March Madness, Lightning Strike or Slog?

Sports Saturday

Once again March Madness is gripping America.  Once again we see Cinderella teams upsetting the giants (Northern Iowa upsetting top-seeded Kansas, Butler upsetting mighty Syracuse) and games won or lost on remarkable shots made in the waning seconds (Murray State, Michigan State).  Maryland, the team I was rooting for, made a miraculous last minute comeback to take the lead, only to then lose on a three-point Michigan State shot at the buzzer. 

I’ve been talking about the games with my colleague Ben Click, who played on a very good JUCO team (junior college) when he was in San Antonio.  (Ben tells me JUCO ball is a rough and tumble affair, more like playing pick-up games with thugs.  He says with pride that he never disputed a ref’s call and never let an opponent get under his skin, although with humility he adds that he let too many opponents get by him for rim-rattling dunks.) We discussed what literary works could best be used to characterize March Madness.

As someone who has never played an office game, I am drawn to those spectacular moments at the end of contests where a tough shot clinches a win, especially if the team (like Michigan State) is down at the time.  So I looked for poems in which the last line plays with spectacular effect, perhaps causing one to rethink everything that has gone before—poems in which (looking at it from the perspective of the Maryland game) things appears to be going comfortably in one direction when—bam!—everything changes.

For that situation, I chose Edward Arlington Robinson’s well-known “Richard Cory”:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good Morning!” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine — we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

I don’t anticipate either Richard Cory’s or Michigan State’s final shot.

The poem may also work for the Kansas-Northern Iowa game. Kansas, like Richard Cory, seemed to have everything going for it.  Many, including Barack Obama, were predicting Kansas would win the entire tournament.  And then, bang, it shot itself in the head. 

And when it did, who amongst us (outside of Kansas fans) did not feel a certain satisfaction?  Those of us who wait for the light and go without meat may enjoy watching the mighty brought down.  (Okay, so maybe we don’t want the light to be a gunpowder explosion.) On a calm summer night—spring night, actually—we sit down before our television sets to watch the glittering teams claim their crowns, only to see the universe turn upside down.

Ben, having played tournament basketball, sees March Madness less as glamorous shots and more as a persevering journey. And if that’s the appropriate analogy, then the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath may be the work to cite.

Rather then describe the entire plot, I will focus on one short episode (chapter 3) where Steinbeck captures that migration of uprooted Oklahoma farmers through a single image: a turtle crossing a road.

The turtle’s journey is laborious.  It takes everything it has to climb the embankment to the road.  Then, when the turtle reaches it, the going gets easier: “all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side.”  Only then the turtle is almost hit, first by a sedan that tries to miss it and then by a truck that aims for it.  It takes a glancing blow from the truck and ends up on its back.  Nevertheless, it keeps on going:

… its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull it over.  Its front foot caught a piece of quartz and little by little the shell pulled over and flopped upright.

And then, it reaches the other side of whatever road it just struggled across:  Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, or Championship Game.

So what has March Madness been for you?  Quick and unexpected strikes? Or a laborious trek filled with close calls and grinding effort?  Either way, it lends itself to drama.