So what’s new? It’s March and my brackets got hammered in the opening round of the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. It seems like something of this order raises its head every year in this space at this time.
But I seldom walk the melancholy streets of March Madness alone. Millions of wannabe “bracketologists” join in this angst-ridden opera each and every year. Take President Obama, Smokey Meehan, and Golic and Greenie from “Mike and Mike in the Morning” on ESPN Radio, for instance.
By baring his hoop hunches for all the world to see, our Commander In Chief ended up providing the media maniacs of the sports world with yet one more talking point. Exhibiting a candor seldom witnessed from one in his office, the President’s “Barackets,” as they have come to be called, wrote off entire sections of the country.
Dismissing the Pac-10 Conference as being “in a down year,” his veto stamp ran amok. Even though his brother-in-law is head coach at Oregon State, the left coast got little love from the Oval Office. It cost him dearly, however, as Arizona, USC, UCLA, Arizona State, and Washington all emerged from the opening round. Only Cal-Berkeley stumbled.
He would not be punished beyond that, though, as the conference that went 5-1 in their early games would go 1-4 over the weekend. Equilibrium, it would seem, prevailed. The President’s muse has been somewhat vindicated.
Smokey suffered an even worse opening-round thrashing in his brackets than did the Prez. He bragged about it, of course! Calling attention to one’s annual haplessness as a hoops prognosticator is every bit as important to this process as celebrating a hot streak. Especially if one is working under the obvious DNA handicap that Smokey is.
By selecting Utah, Utah State, and BYU to move on to the second round and absolutely none of the Pac-10 teams to do the same, Smokey, once the results were in, had, assuredly, dug himself a hole. He’s not fooling me for a minute, however. He’s got the rest of us just where he wants us talking trash.
That brings us to Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg and their televised morning sports-talk show on ESPN Radio. Their bracket picks are a big deal because they make it so by their outlandish wagers with each other.
Last year “Greenie” won and Golic was forced to engage in an on-air chicken-wing speed-eating contest against the world champion, among others. Greenie, not unlike “Monk” of TV consulting-detective fame, is a neat freak and donned a haz-mat suit for that portion of the show.
I’m not sure what they wagered this year but, as of now, Greenie is on one huge roll. Waltzing through the first round with a 26-6 record and, by nailing the second, he finds himself having correctly picked all of the teams who made this year’s “Sweet 16.” He is in the 99.98th percentile. Drat! Go figure!
For the most part, having a much higher “slob” coefficient than Greenie, I find myself rooting for Golic in most all of their competitions. This year, however, my man picked Wake Forest to reach the Final Four. For those who may have missed it, the Demon Deacons lost their opening game to Cleveland State in the biggest upset so far in this year’s brackets.
From here it appears that Golic has an impossibly steep hill to climb. Not that he’s not performing quite admirably (93.66 percent) but, having already lost one of his Final Four teams with four rounds to go, it’s not looking good.
Picture the Albert Camus essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” only with the protagonist having to push a basketball rather than a stone up the hill only to see it roll down again and again. According to ol’ Albert, “The struggle itself … is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I’m not all that convinced as it pertains to Golic. He’ll put on a good face, to be sure, but to once again come up short against the ever-preening Greenie and his constant flaunting of an innate “mental superiority” would quickly get old. Two better poster children for the “philosophy of the absurd” I could not imagine.
Well, let’s see. Whose brackets have I left out? Oh, that’s right, mine. Well, actually it’s not all that bad. Not good, of course, by any stretch. Just kind of like Smokey and Barack in the middle of the pack. I’d share my percentile but, as of yet, you can’t scroll down that far.
There are plenty of other “people of interest” out there who filled out brackets but this particular microcosm will have to do.
But hold the presses! This just in! Rumor has it that Salma Hayek’s Final Four picks are, as the pundits like to say, top heavy.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.