Essays

Ninth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

I have no Wikipedia entry of my own, not even a stub. If I understand the process correctly, you have to be either rich or a character on The Simpsons to get one of those. Being neither, and therefore not sufficiently notable, it's up to me to write my own encyclopedic biography.

I was born on May 19, 1972, of German and WASP extraction. I grew up mostly in New Hampshire and New York, and attended a prep school called High Mowing (a year behind action hero Judson Mills of Walker, Texas Ranger fame). When I was 18, I changed my name because I found a better one. I went to journalism school at the University of Oregon, took a two year design degree at nearby Lane Community College, and moved back east to Philadelphia in 1997. Since then, I've never been out of debt. At Drexel University, in the collapsible bleachers, I discovered mid-major college basketball.

Since 2004, when I got a crazy idea in the upper east stands of The Palestra, I've been curating a website called The Mid-Majority. It's about two things: mid-major college basketball and travel. Over the past five years, I've been to 508 games from coast to coast and in between, sleeping and showering at truck stops when I've needed to. I run a number of websites -- one's about the Olympics and one's about sports transactions and one's about internet scraps -- but this is the only one that's ever landed me a job. The thumbnail bio-sketch I talked about the other day is this simple: mid-majors, truck stops, ESPN.com.

Eighth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

Since the invention of the printing press and discovery of binding, it's been the dream of everyone who strings words together to write a book. A longform work of 80 or 100 thousand words that can be touched, held open, smelled, stacked on a shelf and command a reader's undivided attention for hours on end -- there's a lot of power in that. And it doesn't stop there. When you as a "writer" become a "published author," bulldozers will clear out a forest for you, machines will pulp the trees and stamp your sentences on the flat, double-sided end product. The whole process is a victory of human ingenuity over nature itself.

This April, when the season was over and I'd recovered from Detroit, I was approached by two outlets interested in distributing my work. One was a "digital publisher" that wanted to distribute my travelogue series from last season. I didn't think those entries were as good as I wanted them to be, certainly not good enough to receive payment for -- so I said no thanks. Besides, they were already in digital form. The other company was more forward-thinking -- it proposed a project about the 2008-09 season, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the efforts of several mid-major teams to qualify for the NCAA Tournament, the Big Dance. Sprinkled in amongst, stories of struggle and season survival that would draw the stories of champions in important relief.

At last, someone with large printing equipment was reading my mind. I said yes before negotiating, I was excited. I'd get an advance of several thousand dollars on submission of two chapters, and it was arranged that an excerpt would run in a magazine over the summer of 2009. I'd do a reading tour, flog the book like any author, and embed sales pitches in every single blog post and chat session during the 2009-10 season. The contract was minimally restrictive, except for a non-compete clause that stated that I could not offer another publisher a college basketball manuscript until the fall of 2010.

Seventh in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

For a nation that takes its freedom so seriously, we sure are confused about it. Our society is rigidly segmented and specialized, everyone must find their place. From parental career projections to college "majors" to printed titles on business cards, American life is a series of restraints. To break out of the cycle requires upheaval, doubt, expensive retraining.

Culture provides a series of mixed signals about all of that. Nearly every feel-good Hollywood movie ever made concerns itself with a protagonist busting out of a prefabricated life, finally becoming what they truly want to be at the end, overcoming odds to become what they truly are despite a power structure's insistence of obedience. At the same time, there are high-profile dire warnings about the consequences of destiny-smashing: Don Johnson's singing career, Michael Jordan's flirtation with baseball, and more recently, Mariah Carey's acting.

Maybe it has something to do with the American idea that there's a military solution to everything, this invisible insistence on lock-step. Over the past century or so, the major sports in this country have conformed their rules and customs to become grey, cold variations on human chess. American football, for instance, is the worst. One's size and IQ determines what their job will be, and when an alternate theory comes along, purists act as if the communists are overrunning the game. In our lifetimes, baseball has evolved from nine positions to 20 -- on every pitching staff, you'll find a setup man for the setup man.

Sixth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

Here in early November, we're still at least a month away from the non-stop barrage of "Year In Review" specials, all those tidy bow-snapping recaps that attempt to impose order on a loosely-joined, selectively-selected group of events. But after 11 months, one thing is crystal-clear: 2008 has been a horrible year for old white guys.

Old white guys are shriveling before our eyes, falling increasingly out of step with the times, their power and majesty collapsing, judgement and senses slowly taking leave of them as they drift into history. To the younger generations from failing hands they fumble the torch; be ours, indeed, to hold it high. From John McCain to Jerry Lewis to Ted Stevens, off they go into the cold night of history. And then, of course, there's Billy Packer.

On July 14, the college basketball voice of CBS was carefully extricated from the business, left at the side of the road of progress by his employer after 27 years. The news interrupted my placid and serene summer, a reminder of storm clouds in my sun-dappled reverie. I was idly taking in a weekday afternoon minor-league baseball game in New Britain, Conn. when the news came in, beeping and ringing by voicemail, tweet and text. Everybody wanted to be the first to let me know, to join in on the celebration.

Fifth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

In case you haven't heard, our great nation recently concluded a long and protracted and polarizing popularity contest that decided, among other things, our heads of state and guiding ideologies for the foreseeable future. It was often marked by severe disagreements that pitted American against American.

Voters in this election had real choices, not only in political parties and candidates, but in information sources as well. Thanks to a wide array of television outlets and a million-website universe, people had no problem locating and latching onto the message they were looking for. Republicans, for instance, had their Fox News and their Drudge Report and their conservative radio hosts and commentators; Democrats could huddle around their Air America, trade Daily Kos journals, and -- in a brilliant example of profitable media positioning -- nod in agreement to MSNBC.

It's a level of choice unprecedented in media history, thanks to postmodern technology. In 2012, there will be an entire media complex for the independent middle-of-the-road undecideds, which will view all sides with a shopper's eye, revel in the constant wooing and catering, then not bother to show up for election day by suspending coverage the day before.

Fourth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

If you're just now dropping by and don't know what this is all about, this site is all about going to mid-major college basketball games. A lot of them. I attended 117 total games last year, and I've been to 508 over the past five seasons. I'm still married, happily so, in case you're wondering.

As I travel around the country visiting mid-major arenas from Big South to Big West, I notice a lot of common elements from venue to venue. The national anthem is played or sung or piped in before every game, the rims are always 10 feet above the court, games tend to be 40 minutes long and the shot clock never, ever reads 36 seconds. But the most striking similarity is the stock character I keep running into from sea to shining sea.

The mid-major beat writer.

Third in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

New technology always takes time to find its proper place, to soak into the mainstream. Over three centuries passed before the printing press changed from a luxury item for the powerful into a tool of the people. There were 50 years between "Watson, come here, I want to see you" and the Model 102 that brought simple telephony to the masses. It took nearly 100 years for television to go from early and halting experiments to worldwide acceptance.

The cycles are getting shorter, though. In just 25 years, a global web of interconnected computers grew from a defense communication system to a limitless, bottomless information and multimedia network for consumers. One particular use for this internet contraption is the transmission of sequential packages of information, presented most recent first. Sometimes progress works faster than careful labeling techniques, so the generally accepted and unfortunate term for this mechanism is and always will be "blog." (Which is just as unwieldy and incorrect an indicator as "mid-major," if not more so. At least "mid-major" hasn't yet devolved into a verb.)

Second in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

This being the first Sunday of The Mid-Majority's Season 5 (and a Daylight Savings-adjusted morning upon which thousands of churchgoers will miss their services), it's as good a time as any for a Bible story. Today, we'll be reading from the Old Testament, the first book of Samuel.

No tale is as carefully tied to our regular basketball business than one which appears in the midst of that book. 1 Samuel 17:49 is read verbatim during the greatest two minutes of American sports cinema, the second in a devastating emotional triple-apex within the championship-game locker room scene from Hoosiers. Preacher Purl steps forward before the team and intones meaningfully,

And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen.

First in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.

It's not supposed to work out for the best, and the system is designed to anticipate failure. On March 21 in Birmingham, the four lower seeds wore their extra digits like anchors, eliminated one after another at three-hour intervals. I watched from a corner seat as American, South Alabama and then Boise State, and finally Saint Joseph's had their weaknesses cruelly exploited by superior competition, crushed and crumpled on live high-definition television.

Each head coach ascended to the press-conference dais with two dejected and downcast players, briefly explained to the assembled reporters how those things that worked so well for five months just didn't seem to click on March 21, had misfired so badly. And then they disappeared, shunted aside, back to their buses behind the BJCC Arena. By the time the weekend was over, Butler was gone too.

I remember my first March Madness office pool. The year was 1992, I was about to leave my teenage years behind. I had just nabbed my first real actual journalism job, working for out-of-state tuition as a junior copy editor at a farming magazine in Oregon. I recall that the whole bracket thing was a strange and off-putting experience.

The keeper of the brackets was one of the publishing partners at the company. His name was Jeff, I think. Jeff was one of the pioneers in "business casual," coming to work every day in a polo shirt with the embroidered logo of some golf course or other. Everywhere he went, he carried a cellular phone the size of a Subway sandwich.

During a weekly meeting (there was no mass e-mail in the Stone Age), he announced that we'd be having, once again, the annual office bracket contest. Ten-dollar fees and completed brackets would be due into him on Wednesday. Everybody knew how it worked, except for a few secretaries. And me.

"So we fill the bracket out, the whole thing?" I asked him privately afterwards, hoping to save myself some public embarrassment.

"Yes, jackass, the whole thing," came the reply. "That's how you win, see."

I'd filled out brackets before, sure, but not like that. And people don't believe me when I say this, but I haven't filled out a bracket like that since 2003. And I know I don't have time -- the deadline's coming up fast -- but I'm going to try and convince you that you shouldn't either. Don't fill out a bracket this week.

I can't think of anything that captures the essence of modern corporate America better than Selection Sunday. Four and a half months of sweat and blood spilled by on-court workers is distilled into numbers and charts, spreadsheets and presentations. Merits are debated by people in suits in a locked room -- it's the ultimate performance evaluation. It's the day when Hoops Nation takes a back seat to Powerpoint Nation.

Yesterday evening, when this season's final flowchart was made public, there was the same mixture of overjoyed jubilance and crushing heartbreak outside that hotel that we see every year. At our level, seasons with disappointing ends were validated and brought back from the dead: we're literally beside ourselves with glee that South Alabama was deemed worthy despite a semifinal exit, as Team USA generated the first two-bid Sun Belt since 1994. We exchanged happy e-mails (with lots of all-caps and exclamation points) with Saint Mary's fans, who will see their team go on to the Dance in the first-ever three-bid West Coast Conference.

But the side of the bubble wall with broken hearts had more of an emotional impact, it always does. Virginia Commonwealth couldn't follow up a regular-season title with a tourney title, and were punished with cold non-inclusion. And nothing was sadder than reading a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues from Illinois State fans, some of which made me dewy-eyed (in a Real Man way, of course). The Redbird faithful spent an entire week creating logical arguments that their team's credentials were NCAA-worthy for the first time in a long decade marked with mediocrity. If you've been living with this team day in and day out all year, then went through the past seven days inside your own head convincing yourself that Cincinnati was a "good win," today it feels like your pet died.

And this is why I hate Selection Sunday. The system of at-large bids, the cottage industry of at-large prediction, the will-they-won't-they that has less to do with basketball than psychological torture. All over a damned committee meeting.

It's never going to end. We might try to fight it, we may try to ignore it, but every year it's going to come back. I'm talking, of course, about the endless debate of what a "mid-major" is and what one isn't. Within the past few weeks, we've had weigh-ins here, here, here and on countless blogs.

What all of these explanations lack -- and this is important -- is that they're all painfully complicated and long-winded, and each has some sort of complicated Rube Goldberg scale of three and sometimes four (!) levels and designations. This may be college, and everyone's all smart and stuff, but it's still basketball -- all of these redrawn maps fail the important 35-second clock test. (Honnnnk!) They also use vague, author-defined conceptions of "expectations," "performance" or "prestige." Give me a break.

Once upon a time there was a tiny little cell, one among a million billion, sloshing and sliding inside a gigantic and vibrant and heaving body. The tiny little cell did its tiny little job as well as it tiny little could, and during its time off it had fun bouncing around with other tiny little like-celled cells, having tiny little conversations on its tiny little cell phone (sorry).

In due course, it was time for the tiny little cell to come of age. It was tiny little puberty time! Inside its tiny little globby cell walls, the tiny little cell was feeling changes -- big changes! Chromatin was condensing, and cytoskeleton microtubules were collapsing! Soon, the tiny little cell had pulled apart from itself and become two tiny little cells, appearing to be exactly the same! This is what tiny little scientists -- great big ones too -- call "mitosis."

It was an easygoing, unassuming late-summer Saturday in Rhode Island. I had completed my weekend house-husband chores (saving the stinky litter boxes for last, as usual), then prepared for a long, languid afternoon of relaxation on the patio. I contemplated the birdfeeder, turning out a few chamber-couplets about finches into a Moleskine. Finally, I switched to the French pop station on the XM radio and tucked into a long novel about cowboys.

Then, far behind me in the house, the phone started ringing. Then again. Custom ringtones in quick-cut edits, like a 20-second rotation from a mad deejay on a scratchy AM radio station.

Before throwing the switch, he gathered his thoughts in the virtual darkness, choosing his words carefully. He didn't know who was out there on the other side -- who his audience would be, whether or not he would be able to find one. If an audience for someone like him even existed. This was something very new, without any sort of market testing, and represented a leap of faith.

And so he leapt, issuing his first missive out into the ether.

I am your voice, the voice of the fan, the everyday Joe who can't afford a beer and a hot dog and shouts bloody murder from the first pitch to the last out because I paid for my ticket and I am entitled! ... I am your best friend and management's worst nightmare! I am... Superfan!

Here's another story we won't have time for later. When I was 12, I went through a phase that most failed child prodigies go through, the fitful burst of youthful creativity and frustration that comes right before the realization that girls are interesting. For me, it manifested itself in a short-lived Dungeons and Dragons addiction.

My PC (player character) was Mitra, a powerful wizard who had attained Level 30 and thousands of HP (hit points). In games at slumber parties and friends' houses, Mitra had earned long lists of abilities and castable spells, with XP (experience points) in the hundreds. His STR (strength) and DEX (dexterity) numbers were off the charts, his CON (constitution) solid, his INT (intelligence) and CHR (charisma) second to few.

In 1995, five years into my stay out in Oregon, I became homesick for the opposite coast, the one I grew up on. The feeling started as confusion and frustration, which grew into a acute sense of not belonging, culminating in a crystalline realization.

I missed hockey.

The New Hampshire boarding school I attended is located on a remote hilltop, in a broadcast television dead-spot and a half-hour's walk from the nearest cash register. Back in the 1980's, before WiFi brought the world together, our only contact points with the real world were the radio and the Boston Globe. Every morning, a forest-green van would drive up, drop off a bundled stack of paper news, and disappear again down the hill.

I had the sports section memorized by 9 a.m., every boxscore and gamecap and pitching probable. Not only did I know exactly what happened in the American sporting world the previous night, I knew what certain people thought about it all too.

Mid-major universities tend to fall in one of three categories. There are the expensive and tiny religious schools in remote and leafy locations, flame-keepers of Christian subsects born out of the Great Schisms. You have your specialized colleges: the teacher's schools, the agriculture and mining institutions, the technicals and polytechnics, the private liberal arts outlets named after dead guys. And then there are the public universities established by state school boards of ed that are intended to serve smaller cities and towns, the ones that had the misfortunes of springing up too far away from the motherships. These directionals and satellites often find themselves living on scraps, with money piped through a tube that is just about as thick as the hyphens in their titles. Or perhaps those represent ten-foot poles.

There's an annual event -- if that's a phrase suitable and grey enough to describe something that doesn't cut it as a tradition -- here in our household. Every year around this time, the satellite television company beams in a solid week of unlimited American professional basketball in a free preview of the "NBA League Pass." This, to me, is like our neighborhood drug dealer saying that it'll be the second dose of snortable laxative cut with Drano that's going to cost you. If we had neighborhood drug dealers in Pawtucket, R.I., that is.