By the time this column appears in print, “March Madness,” the term adopted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to describe the basketball tournament it has developed into a spectacularly lucrative business, will be a full-blown epidemic. Official play opened on March 19th, and will end with “one shining moment” on April 8th. During that time, “oceans of ink” will be spilled; a million clichés will be written and uttered, along with oodles of analogies, metaphors and similes. NCAA basketball in March produces commentary that makes for a wonderful and painful time for lovers of words.
In these days of “info-snacking,” Internet blogging, YouTube posts and instant news, sportswriters are under immediate delivery pressure. Today’s sportswriter has little time to compose something as evocative as Grantland Rice’s coverage of a 1924 Notre Dame football game: “They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice …”
I was glad to hear a television sportscaster use the words “figuratively,” and “literally” absolutely correctly. (His reference was pointed, as if to convey a silent rebuke. As we all know, “literally” is often used when “figuratively” is meant.) One sportscaster I used to watch impressed me with his vision and unforgiving notation of a particular basketball infraction: the “push-off.” He let viewers know whenever he saw one, making his commentary one boring string of “Push-off. He pushed off. Push-off. Push-off. He got away with a push-off.”
The journalistic quest to determine “who, what, when, where and why,” and to deliver the answers in an eloquent way to an anxiously waiting public is made more difficult in this age of instant info. Which is why sportswriters and sportscasters have a heavy reliance on the “Big Bag ‘O Clichés” (like “full-blown epidemic”). A sharp move toward the basket can be more descriptive as a “cut,” or a “slice,” but after that, they got nothin’. Which is when they start to make up stuff.
I love to hear sportscasters refer to a “shuffle-cut,” “banana cut” and “curl-cut” (something my mother did to an apple peel), apparent descriptions of “basketball moves” (not to be confused with the “football move” necessary to establish whether it was an incomplete pass or a catch and fumble). And there is the “dribble-drive,” (which should not be confused with the activity engaged in by me and my sleepless, slobbering and teething youngest daughter) the “pick-and-pop,” which might get a “shooter’s roll,” and the “step-and-go” that can be successfully diverted provided that the defender observed “the principle of verticality.”
In March 2010, I was driving through some spooky weather and listening to a radio broadcast of a Butler University game. I could visualize the court and the players because I have spent long years watching games, both in person and on television. The broadcasters gave me specific information about what the players were doing, and my mind provided me with the “soaring” and “swooping” that I had seen. For the sportswriter though, it is tough to squeeze “spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below” into the “Five Ws.”
Maybe some of us would like to go back to the moment before the basketball hoop became “the rack,” and the ball, “the rock,” (and maybe others do not give a … hoot) but we are here now. Our Four Horsemen of Indiana — IU, Purdue, Butler, Notre Dame — have marched toward March with varying degrees of success, and what we want from those who are left is to “rock the rack.”
Someone should write that down, because after that, I got nothin’.