Feeling like a billion bucks in March
It’s Friday morning, just 17 short hours after falling out of Warren Buffett’s Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. Easy come, easy go.
This isn’t about beating 9.2 quintillion-to-1 odds for a payout you’d never get around to spending anyway. This isn’t the Super Bowl, where for 10,000 clams you get a football game with your halftime show.
This is the NCAA Tournament, March Madness, America’s true and only People’s Tournament. And as it has since Larry Bird and Magic Johnson invented it, the People’s Tournament has all of America, at least according to the Arab News on Wednesday, in a “collective tizzy.”
Just handing out the brackets in our house had me singing that old Christmas chestnut, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and I don’t even like Andy Williams. March Madness is two sol- id weeks of Christmas, a fever, a mania, utter insanity, to borrow just a few of the words that are sure to be overused over these next two weeks.
By now your bracket is studded with red Sharpie marks and you are blaming everyone, including the school mascots, for your misfortune. You are most likely that guy whose $10 investment in an office pool has reduced you to the calculating, insider-information-trading, blue-blood-picking sort I always dread sitting next to in a bar.
You’re thinking about this tournament all wrong. Loosen up. The website TFM (Total Frat Move) picked its bracket strictly according to which it considered the best party schools. No surprise, it picked Wisconsin, my alma mater, to take down Florida.
SB Nation had cats make their choices, putting identical kitty treats over the two opposing schools and penciling in the school beneath the treat the cat first devoured.
Being an old high school gym rat, I once believed my accumulated basketball wisdom gave me an edge in picking a national champion. In reality, my bracket is every single year the ragged
March Madness, America’s true and only People’s Tournament ... is two solid weeks of Christmas.
and defeating sum of ancient loyalties and grudges.
And there is nothing wrong with that. In spite of all our Thursday pratfalls, it’s still anybody’s tournament to win. There are still dozens of chances for a Cinderella story, although I think how differently her story might have turned out had she had a shoe contract.
Before today’s slate gets underway, take a long sip of your favorite hyper-caffeinated beverage and take one deeply appre- ciative moment.
Don’t dwell on all of those stories that say American enterprise is out $1.2 billion in productivity lost to March Madness inattentiveness. That precise sum is at this moment pouring into sales of liquor, food, hotel space and those amazing Bud Light bathmats that look like a basketball court.
America may bowl alone, squandering our social capital like drunken sailors. We’re either red state or blue state, Bill or Rachel. Everyone tells us we’re unmoored from the old institutions.
I can account for only one. The sacred tradition: Sometime after 12 p.m. Eastern time on tipoff Thursday, slip away from wherever you are, go someplace that has walls festooned with televisions, order a pint of good IPA and take a good look around.
Warren, you can keep your $1 billion. I’ll take Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery.