The big surprise of this winter for me has been the return of college basketball to my sports-watching radar screen. Like a lot of people, I had loved the game once, in the golden age of Valvano, Jordan, and Villanova in the 1980s, as well as the darker years of the Duke dynasty and Michigan’s ill-fated Fab Five in the early 90s. But also like a lot of people, I had left the college game’s screaming, comically coiffed coaches and hopping student sections behind, just as the best players continued to leave it behind for the pros. By this fall, sports pages in the States were filled with laments over the decline of this All-American amateur pastime. It seemed that fewer and fewer people were tuning in until the NCAA tournament came around in March. What was the point of watching before that?
This January and February, though, while the NBA has turned into a one-team soap opera known as the Los Angeles Lakers, the college game has staged a riotous renaissance. Every few days brings a new twist in the rankings plot. The leading members of the Big 10 conference, Indiana, Michigan, and Michigan State, have been slugging it out on a nightly basis, while new contenders like Miami and perennials like Duke, Gonzaga, Florida, and Syracuse remain in the mix. Watching, I’ve been reminded again of the upsides of the college brand of basketball. The games, at 40 minutes, aren’t too long. The style of play is more energetic and pass-friendly than the NBA’s. And the hysterical intensity of the crowds and coaches creates a hothouse atmosphere in those cramped university gyms.
The atmosphere this year has been at its hottest in the Big 10. I’ve enjoyed these games the most, in part because they’ve have been competitive, but also because of the traditional state rivalries of the midwest, and the traditions of each program. Unlike in the NBA, at the college level the uniforms and arenas and colors and cheerleaders and floor insignia haven’t changed their look much through the decades. You can feel the presence of Bob Knight in the Indiana gym, Magic Johnson at Michigan St., and even, hovering somewhere just over mid-court, the legendary early-60s Lucas-Havlicek teams at Ohio State.
I may also identify with the Big 10 because I grew up just east of that part of the country, in Central Pennsylvania. That’s where, roughly speaking, the Northeast begins to give way to the Midwest, where people stop saying “soda” and start saying “pop," where rusting ports turn to rusting steel mills. College basketball has never had a huge hold on PA; football, as everyone knows, has always been king at Penn State, and Paterno's program dominated when it came to scholarships. But basketball was popular at the high school level, and particularly at my high school, where on winter nights we packed our own sweaty hothouse gymnasium for every home game, and won a state title when I was a freshman.
I was in the stands for those games, but in earlier years I had played, or tried to play, against most of the players who were on that title-winning team. I was the basketball team in 5th and 6th grade, and had been encouraged to keep going by the high school's coach, another successful screamer who kept a beady eye on every far-flung young prospect in town, seemingly from the moment we first picked up a ball and tried to spin it on our fingers. By the time I reached fifth grade and caught his eye, I had shot a lot of baskets, pretending to be Julius Erving of the Sixers or Darrell Griffith of my favorite college team at the time, Louisville. It was probably Griffith’s outstanding nickname, Dr. Dunkenstein, that made me a fan, though I was and will always will be strictly a jump-shooting man.
My two years of organized hoops were played at my elementary school down the block, a big brick building with black floors. The team, a mix of black and white kids from the surrounding neighborhoods, was coached by the school principal, a man with the no-nonsense name of Mr. Dice. He was “Mr. D” to the team’s black players—they liked him and clowned with him—but never to me. Mr. Dice was a stocky, bow-legged, white-haired hollerer and hoops obsessive. But he cared about “his boys.” Once he was seen weeping with pride when a former player of his was announced as a starter on the town's high school team.
Watching college basketball today, I can see why people object to the berserk, neck-vein-straining coaches who prance along the sidelines and occasionally give their players a shove. Their autocratic ways are about as up-to-date as their hairstyles. Mr. Dice never did anything like that, but he did make basketball an intense, pressure-filled experience, and that’s how I still think of the sport. It’s probably wrong, but to me it only seems natural: If you play basketball, you’re going to get a coach, and his loud mouth, in your face.
Playing on that team, with kids from the grade ahead of me, was nothing if not a lesson in humiliation, sometimes comically so. Each winter the team took a trip to a tournament that was held in a backwoods village a couple of hours northwest of my town. In the weeks leading up to it, the kids who had been to the tournament the year before, and who eaten in the village’s only restaurant, a diner called Stockey’s, couldn’t stop telling the rookies about the “wing dings” they had there. Every practice, every drill, every sprint, every day walking the halls to class, they’d call out to each other, “We’re gonna get some wing dings!” Doing layup drills, they’d high-five as they crossed each other’s paths and sing, in gleefully high voices, “Wing dings!” It was all wings dings, all the time.
