Ellen is our Sports Diva guest blogger today. She is a ballerina, biker and boarder. None of those really help her unravel the complexities of Cleveland Sports fandom though.
Fathers: Talk To Your Daughters About Sports
by Ellen
It's March Madness again, and, as an Ohioan, the absence of the Buckeyes gives me a legitimate reason to ignore the NCAA this year. I graduated from an all women's college deep in the Virginia mountains and our basketball team, led by school mascot Gladys, the fighting, pearl-wearing squirrel, had a lot of fun piling into vans and driving around the state to play games in other people's gyms. There were no brackets involved and the team had an equal-opportunity, open-enrollment roster.
That is how I found myself a graduate student at a 40,000-student co-ed university who had never heard of March Madness.
Apparently, it's a big deal.
Blank brackets were everywhere that spring, in the graduate student lounge, in the dining halls, in the student housing, and in the university offices.
Bracket pools are illegal in most states, right? But no one cares? Okay, just checking.
One mid-March afternoon I accidentally wandered into the middle of an intense tournament summit. The table in our graduate lounge was spread with brackets, newspapers, pens, and an assortment of potato chips like cheese doodles and Doritos. These men, my colleagues, peers, classmates, future leaders of the nation and possibly the world … these men were wearing filthy baseball caps. They were covered in cheesy dust. And they were very upset.
It's not a good idea to tell a Duke graduate that Duke's basketball team is stupid and their coach is blind.
Only a naïve native Midwesterner would pick Indiana over Vermont.
Carmelo Anthony is the best basketball player ever born and he will take Syracuse all the way.
Then I heard the words "St. Bonaventure" and I flashed back to the previous summer, driving through the deserted woods of upstate New York with my dad. We passed a billboard advertising St. Bonaventure, and my dad said, "Since I've got you trapped, let me bore you with a sports story."
The story went like this. St. Bonaventure had a decent NCAA Division I men's basketball team. Then they disclosed that one of their best players had been improperly certified as NCAA-eligible. He had transferred from a two-year junior college, where he earned a "Certificate of Welding," a vocational degree, not a technical or academic degree as required by NCAA student-athlete standards. St. Bonaventure's administration, at the insistence of the former university president and his son (who also happened to be an assistant men's basketball coach), declared him eligible despite the obvious problems. They also covered up his academic struggles at the university by changing grades and course status.
Because of the scandal, St. Bonaventure was barred from participating in postseason competition.
"St. Bonaventure," I said to my graduate school classmates. "Their star player turned out to be a welder, right? And now they're banned from the tournament."
The jaws dropped. The baseball caps tipped up. "Yeah, that's right. How'd you know that?"
It was kind of a back-handed compliment, but I took it, along with the respect that single comment earned me for the duration of my graduate program.
Thanks, Dad. I still don't know anything useful about the game of basketball or how to fill out an NCAA bracket. But when my dad talks about sports, I listen. I learn a little something. And I get some respect.
