IAAS (It’s All About Sports!) section of this site PDQ. TGIF! (Thank Goodness Initials are Finished.)