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I'm Canadian.
You know what that means? It means that when something intrinsically internal to the US is all over US headlines like batshit on glue, I feel like I'm missing out on something big and important (and consequently making nonsensical metaphors about it). This is something I do not tolerate. Above all, I absolutely must understand what the excitement is all about. Usually the best way is to get a stick and poke at it until I get some nifty results, like a caveman stumbling upon something green and glowing that fell from the sky. But mostly I just sit and complain, admitting my inability to make rational sense of something so Americanically complicated due to my simple, neanderthalic Canadian brain. For instance, I didn't get the whole gay marriage thing. How many Americans actually see a gay person on a regular basis anyway (no, watching Will & Grace doesn't count)? And I didn't get the whole Janet Jackson thing. It was a nipple. So what. America's reaction to some things is so bizarre, vending machines dispensing used schoolgirl panties make Japanese culture look sane by comparison.
And now we have March Madness. From what I can understand, it's a yearly celebration of excellence in education. Every school putting its best, brightest, and most over-achievingly gifted in a gigantic geodesic dome where two teams enter, one team leaves. Held by the NCAA, which stands for No Cluebies Are Allowed. Huh. No wonder I never get any invitation.
For me, there is no historical context, backstory or duelling reputations here. I am a blank slate. All I see are locations of states, tall guys in colourful outfits and people committing hari-kiri if their alma-matar fails to put the ball in the hole. It's been explained to me that there are no less than 847 rivalries that go back thousands of generations like the Vulcans and the Romulans--the sort of things that only make sense to those who've been here since the beginning. Diving into this stuff now is like reading the last page of War and Peace and figuring out how the rest of the book went by yelling indiscriminantly "Shoot the J! SHOOT IT!!".
And these rivalries aren't just between schools. There are also, like, meta-rivalries between collections of schools. I can't explain it very well. There are multiple levels of existential deepness here that even the most pretentious, goateed coffee-house types couldn't unravel. Big Ten. Big East. Big West. Big ACC. Big North. Big Ivy. Big Bunch of Schools. Big Deal. Big Ups. I don't understand what any of these mean. I'm just a caveman. I was frozen in ice and was later thawed out by some of your scientists. But I do know one thing: that if my client isn't seeded first in his division, then he must be acquitted.
And then there are cute names for the various levels of advancement within this contest. Final Four. Elite Eight. Sweet Sixteen. Thriving Thirty-two. Sucky Sixty-four. Uninvited One Hundred Twenty Eight. We Spent All Our Money on Football Two Hundred Fifty Six. We Don't Even Have a Team Five Hundred Twelve. This One is For All You Binary Math Geeks One Thousand Twenty Four.
The biggest noise seems to be all about brackets. Gotta fill your bracket. Bet your bracket. What's your bracket look like? This is my bracket? My bracket's better. Your bracket's wrong. That upset screwed my bracket. My bracket's still going. If only my bracket hadn't broken. I have no idea what any of this is about either, but I imagine that the average college student probably spends more time with a pen and paper filling out his bracket than he does preparing for and writing his ACT exam. Maybe the SAT for all highschool students should be to fill out March Madness brackets for now on. At least it will weed out the intellectually astute from the truly dumb.
But, despite all this superfluous nonsense, you gotta admit: The spectacle is damn fun to watch. However, since I've never been to an American college before, much less an American collegiate basketball game, and I couldn't name a single player if you held a gun to my head and showed me Georgia Tech's roster, I must find other ways to motivate myself to vest an emotional stake in this event. I choose beer. What I do is put 4 different beers in front of me, and assign each one of them to a team. At any given time, there are two games playing at once, so flip back and forth between them at your leisure, and every time a team scores, you drink from that beer. The first beer you empty.....that's the team you root for. I just made this up now.
If you are like me, or you happen to be Canadian too, here's a handy dandy guide to how I wrap my head around American collegiate activities.
I like Colleges with locations in their names. That way I know where they are, and I can correctly guess if they're chalk full of pompous, yuppie, upper class douchebags like University of Connecticut or toothless, belligerent redneck meatheads like Texas Tech. There's no time to study minute and subtle dynamics in college athletics. When you're as ignorant as I am, stereotypes are the only way you'll make sense of anything.
Subsequently, private schools and odd names get the glazed look from me. What's Bowling Green? A ten-pin college? And where the hell is Wake Forest? Are there even forests back east anymore? (Understand...I live in British Columbia. To me, a forest is something that starts in your backyard, is green year-round, and is approximately 200 feet high and covers 900 million square miles of ridiculously mountainous terrain. Also, there are beavers).
Subsequently subsequently: Schools with cool names get special favours. Like Syracuse, named after, presumably, the infamous ancient Greek colony on Sicily, the most powerful of the non-Mycenean city-states that dominated the island under a ruthless monarchy until it was torn asunder by Rome and Carthage during the Punic Wars. Yeah, but just how many players on the team know this.
Of course, I'm also an avid reader of Fark, and if you are too then of course you understand why I am a healthy and rabid supporter of Duke. Don't you ever tell me who I can or can not cheer for, you pushy, ingrateful dicks. Your plan has backfired. I'm now a Bluedevils fan for life.
(note: this is the only NCAA history trivia I know, because it's recanted over and over again on Fark by Drew Curtis, UK alumni, harbouring a Brian Wilson-like deep-rooted psychopathic resentment towards Duke. Seriously, man. Get help. Laettner's shot was thirteen years ago. Get over it already, you bitter, basketball freak.)
As a corollary to the above: never root for UK. I hope UK gets crushed harder than Angola when they played the Dream Team in 92. Or any country when they played the Dream Team in 92.
When in doubt, go for the school nearest you. I was rooting for Washington State because I remember them being really good in that Rose Bowl thing they had going in that other sport that no one outside of the US really understands either. Imagine my surprise when they had a top-seeded basketball team too. Holy hell, when did that happen?
And when the team you're rooting for gets eliminated? Let's see....Syracuse. Damn. Duke. Damn. Huskies. Damn. Is UK still in? Then I'm rooting for Michigan State. My bracket is completely toast at this point. And so is my beer supply. Beyond my vile hatred for UK, I'm just winging it with some absynth and going for the underdog the rest of the way. May the lowest seed win. Because everyone loves an underdog. Without an underdog winning occasionally, how else is Hollywood supposed to make sports movies based on true stories?
So there you have it: A Canadian's Guide to NCAA Basketball. Next, I want to see an American's Guide to CHL Junior Hockey. It's just like March Madness, only it lasts three months instead of one.
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