Part II, March 13-March 19

Hiking with Meghan at the White Tank mountains near Glendale, AZ. Dressed in khaki shorts, my blue and orange pumas, white ankle socks, my orange rope-anklet from Alan Brooks, (my British co-counselor from last summer), my green Minnesota North Stars hat, and a bright blue KU shirt I got from my brother. Shirt has a giant “KU” in red on the front of the shirt. A pair of hikers, an old man and woman, pass us. They freeze.

I laugh. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t hear you.” And then… “Yeah, I’m not from Kansas.”

“Oh…” Disappointment? Newfound boredom? What? “Does he like it there?”

That’s the problem with misrepresenting your fandom through clothes or other gear. Even wearing the hat of a now sort-of defunct hockey team,[1] I’ve encountered a fair amount of North Star fans, people who excitedly hurry over to talk hockey with me, dropping names like Curt Giles and Basil McRae and Elmer “Moose” Vasko, waiting for me to respond in like-minded nostalgic fashion, only to have me tell them in great disappointment: “Actually, I’m not a fan. I just have the hat…” I then try to explain to them the significance of the hat, how I go to a camp called North Star, how I love hanging out in Duluth and Minneapolis, how one of my best friend’s gave it to me…but by now they’re gone, shuffling off to someplace else.

If there is one mistake that we’ve definitely made during the first half of this trip, it’s been setting aside too much time in the Phoenix area. I’ve loved spending time with Uncle Eddie, Aunt Sharon, and the kids, as well as Aunt Andi & Uncle Terry, and it’s been great staying at this condo with Don and Bonnie and getting an opportunity to see the Cubs play spring ball, but it was during the early part of our trip that I really felt like we were exploring, which has been my goal ever since the road trip’s initial conception. Now I feel like we’re vacationing.

It’s clear now that even with the time we had to take out of the trip due to Meghan’s grandmother’s passing, we would have had time to head south east through Tennessee and down to the Atlantic at near the Florida/Georgia border. We would have then gone west through Atlanta, stopping on the Emory campus to see my camp friend Aaron Hamer, then through the mystery states that are Alabama and Mississippi on I-10 before experiencing New Orleans. We would have then entered Texas at Houston, missed JR in Oklahoma as well as Dallas and possibly Austin, instead following 10 to San Antonio and onward from there.

I am very excited to see the Pacific Northwest; it’s an entire region that I know only from pictures. But in a different way it would have been cool to see the “Deep South.” I can’t hide the fact that the South intimidates me, and I don’t try to. While I know the Northwest from pictures, I know the South from stereotypes, both good (southern hospitality) and bad (Confederate flag waving racists). I greatly wish to visit that area and experience it…it sometimes feels like I’m a child who has been told repeatedly by his parents to “stay away from the Old Carter place,” and so my friends and I creep past it and exchange myths and ghost stories about all of the horrible things that have happened within its walls, and yet all the while the house is home to...who, exactly?

America is a vast and spectacular land, filled with a multitude of people and cultures. And I feel like I can relate to nearly all of them including most of the ones that I’ve yet to be exposed to. But I don’t feel like I relate to the South, an area and a people that feels entirely foreign to me. I don’t think that we will get an opportunity to explore that part of the country during this trip, but in my quest to fully experience America I am greatly anticipating my eventual visit to the South.

The second Cubs spring training game of my illustrious career would feature one of the great rivalries in the history of Chicago sports: the Cubs vs. the White Sox. As we have seen, there are different kinds of rivalries. There are the eternal ones, such as Bears-Packers, and there are the ephemeral ones, such as Bulls-Pistons. Cubs-Sox is certainly eternal, but it is a different kind of rivalry than Bears-Packers, which functions like the Capulets and the Montogues. Cubs-Sox is more of a sibling rivalry; Cubs fans are the intelligent, seemingly well-behaved yet underhandedly devious older brother, while the White Sox fans are the immature, bitter, jealous, harder working, more ambitious, and less respected younger brother. It’s like Michael and Fredo Corleone.

“You look out for me? I’m a professional baseball team, just like you, and you look out for me?”

“It ain’t the way I wanted it! I’m talented. I can hit and field and pitch! You’re not the only lovable loser around here!”

And yes, I realize that Fredo was the older brother, but that’s not the point. Michael never cared about his sibling rivalry, because to him it wasn’t a rivalry. He was above it. He was the favorite, and he knew it, and he had the power, and he knew that too. Sox fans have always been more attached to the rivalry than have Cubs fans, who don’t have time to bother with “that sort of thing.” Luke has always said that his two favorite teams are the White Sox and whoever’s playing the Cubs; many fans of a rivalry team think that way. But it’s more than that. Sox fans often put as much energy into rooting against the Cubs as they do pulling for their own team. Most Cubs fans really don’t care about the Sox. They might not like it when they win, and certainly they want to control all of the head-to-head battles and general popularity in the city, but even when the two teams tussle during the regular season, the games always mean more to Sox fans than to Cubs fans, who could leave Wrigley on a late Sunday afternoon after a three-game Sox sweep and think to themselves “Whatever, it was just three baseball games. Meaningless in the whole picture. We’re still better.” It’s that pseudo-pompous attitude that really fires up Sox fans, and can you blame them? Cubs fans—myself included—have always found ways to separate their fandom from their baseball team, as if the two were somehow related yet not directly connected, as if the Cubs’ on-field performance was our drunk uncle whom we tolerate but who has always been separate from our love for The Family. It’s not that we don’t care about winning and losing, it’s that so much losing has enabled us to have a certain detachment from all of the ups and downs.

For most Cubs fans, our focus is centered entirely upon our joy of being a Cubs fan as well as our enjoyment of our team’s performance. Only when the rivalry is thrown right in our face do we focus on it. Like Michael Corleone, we’re fine as long as nobody steps on our toes. It was only when Fredo tried to get “something for me, on my own” that Michael became jealous and, well, ordered the murder of his brother.

But that’s really pretty far down the road. Cubs fans, real Cubs fans—and this is where we must begin to differentiate between real Cubs fans and people who “Love those Loveable Cubbies,” because we really are two entirely separate and nearly incomparable groups—don’t care much about what the Sox are doing. I know I don’t. To me, the White Sox have always been more like the Brewers than the Packers…just another team that plays nearby, the difference of course being that the White Sox play for Chicago, which means that they carry the emotions of many of my fellow Bears and Bulls fans.

That is why I never root against the Sox. When the Cubs and Sox go head-to-head, I root for the Cubs, not against the Sox. It’s always exciting to see both Chicago teams sharing a field, but other than that it’s no different that playing St. Louis, Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or Milwaukee. The Sox are like our sixth divisional foe that we don’t play nearly as often. My main objective is the Cubs’ success. If they are losing, no amount of White Sox failure can cheer me up. Likewise, White Sox success does not get me down. Among my closest friends, Luke and Sven are absolutely diehard Sox fans, and my buddy Josh used to love them before he went to New York and his interest in sports waned, two unrelated yet simultaneous occurrences.[2] We have other family friends who love the Sox—my mom’s best friend Sandy Lorgeree, her entire family loves the Sox, as does my New Trier buddy Dave Kraut. When the Sox are winning, my friends are happy, and as they are Chicago and thus tied into my other teams, I would rather see the Sox win in the playoffs than some other AL team. I pulled for them in 2000, but when the Mariners finished off their three-game sweep, I moved on with my life swiftly and happily as Luke and Sven and Josh dealt with the pain of losing…

So the stranger you high-five at the UC may be the same one who curses you out at Wrigley, and the one you bark with at Soldier Field may be the same one you sneer at Comiskey, and it is these differences that make baseball season in Chicago unique amongst other Chicago sports seasons. As Bulls fans we scream about Laimbeer’s dirty play, and as Bears fans we lament Favre’s knack for dominating us, but as Cubs and Sox fans we scream at each other, brothers so tight one day yet feuding the next.[3]

Another catalyst for the teams’ differences in popularity is their stadiums. Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park/U.S. Cellular Field both have their niceties, but when it comes to Old Timey Baseball, Comiskey[4] falls short. Wrigley gets the popularity nod due to its history, landmark status, and surrounding neighborhood, all of which outshine their South Side counterpart. That said, I really like going to games at the Cell. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Comiskey was the home of my first and only Rolling Stones concert, an event that my life had been building towards since I was four…but Stones or no, I still love this park of many names. Be it Comiskey, New Comiskey, Comiskey Park, Sox Park, U.S. Cellular Field, the Cell, Cell Block Field, or even the Joan,[5] the ball park on the South Side is a wonderful place to see a game. It caters equally to college students and to families, and let’s face it: the food is much better at Comiskey than at Wrigley. Half Price Mondays are a treat, and the fireworks are always fun, and though I haven’t been there since the renovation I’ve seen pictures of the improvements, including the new “fan zone” areas that Luke raves about. The place looks fabulous. There’s not much that the Sox are ever going to be able to do about the neighborhood—it’s not awful, and I don’t feel unsafe…it’s simply the nature of having a ballpark in the middle of the projects as opposed to a yuppie quasi-suburbia—but as far as making fans feel welcome and excited at the park, they’ve done an absolutely fabulous job. And to think, they didn’t even need to dump a spaceship on top.

So the Cubs are media darlings, the most popular team in baseball not called the Yankees. And yes, we are plagued with a ba-jillion tag-along fans who are indeed wearing their Cubbie blue just because they are “fun and cute,” as well as fans who just want to come to Wrigley to have a good time. There’s nothing we can do about that. Were you to somehow remove those fans, then the fan bases of the Cubs and the Sox would be about the same. But that is not the case, and as we get all of the attention and love for our ballpark and our colors, and as we get all of the hype for our talented pitching staff, and as we get all of the pity and sympathy for our 97 title-less years, the Sox just sit quietly with their fun park and their solid pitching and their 88 title-less years, and they become that jealous younger brother, unreasonably angry over things he can’t control and things he should not even worry about…

So with all of these differences between Cubs fans and Sox fans, is it ever possible to legitimately switch sides?

Conversion is a tricky thing. Changing over from one team to another is a lot like changing your religion. When a Christian wishes to convert to Judaism or vice-versa, it’s a very personal decision. Sometimes certain members of the convertor’s family are disappointed or upset, but the convertor does not have to deal with the potential wrath of every member of the faith.

Like converting to a new religion, a sports conversion requires the love and support of family members. Also like religion conversion, sports conversion requires a major lifestyle change and true commitment on the part of the convertor. But the nature of sports makes conversion much more difficult and harrowing.

Like with music, there’s nothing in religion that states firmly that new people cannot join the faith on a whim. Of course, religion is different than music because the majority of religious people in the world tend to stick to one or another, whereas a person can enjoy many different genres of music. Rare is the person who follows the advice that my mother’s rabbi once gave to her: “Mickey,” he said, “pick a religion and go with it.”

My mom is Jewish in three ways: she was born of a Jewish mother, she is a cultural Jew, and she maintains a Jewish identity of her own accord. However, my mom is also a practicing Buddhist, a religion she chose on her own. She doesn’t take heat from Jews and Buddhists demanding that she “pick one.” She finds elements in both that she likes and respects, and practices both equally.

Imagine asking somebody what baseball team they root for, and getting this reply: “Well, I’m mostly a Cubs fan, but I root for the White Sox batters. I just like their lineup more than the Cubs’.”

So, barring odd familial circumstances, a sports fan can have only one diehard favorite per sport. Any conversion is difficult, even one between two teams that have no real connection—like, for example, the Bulls and the Nuggets. But when you are trying to convert between two rivals, well, you’d better have a damn good reason. It’s also best not to try it during an “up year” for your “new” team, lest you be persecuted by the current members for what would appear to be blatant fair-weather fandom. But if you really are serious about your switch, if you are truly committed, and if you are completely backed up by your friends and family, then you will have an easier transition period than many others, even if you do so during an “up year.”

For nearly all of his life, Don was a Cubs fan. His mother was a Cubs fan, and she passed her Cubs love along to him. He grew up across the street from Wrigley Field. He snuck into games when he didn’t have tickets. To this day, he glowingly reflects upon his many summer days that he spent out in the bleachers. He got married, had two daughters, and shared with them his love for the Cubs.

My father, a great Cubs fan himself, has always held fast to the idea that being a sports fan is about the good and the bad, and if the bad happens to include having your head bashed in and your heart ripped out every so often by your favorite ball club, well, this was simply part of the job.

The first time I met him was just after last summer. Meghan and I began dating in May, just before I went to camp. When I got back, it got more serious, and in the middle of September she invited me to a Cubs game with her dad and his friend. I wasn’t nervous to meet her father, but certainly I wanted to make a good impression. Still, I could not hide my shock and confusion when Don threw on a White Sox hat on our way out the door. From there, the story came tumbling out of him as Meghan stood, shaking her head. It was pretty simple: Don was fed up with the losing, but even more than that, he was fed up with the nearly unbearable way that the Cubs jerk around their fans’ emotions.

Overnight, he became a Sox fan. He was like a guy who had clung to his unfaithful girlfriend for years before snapping one day, dumping her, and finding an intense love and full devotion with a new woman within the week. This was Don Gordon. His sudden defection left his friends and family members stunned. Meghan was a freshman in college at the time; Shanna was in high school; both were Cubs fans. But Don, after years of misery, decided that enough was enough. He traded in his Cubbie blue for White Sox black, and that was that.

His family still gives him crap for it, though rather lovingly. In truth, he seems like a White Sox fan. Passionate yet bitter, intelligent and cynical, a baseball fan with a dark and twisted soul for the sport. He is also an extraordinarily kind man, and still carries a soft spot in his heart for the team from which he escaped. He keeps track of his “old girlfriend” just to see how she’s doing, and shakes his head as she continues to sleep around and break the hearts of every man she sees. Sometimes, though, the pain is too much, and he lets loose on his old flame. “The only baseball worth a damn is south of Madison Ave.,” he proudly exclaims. His friends still respect him; his conversion has been absolute and he is clearly satisfied with his new life…yet I believe that in his heart of hearts, he wishes for only good things for the Cubs, because even though he is done with them completely, he still wants good things for his old team, hoping that they will finally, finally, reward their faithful and adoring fans with a championship.

Once again, we are treated to a beautiful day of spring baseball. The D-Backs game had been a nice appetizer for what was clearly the main course. There’s nothing like seeing the Cubs and the Sox on the same field. For me, it’s always been more a game of city pride than of city animosity. What a great feeling to see these two home teams slugging it out. I’ll take mine and you take yours. Like one-on-one hoops against your brother. Always intense, always fun.

The big advantage of attending the game on Friday was that it was my warm-up game; I enjoyed the baseball, but it was also my time to get acquainted with the spring training experience. With those details and basic questions accounted for, I was now prepared to fully immerse myself into the depths of Cubs-Sox. Don’s eyes have a mischievous look about them; he and I have come to enjoy hammering away at each other about the Cubs and Sox, and this spring game is our first real opportunity to do so. Out in the outfield we watch as starters Ryan Dempster and Mark Buehrle warm up in the pen, and we watch as Derrek Lee stretches and Aaron Rowand jogs. The crowd is about two-thirds Cubs fans, which seems about right. A small group of Sox fans can always hold their own against the larger Cubs contingent.

Meg and I take a walk around the park, meeting my camp buddy Danny Muschler, who came in from the University of Denver to watch the game. Annie Millstone and her roommate came along as well, so we had a nice little camp reunion at the game. Anyhow, on our way around to meet Musch, we pass by the players’ entrence, and though most of the guys are on the field, Neifi Perez is late getting there. Ordinarily this area is closed off as players walk through, but since he’s the only one it is open. He stops and signs some baseballs for some fans, and I approach him and shake his hand.

“Hey! No problem buddy!” He says. I now love Neifi Perez, even more than before.

When we get back to our “seats,” Don looks at me, a sly underhanded smile on his face. “I’m happy that you’re finally getting a glimpse of what World Series-caliber baseball looks like.”

“Yeah, it’s fun,” I say. “The White Sox are probably excited to see the Cubs, too.”

…and as it turns out, the Sox are ready to play. The Cubs score first with a run in the second, and then the Sox begin unloading on Dempster. They put up three runs in the third, one in the fourth, and then four in the fifth off Glendon Rusch. Bam! Bam! Bam! Home run upon home run fly out of HoHoKam, and four land around our section during the first five innings. Two of those Sox home runs are caught by Sox fans, while the other two are caught by Cubs fans, and of course we all did our “Throw it back!” chant on each home run, and of course, the Cubs fans throw them back.

Then in the bottom of the fifth, Michael Barrett rips a home run back in our direction. This one is fielded by a young mother who is sitting on a Cubs blanket with her nearly-infant son. I mean, this kid was barely old enough to throw a baseball…which is exactly what he does, right over the fence, much to his Cub-fan mother’s dismay.

Can you blame him? For the past half hour he’s heard repeated chants to “throw it back,” and twice they were followed up with a fan throwing it back. His mom set the ball down next to them, and as soon as she did the kid just picked it up and tossed it over the fence. When we all saw it we immediately began laughing, and then murmurs of “Aaaawwwwwwwww! How cute!” began filling the outfield. Incredibly, it was clear in this kid’s eyes that he understood that he had done something wrong, and within a two count of tossing that ball over he begins to cry. His mother takes him and tries to comfort him, and all of the fans in the area feel bad. The ball rolls past Rowand in center, and then, in a wonderful scene of sports togetherness, a man in a Sox hat begins yelling at Rowand, getting his attention in order to get him to throw the ball back. It was “Throw it back” to the extreme. Sure enough, Rowand calls time, picks up the ball, and tosses it back to the guy in the Sox hat, who in turn brings it over to the kid.

“Hang on to it this time,” he says with a smile as he hands the kid the ball.

We all applaud, and as I laugh I take a closer look at the kid, and realize that, perhaps, his reasons for throwing it back extended beyond his nature as a young and confused toddler.

After going down 8-1 in the fifth, the Cubs make a game of it with a run in their half of the fifth and three in the sixth. They go on to lose 9-5, but the score hardly matters. I have taken in my first spring training season, and it feels great. The next time that I pay such close attention to baseball will be April 4^th, on Opening Day.

I’m not a big drinker—I didn’t have my first beer until I turned 22—and so much of the popular and obvious social scene did not appeal to me. I’m also not into the frat thing, so my social life was nearly non-existent during my first two years at school. I didn’t even begin to find my niche in Bloomington until midway through my junior year when I took some creative writing classes and started hanging out with some guys from class. By the end of my junior year, I was really beginning to love Bloomington, and all in all I’m glad that I went there…

Early in the going, though, my affection for IU and Bloomington was minimal. I just couldn’t get into the sports scene, one that directly conflicted with my love for Northwestern. NU was my life, my heart, my childhood. Some Hoosiers were going to change that? No dice. Indeed, it was exciting to be in the thick of the “riots” the day that Bob Knight got fired, (9-11-00…IU students up in arms over the firing of their talented and abusive coach…funny to think that exactly a year later, we were all back out on campus, albeit for decidedly different reasons…), but that alone was not going to sway me.

My love for IU began to grow during my sophomore year, the year that I began delivering pizzas for Dominoes. For the first time, I was seeing a lot of Bloomington, as well as getting a glimpse into the social life and the diverse student body. It was a treat to get little snapshots of other IU students. Driving all night, music blasting, lots of Hellos and How’s It Goings, good tips, absurd stories, and the occasional fringe benefits…

So sophomore year was where my appreciation of Bloomington and IU began to grow, and though a lot of it had to do with my job, a good deal of it also hinged upon one of the most exciting seasons of basketball in IU’s glorious history.

When Bob Knight was fired, IU hoops was in disarray. Campus was a mess. Luke and I saw a large group of people forming around the stadium, and so we went out there. The student body was in such a rage that day that they decided to hang and burn Kent Harvey and Myles Brand in effigy. Students were swearing up and down that they would never again set foot in Assembly Hall, and there was early word out that freshman AJ Moye would be transferring. I remember seeing redshirt freshman George Leach out in the crowd, with somebody screaming through a bullhorn, “This is not why George Leach came to Indiana!” while Leach stood towering over everyone with a look of bemusement on his face. Eventually the loud, disgruntled, and disorganized mob of students decided to storm Brand’s front lawn, at which point the police—who were already in their full riot gear—began thumping their batons in their hands. I had managed to move up towards the front of the crowd, right at the lip of Brand’s lawn and about fifteen feet away from the police force, and as I was more interested in observation than participation, and as I had heard my parents’ stories about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, I decided that I did not want to be standing directly between the police and the student mob when whatever was about to go down went down. So I booked out, squirreling my way out of the large mass to a spot behind them with clear running lanes and escape routs…and just in time, as the police sprung into action shortly there after. By no means did Bloomington ’00 rival Chicago ’68 in violence or importance, but lack of historical significance probably wouldn’t soften the blow of getting hit with a shot of tear gas. The crowd scattered, and in the days following the “riot” it was announced that assistant coach Mike Davis would replace Knight. This was big news; not only was Knight’s 29-year Indiana basketball career over, but the first black coach in school history was named as his successor.

The 2000-01 season was definitely a transitional period. Davis maintained a title of interim coach, and the team went 10-6 in the Big Ten, eventually securing a 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament. However, as they had done four times in the previous six years, the Hoosiers were bounced in the first round, this time by Kent State.

Junior forward Kirk Haston bounced as well, skipping his senior year for the NBA. Too bad for him, but the Hoosiers got on well enough in the ’01-’02 season. They finished the year 18-9 overall, good for a number five seed. Nobody was too excited, least of all me. I had yet to attend an IU basketball game in two years, and I wasn’t yet referring to any IU teams as “we” or “us.” When the Hoosiers advanced to the Sweet Sixteen with wins over Utah and UNC Wilmington, I was happy for the team and their fans, but not particularly excited myself…

…except for the fact that IU’s Sweet Sixteen opponent was none other than the defending champion and top-ranked Duke Blue Devils. Shane Battier had graduated and moved on to the NBA, but Duke still possessed Player of the Year—and future, yet brief, Chicago Bull—Jason “Soon to be Jay” Williams, as well as future NBAers Mike Dunleavy, Carlos Boozer, Chris Duhon, and Dahntay Jones. So I watched the IU-Duke game with the interest of a basketball fan, though not as an IU fan per se.

I was slated to work that night at ten, and though the Blue Devils jumped out to a big lead early, the Hoosiers kept chipping back and back and back, until finally they had the lead with under a minute to go. A.J. Moye hit a pair of free throws with 11 seconds left to give IU a 74-70 lead, and then it was Williams, coming down the floor, hitting a three, and, remarkably, getting fouled by IU senior guard Dane Fife with four seconds remaining. But Williams could not convert the free throw, IU controlled the board, and the Hoosiers darted off the court like bank robbers, fleeing with a 74-73 upset win.

Again, I was excited to have watched such an intense, well-played, and competitive game, but as I walked out of my dorm and out to my car, I did not have a sense of what this all meant on a local level. I still didn’t equate my choice of school with the athletics program, so when I began driving to Dominoes I was a bit taken aback by the number of people hanging from light poles in celebration while their friends watched for cops (while they, the lookouts, were double fisting). Another IU-hoops related bru-ha-ha in the streets, but this one much more positive and much less violent. What normally was an eight minute drive took about twenty, and when I got into Dominoes the place was buzzing. We usually had four or five drivers working in a night, and when you got back with your run you’d have to wait a bit for the next one. Not that night. They had us coming and going like hockey shifts. Anybody who is out comes in, and anybody who is in goes out. Needless to say, I got some of my best tips that night.

Two days later, behind an incredible barrage of three pointers (IU made their first eight, and went 15-19 from the arc), the Hoosiers defeated Kent State and advanced to the Final Four. I can’t stress enough what kind of a huge deal this is. Though the Super Bowl is bigger than the National Championship game, the Final Four is bigger than the Conference Championships. Easily. When your school advances to the Final Four, it’s party city for a week straight. Campus is abuzz. The whole sports nation of America pays attention to March Madness, and particularly to the Final Four, and then after a long season and four rounds of basketball, there are four teams remaining and yours is one of them. Incredible.

No other sport has a semi-final event like the Final Four. People get excited when their team is a round away from a championship…when the Cubs were in the NLCS two years ago, the whole (Cubs half of the) city was pumped. Now imagine if you could compress that city onto one single campus, and imagine if you could inflate the country’s interest in the event three-fold. That’s how crazy it is to be at a Final Four school.

But it was growing. It was that season—actually, that month—that launched my love for IU. Perhaps after a year and a half of personal and collegiate malaise, I needed something monumental to shake me into Hoosierdom. Or maybe the love I feel for Bloomington today would have grown naturally, and the Final Four trip just gave it a jump start. Either way, though I was not at the fever pitch that Luke or many of my other schoolmates were at, I still felt privileged to be there for the whole deal. I had a lingering sense that I was lucky to be a part of a Final Four season, even if it didn’t mean as much to me at the time as it would have a few years later.

IU defeated Oklahoma in the Final Four, and for that they were given a chance to play the Maryland Terrapins, a team On A Mission since they were eliminated by Duke in the 2001 Final Four. IU played very well, actually taking a 44-42 lead with under ten minutes to go. But Maryland senior Juan Dixon hit a three on the next possession, sparking a 22-5 Maryland run to close out the game. Ric, Luke, and I watched the game at Luke’s fraternity house, sitting silently with Luke’s brothers as Maryland ran the Hoosiers out of the building, and by the time it was over, we knew It Was Over.

Lambda Chi Alpha sits on 3^rd street in Bloomington, just west of Jordan Ave. It is an imposing sight, resting about four hundred feet back from the street on top of a hill so that the walk from the sidewalk to the house leads upwards before the stairs even begin. After the game was over, Ric and I joined Luke and some of his brothers out on the front porch. It was dark, but campus was still active, with students and faculty in transit; many were heading home from wherever they watched the game, while many others were heading over to Kirkwood, the main strip of the Bloomington bar scene. There was the requisite disorderly conduct that night, with a few fans getting arrested…standard scene in any town or city that has just won or lost a championship game. Instead of joining the action, we sat up on that big porch, watching as fans drove by honking and screaming from their windows things like “Maryland sucks!” and “We lost to a turtle!” Other fans were on foot; all looked upset, or at least drained and unhappy. In the end, the Terrapins wanted, and needed, a championship more than the Hoosiers did. We were but a footnote, a necessary step in their two-year quest. Still, Indiana had been treated with a gift, a special team that did not give the school its sixth national title yet gave them a team to cheer for.

It was as obvious to me then as it is now: the 2002 Indiana Hoosiers were a fun and successful team that happened to play at the school I attended. Yet they were not then, nor will they ever be, my team.

Fed up with the specter of steroids in baseball, Bud Selig has finally brought in suspected players for questioning in an attempt to figure out exactly what is going on. Oh, wait a second, that’s not Bud Selig. That’s Congress! Hooray! Congress is here!

Led by chairman Tom Davis and Arizona senator John McCain, the House Committee on Government Reform began holding testimony at a Congressional hearing today. Among the subpoened were Sammy, Mac, Rafael Palmeiro, Frank, Curt Schilling, and the author himself, Jose Canseco. And no, I did not forget to mention Barry Bonds. He was not subpoened. Of course not. That’s like attempting to find out what happened in the Tate/LaBianca murders by bringing in the entire Manson family while letting Charles stay home. And yes, that’s probably a bit too harsh (a bit?), but come on. I won’t say that Bonds is guilty—there’s no proof, he’s never failed a drug test, and I don’t see how you can be guilty of steroid use when it wasn’t illegal in baseball until 2003—but if you’re going to round up a group of players to rap steroids, shouldn’t Bonds be involved?

The whole thing is a sad sight. Canseco speaks first, giving his condolences to those who have been affected by steroid use. Sosa suddenly forgets how to speak English, going solely through an interpretor. Palmeiro denies steroid use, pointing at the committee members as he says: “Let me start by telling you this: I have never used steroids, period.” Schilling blasts Canseco for trying to sell copies of his book Juiced, and Frank appears via satellite, also denying any steroid use.

But the most painful of all is Mark McGwire, who is tearful throughout. He starts by saying that the whole thing is a Catch-22: “If a player answers no, he simply will not be believed. If he says yes, he faces endless scorn.” He then answers nearly every question with some form of the statement that will probably end up haunting and defining him for the rest of his days: “I’m not here to talk about the past.” Musch is with us over at Annie’s house, and while the girls are taking—(it always amazes me how quickly two girls can become friends, as well as how two girls who are “friends” can bad-mouth each other)—Musch and I are watching, flipping back and forth between this and the start of the NCAA tournament, which ultimately wins our focus. A sad day for baseball…

…but a great day for basketball fans, because here we go! The start of the dance.

Are there a better four consecutive days in all of sports than the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament? What a great weekend. From Thursday to Sunday, 64 teams play 48 games of basketball, and every game is important. They’re not all important in the way that Bears-Packers is important, but because of the tournament’s unpredictability, each team plays with a passion and urgency that is unsurpassed in sport, and that means that a basketball fan can turn on any game at any time and be immediately drawn into the action.

The tourney has always been fun, ever since I was old enough to follow it. And while I still fill out my brackets and still love watching college basketball and still get pumped for the tourney, I don’t go as insanely loco for March Madness as I used to. As it turns out, the high school atmosphere lends itself quite nicely to the chaos of the tourney’s first weekend.

It all starts Sunday night, with the announcement of the brackets. Ah, Selection Sunday. Definitely one of the upsides to the new age of sports, brought on by the proliferation of around-the-clock sports coverage in both the television and online forms. The decision-making process that leads to the brackets is, dare I say, similar to the selection of a new Pope. I read one time about the selection of Pope John Paul II…what a cool process! They gather this group together called the College of Cardinals that forms a secret conclave in the Vatican, where they chill out for a few weeks while narrowing down the candidates. After the names have been collected, the Cardinals vote. Meanwhile, people fill St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, waiting anxiously to hear the announcement. The people are informed via smoke signal. If no winner has been selected after the vote, the Cardinals burn the ballots and mix the ashes with a chemical that turns the smoke black. When a new pope has been selected, they burn the ballots alone, producing a white smoke.

OK, so that’s a bit of a stretch. Papal selection is much more important and much less frequent than the annual bracket selections. But still, the brackets feel that important. The big conference tournaments usually end about an hour or so before the brackets are announced, which means that even though much has already been decided before the completion of these games, it is widely known that the Committee is in the process of finalizing the selections. There is a strong feeling that something important is Being Decided, that it is going on Right Now, and this mix of importance, secrecy, and immediacy makes for an exciting build up before the actual announcements. We then tune into CBS for the Selection Show, in which Greg Gumbel, Jim Nantz, Billy Packer and the rest of the (boring, stale, obnoxiously professional) gang announce the seeds. These announcements are always intercut with live shots of teams reacting to their seed and draw, with teams either pumped to be in, pissed to be out, or happy to be in but pissed to be playing Duke.

Once the brackets are out, the next fifteen hours are crucial, because anyone running a March Madness pool must have the brackets and scoring sheets ready for school Monday morning so they can pass them out as soon as school starts to ensure good numbers. The biggest pools are generally run by seniors, though my buddy Jon Happ and I ran a big one when we were juniors.

Running a high school gambling ring is a risky hustle. It’s easy to get a group of friends together for an NFL pool or for fantasy football, but you can’t really get it on a big enough level for a big nearly risk-free payoff, and you don’t have the flexibility and size to skim. Plus, ripping off your friends is no fun. But when your pool is padded with a bunch of people you’re not really friends with, March Madness is a gold mine.

The keys to a successful March Madness pool are promotion and timeliness. Without numbers, a pool is useless, so students have to be signed on for yours. It’s like getting people to vote for your candidate; first you have to get them to commit, then you have to get them to vote. It’s a two-part process. Fortunately, people seem much more enthusiastic about March Madness pools than they do about voting. Brackets are announced Sunday night. Copies of the brackets and scoring sheets have to be ready Monday morning. No sheets of either go out without an entry fee, and once you’ve got their money, and it is their responsibility to get you the completed sheet before the tournament starts on Thursday morning.

This may all sound pretty easy and obvious, but even the easy and the obvious tasks can be screwed up. There was a senior who did a huge pool during my sophomore year. Happ and I went halfseys on a sheet, but when we got it we were shocked to see all of the mistakes this guy had made. First off, we didn’t get the sheet from him. We got it from a friend of a friend of a friend. These things were just going around. And the entry fee was due upon completion rather than upon hand-out, which meant that lots and lots of sheets were going out, even to people who were on the fence. There was no such thing as “on the fence” in our pool, because you were already five bucks in the hole when you got the sheet, and it was up to you to get it back in time to cash in on your fiver. Not so here…and the high volume of sheets going out would not have been such a huge problem if the bozo in charge hadn’t LISTED HIS NAME on every goddamn one.[6]

As it turned out, Happ and I finished second, which meant we were going to split about 500 bucks, but unfortunately for us the whole thing went down in a blaze of ineptitude. Some idiot freshman, who had presumably received a sheet via the grapevine, strolled into the advisor chair’s office[7] in the middle of the tournament because he wanted to know how he could find the bozo. The administration quickly put the ki-bash on the whole operation, apparently laying down an ultimatum that either the pool be called off or a gambling infraction would be put on his permanent record and sent to his colleges of choice. Or maybe it was that he’d be expelled. Or not allowed to walk at graduation. There were a few rumors going around, but all I really knew was that Happ and I did not collect on our second place prize money, nor did we get our five bucks back. A shame.

The whole thing was pretty ridiculous, of course, since everybody knew that the teachers had their own pool going. It wasn’t even secret. Every year at New Trier I had at least one teacher—usually a female math teacher, for some reason (not sure why)—ask me to make her picks for her. I had a sports show on the radio station all four years that was pretty popular (in the realm of high school radio, that is), and I did the “Sports Brain Teaser” in the newspaper my junior and senior year, so it was pretty well known that I was a sports nut. I usually tried to negotiate some kind system of bonuses, whereas if I were to get, say, all four Final Four teams right I’d receive a bump in my grade. I only got one teacher to bite on that deal, and unfortunately I hit three out of four. So the teachers were just as guilty as the students. What can you do?

Well, Bozo the Greek did end up going to college, and during our junior year Happ and I cleaned up. Happ and I were in-school friends, meaning we’d met in classes and were friends in-school, but we hung out with different groups outside of school. This worked entirely in our favor, of course, because it meant that we had a much larger base pool of students to draw from. Our graduating class was a shade under a thousand, so with two guys in different social circles we roped about 200 Trevians into our pool. I also supplied about twenty Evanston kids—my best friends, and some of their in-school friends—as well as my brother and some of his friends. The following year, two other kids in our grade were having a pool, and the four of us put ours together to produce an epic senior year March Madness pool of somewhere over 500. It was pretty cool…

…and here’s where the hustle comes in, because only the people in charge actually know how many people are in the pool. Whenever there’s gambling in high school, it’s always assumed that the people in charge are skimming a bit off the top; after all, our risk, our reward. And when you’ve put together a pool that encompasses nearly an eighth of the school’s population, you’re entitled to a nice chunk. On top of that, anybody in charge gets to put in a sheet for free, so there’s also a chance that you’ll win some low-risk money.

Of course, even without the gambling, the NCAA Tournament is still a terrific time. The first four days of the tournament comprise the first two rounds in which 48 games are played overall, and all 48 are spaced out evenly over the course of the four days. One of the best aspects of the tourney is that the way they space the games out. For the first round, played Thursday and Friday, there are usually four main time slots in which games are played: (approximately) 10 AM, 1 AM, 6 PM, 9 PM. Sixteen games are played on Thursday, and another sixteen are played Friday. Each one of those time blocks gets four games, and the tip times for those four games are spaced out by about five minutes. CBS will only show one game in your television market in each time block, but whenever one ends they switch over to another. That means that you can see, in rapid fire, the endings of four games in a row…and since March Madness games are consistently among the most competitive in sports, you get to see the ends of three or four good to great hoops games in a row. My dad always says that if you could only watch the last two minutes of a basketball game you’d still get your money’s worth; March Madness puts that theory to work.

By Sunday night you’re down to sixteen teams, and of course the next day at school is all about comparing brackets to see if anyone had Tennessee-Chattanooga making it to the Sweet Sixteen. The round of sixteen is played over Thursday and Friday, and then four games for the Elite Eight over Saturday and Sunday. Then the Final Four is set, and we wait a week for the National Semifinal game before Monday night’s championship.

All told, March Madness is one of the great American sporting “events,” and it is an event from Game 1 to Game 63. It’s wonderful dry, but to quote Marty McFly: “What’s wrong with making a few bucks on the side?”

[1] The Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas and dropped the “North” in 1993. Minnesota has since gained a new NHL franchise, this one called the Wild.

[2] Or maybe not. When we left for school in the fall of 2000, Josh went out to Columbia. Two months later, the Mets were in the World Series against the Yankees, and three months after that the Giants had stumbled their way into the Super Bowl. New York fans are all kinds of annoying—not all, but most—and even in Bloomington I was being hammered by them. We had three or four New York guys on our floor in the dorm freshman year, and there was one in particular who, while very nice in real life, was an absolute dickhole when it came to sports. I don’t think he even meant it; he just had no outside perspective. That’s the thing about New Yorkers: they have eternal tunnel vision. They can’t help it; it’s the same as old people who just never got the whole p.c. thing and drop comments about how the Chinese have “beautiful eyes” while they eat in a Chinese restaurant. Case and point…the week before the Super Bowl, I was hanging out with this kid in his room, and he asked me if I was going to watch “the Giants game” on Sunday. I looked at him, incredulous. “You mean, the Super Bowl?” Totally absurd. And I was just in Bloomington. I can only imagine what Josh went through in NYC. It’s entirely possible that they just wore him down in those first six months.

[3] It was not that long ago that the biggest story in the city was Cubs-Sox related, when during a game at Wrigley Field then White Sox short stop Jose Valentin pounded a key home run into the bleachers and proceeded to mock Sammy Sosa’s heart-thump-finger-kiss-peace-sign-dugout-salute. Sox fans loved it. Cubs fans were shocked. They called it “blasphemous” and “bush-league.” I called it sports. Who cares what Valentin does? I was more upset about giving up the runs. Yet therein lies an interesting example of our respective behavior patterns. I can’t imagine a Cubs player going out of his way to do that sort of thing to the Sox. If Magglio or Konerko or the Big Hurt had a distinctive home run salute, would Sammy or EY or Gutierrez have done it? I doubt it. The Cubs are love or hate, like Seinfeld and the Beatles. There are some people who just can’t stand those types of obvious favorites. Sox fans hate the Cubs like college basketball fans hate Duke. Of course, the other big difference is that if the roles had been reversed and it had been Sammy mocking Valentin, Sox fans probably would have rioted.

[4] Interesting side note: Isn’t it funny how I don’t like the name change because U.S. Cellular Field is named after a corporation? Charles Comiskey was one of the worst owners in the history of sports, a guy who lowballed his players to the point that they decided to throw the 1919 World Series. He was essentially the one-man version of a heartless corporation But still, I’d rather call it Comiskey Park than U.S. Cellular Field. Funny.

[5] Thank you Jay Larmee.

[6] I’m pretty sure this guy ended up going to Harvard.

[7] The advisor chair was a staff member in charge of all disciplinary issues within a group at New Trier. There were eight all together, one for each gender of each year. (FR/boys, FR/girls/ SO/boys, SO/girls…)