BIG EAST IS EDEN
Few better ways to spend a day than at Garden for tournament
WHAT I remember best is the pure surreality of it all. Look, my buddies and I were never going to be confused with Spicoli and his crew from “Fast Times,” OK? There were few rebels among us, and we certainly didn’t have a cause.
Our idea of getting over on authority was to “coincidentally” all come down with the flu on the second Thursday of March. It was the basketball flu, is what it was, or more specifically the Big East flu.
Forty-odd years later, it’s unlikely the fair-minded Marianists at Chaminade High will hand out retroactive demerits for such scandalous behavior, but if that’s the cost of coming clean, it’s the cost of coming clean.
(Kudos to Coach Dan Feeney and my Flyers, by the way, who this week won the Long Island Catholic League title again, first time in 30 years they’ve pulled off the back-toback).
So one of us would score tickets because one of our fathers or uncles had a hook, and we’d take the LIRR to Penn Station, and we’d be joined by this glorious tapestry of colors: Syracuse orange, Georgetown (and Villanova) blue, St. John’s (and Boston College) red, and we’d get there for the early game, 1 o’clock, and we’d plant ourselves there for the day.
Sometimes we’d follow the rules and exit between games two and three. Sometimes we’d get “lost” instead, hiding under the stands, wandering the Garden hallways in an era when you could actually wander the Garden hallways and not draw attention to yourself. The only rules we followed were that we stayed until the last game was over, about 10 hours after it all started.
The Big East Tournament returns to Madison Square Garden this week, as it has every year since 1983. It will feature three Top 25 teams and at least two other NCAA Tournament teams, and, as always, there will be a swath of nostalgia that will surely accompany the hoopla.
No basketball league is as rooted in its history as the Big East is, even as teams such as UConn annually honor that tradition by fielding teams that easily could’ve played with all the big boys from the old days.
There are more teams now, and even more games. Thursday will still be the big one, four games at the Garden, the alums and the boosters and the basketball fans without dogs in the hunt arriving in the morning and staying until just past midnight, all manner of basketball fun squeezed in the middle. Thursday is always the day when it always feels the whole of college basketball is on the house. And you know something? There are fewer and fewer things in college basketball that we can celebrate simply for the purity of it, that we can enjoy only for the fact that it makes you feel good. The whole sport feels like an endless business transaction these days, and a transient one at that. A lot of the joy has been squeezed out of it. And look, part of the reason the Big East has continued to be a viable elite league is because the better teams understand the game’s modern business model and excel at it. That’s fine. You can still forget about all that when the tournament comes to town, especially on Thursday when those four games occupy the big gym from noon till midnight. Do kids still get “sick” in order to get well at the Garden, the way I and my guys did back in the day? I’d like to think they do. I’d like to think it’s one of the few things left for which I could recommend something like that.
See you there.