Sports Saturday
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” T. S. Eliot’s well-known conclusion to “The Hollow Men” (read the poem here) came to mind this past Monday as I watched the Butler Bulldogs lose to the Connecticut Huskies 53-41. The game was so bad that it takes a masterpiece of modernist despair to do it justice.
Shape without form? Check
Shade without color? Check.
Paralyzed force? Check.
Gesture without motion? Check.
What is one to make of a game where one team shoots under 20% from the field and hits only three two-point shots in the entire game? Where the winner—the winner!—goes 1-11 from beyond the three-point line? Where the total number of points scored was the lowest since 1949? (And they didn’t have three-point shots, the shot clock, or the dunk back then.) You can go here to read how bad the statistics were.
Will past champions remember these players, “if at all,” as “the hollow men, the stuffed men”?
Let’s say that the Huskies were the hollow men and the Bulldogs were the stuffed men. The second designation is certainly on target since Butler was having its shots stuffed all night. Connecticut had itself (as they call it) a block party.
Given the general scoring drought, this was indeed “cactus land.” Neither offense managed to get in rhythm but instead sightlessly “grope[d] together.” Here we go round the prickly pear, the prickly pear, the prickly pair, here we go round the prickly pair, on prime time tv in the evening.
We came expecting so much more, a different narrative. We were trembling with, if not tenderness, then at least excitement. This was, after all, supposed to be Cinderella’s night. We had just watched one of the most entertaining March Madness tournaments in years, one which had experienced upset after upset. The semi-finals were set up so that two unknown schools battled for one spot and two schools from powerhouse conferences battled for the other. A princess vs. ugly stepsister final contest was assured.
On the one hand there were Butler and Virginia Commonwealth University, two mid-major universities that nobody predicted would get this far. VCU even had to play an extra game to get into the tournament. On the other hand there were Kentucky and Connecticut, who between them had won nine (now ten) national basketball championships and who are coached by men that play fast and loose with ethics. We could almost taste the fairy tale ending. Many were predicting that Cinderella would win this time.
Uh, no. She tripped while running in those glass slippers. Or she listened to older sis, who told her to go back to her ashes in the brick fireplace. After all, she threw up bricks all evening.
Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.
If this is how the world ends, don’t pay for expensive seats to watch it.
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