Well, it’s happened. I thought it might happen at the beginning of this college basketball season; I thought it might happen in the middle of the season, when it was clear they’d both be 1-seeds; I thought it might happen the first weekend of the tournament; and here we are. Monday night, it’s Purdue vs. UConn for the men’s college basketball championship.
Last year I moved back home to Connecticut after 15 years away. Since our beloved Hartford Whalers left (for the fucking snowless south) when I was a child, CT has had nothing to hang its sports hat on other than college basketball. But that’s OK, because UConn is undoubtedly the greatest women’s college basketball program of all time, and while the men are less likely to get mentioned than Duke or Kentucky, they’re quietly creeping up the leaderboard. Here, college basketball is something like college football in Alabama - the fervor would still be intense if it wasn’t the only game in town, but it helps that it is. And it helps that, with a win on Monday night, UConn would be behind only Kentucky and UCLA in terms of all-time championships. Incidentally, ten of UCLA’s championships came under the coaching of John Wooden, who played college ball himself for… Purdue, where I got my PhD!
I am very grateful to my undergraduate alma mater, Central Connecticut State, and had a great two years at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my MA. Those were formative days and I have great affection for them. (And I donate.) But Purdue was the college where I most felt at home, where I dug into campus life and truly enjoyed the unique pleasures of living in a big education factory with Big Ten football and former Purdue aviation students doing flybys in giant military planes and grimy local bars and long bike rides across the university’s endless acreage. (You can read a little about that here.) I completed my PhD there in four years - that’s fast, for the people out there still calling me the “eternal grad student” or whatever - and then took a fifth year there to teach and apply to jobs. It was a wonderful time, and it essentially afforded me the collegiate experience I had missed as a commuter student when I got my bachelors. And, you know, I’m a creature of campus; the fact that my mental illness destroyed my academic dreams at multiple times and in multiple ways will always be one of the great regrets of my life. I’ll always be an academic. I just don’t really work anywhere else but campus, a point which I made years ago on Twitter which Gawker subsequently mocked me for. Different times! Anyway, this game has got me waxing nostalgic.
This is all complicated by the fact that I swore off college basketball forever when the Big East of my youth was destroyed by greed, greed for college football. From John Thompson’s Georgetown to Jim Boeheim’s Syracuse, St. John’s and Villanova and Seton Hall, from Patrick Ewing to Kyle Lowry to Derrick Coleman to Kemba Walker, it was an incredible conference with so many incredible moments. I think the Big East tournament was often just as exciting, and with just as high a level of play, as March Madness itself. And it was killed by the absurdity and greed of college football, a font of corruption and educational malpractice. For the past couple of years, at the start of college football season I’ve pitched around a piece about UConn’s absurd, quixotic, wasteful campaign to become a meaningful college football team. The ridiculous notion that UConn could compete for national titles in the first decade of ascending to the FBS division prompted acts of such institutional hubris as I’ve never seen. It all depended on the absurd idea that a tiny state with no local recruiting population and no college football history to speak of - besides, like, Yale winning championships in the 1920s - could muscle in with the Alabamas and Ohio States of the world. Absurd! Absurd. And they killed the (real) Big East, a wonderful college basketball conference in which UConn had already achieved actual, real, non-hypothetical success…..
Well. Maybe I’ll get a chance to write that piece this fall; it would have to be just the right publication and I probably don’t have the juice to do it. ANYWAY. When they killed the Big East, the real Big East, I said, never again! But going to Purdue started to tug me back into caring about college basketball. Being on campus has a way of doing that to you. Our football team was terrible when I was there, and yet when the stadium was full and campus was packed and you had all these people parked in their RVs, well, it was impossible not to miss the lure. And now even in absentia I get gassed up for the possibility that Purdue will break its curse and finally win one. Call it a memorial to Neil Armstrong. Luckily for my principles, all we achieved when I was there was a series of early flameouts in the tourney, so I’m particularly primed. And now here we are.
I truly can’t lose. I’ll be happy with either result, though because UConn has five trophies and Purdue has none, I’ll be rooting for the Boilermakers a little bit. And if they win I’ll be jealous that I’m not on campus to observe the madness, just like I’ve been jealous lately that I never got to see a 7’4 giant striding around that kingdom of brick academic efficiency. But if UConn wins, that’ll be great too; I’ll get to enjoy the revelry in person. And it’ll be even easier to tell Duke and North Carolina to eat shit. What a perfect little ray of sunshine into my life.
You ever see Gordie Howe play for the Whalers? "Goddie" as some used to call him. No roids, but built like a brick shithouse from all that farm work in Canada. I think he played into his 50s. Still the greatest in my eyes, along with Bobby Hull (who was a terrible person, but an explosive hockey player). The NHL just isn't the same anymore, sadly.
Good stuff. I prefer columns like this to take a shot at Boston College who, while jumping into the life raft of the ACC, elbowed UCONN out and left them to drown. https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/sports/bc-admits-it-doesnt-want-uconn-in-acc/1893542/