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Sports, let’s face it, are a big-city thing. For all the talk about large- and small-market franchises — sure to be the center of the labor battle looming over Major League Baseball — they’re all big markets. Only a New Yorker could consider Milwaukee, a city of more than 560,000, “small.” I grew up in a Midwestern farm town of 15,000 people, and St. Louis, to my 10-year-old eyes, might as well have been Jakarta, Tokyo or Mexico City: so vast it seemed infinite. I was in a big city.
No matter how much you value your small town, if you want to watch a big sporting event in America, you’re headed into the city. Nobody wins the Super Bowl in a small town; they don’t have championship parades down one-lane roads.
Except for one week a year. This week.
The NCAA tournament is the great democratizing event in American sports. The key to loving college basketball is embracing its comprehensiveness. MLB has 30 teams; the NFL 32; the NBA 30; top-level college football 136. College basketball’s Division I has 365. From November until March, all over this crazy country of ours, there are elite-level college basketball games happening. In New York City. In Los Angeles. In Itta Bena, Mississippi. In Boiling Springs, North Carolina. In Laramie, Wyoming. In Edinburg, Texas. In Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The beauty of the tournament, which kicks off Thursday for the men and Friday for the women, is that each of those 365 teams is eligible to win the championship. As the season comes to a close, and the field is whittled to the 68-team bracket we know and love, all a team has to do is keep winning. The eyes of the country are on the NCAA tournament this week — which means they can be on Anyplace, U.S.A.
One of my favorite moments in NCAA tournament history came 20 years ago. In the first round, the heavily favored Iowa Hawkeyes, fresh off a Big Ten championship, strolled into the Michigan home of the Detroit Pistons dreaming of a national title run. Standing in their way was little Northwestern State, from the piddly Southland Conference, playing only its second-ever tournament game. With eight minutes left, Iowa held a 17-point lead. And then! Northwestern State (they’re the Demons) went on an absurd run to storm back, until they were trailing by two in the final seconds. One Demons player missed a shot, and the ball deflected to the corner, where a kid named Jermaine Wallace, in desperation, threw up a heave as time expired … and, stunningly, the shot went in.
Suddenly, Northwestern State was everywhere. Tiny Natchitoches, Louisiana, population 18,000, previously known primarily (only?) for being where “Steel Magnolias” was filmed, was the center of the sports world. If you were a college basketball fan, no matter where you were, no matter whether you previously had any idea there even was a Northwestern State, your eyes were on Natchitoches. For one afternoon, lo, one shining moment, the entire country was theirs. (The shot even became a plot point on “The Young and the Restless.”) Twenty years later, that shot still resonates; when Verne Lundquist retired from calling college basketball, he said the Northwestern State win was his second-favorite moment as a broadcaster, behind the legendary last-second shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner to beat Kentucky in the 1992 tournament. Natchitoches just celebrated an anniversary event this week, and Wallace, now in his 40s, was there to say hello. He coaches at a high school in Minden, Louisiana, population 12,000.
The shot is what this sport is, what this event is, at its core: a chance for an underdog to have its day, an opportunity for a place in the middle of nowhere to become the middle of everywhere. It’s why the tournament is so irresistible. We adore Cinderella stories like St. Peter’s (Jersey City), Mercer (Macon, Georgia) and Weber State (Ogden, Utah), and we can end up remembering those teams more than the ones who reach the Final Four.
Fans strain for underdogs in other sports, too. Many spent last year’s World Series pretending that the Toronto Blue Jays, a team with a payroll of more than $300 million that plays in a city of 3 million, was a plucky upstart from some tiny village just because they were taking on the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers. The NCAA tournament gives us the real thing: players you’ve never heard of, schools you’ve never visited, towns you might only know as passing signs on the highway, doing something that they’ll still be celebrating 20 years later.
I love big cities. I love visiting them, and I love living in them. But they monopolize our great sports moments: They get everything. Except for the NCAA tournament. This week brings together teams from New York and North Dakota and Ohio and Alabama and Hawaii, different places, different mindsets, different worlds — but all of them after the same trophy. Let them serve as a reminder of how vast this country is — and how much of it gets overlooked, in sports and in everything else. There are few stages in America larger than the NCAA tournament. And today, at least, it can be almost anyone’s.
The post Why March Madness is the most American big-time sporting event appeared first on Washington Post.
