Rediscovering...

"How could i forget a waste of breath
Of course, i do remember
All the things you said were pointless
Now you go on dropping names"
--How Could I Forget, The Faint

Sitting in the edit bay Monday afternoon, watching the final touches get applied to a good rebound show (see Sunday's debacle if you need to know why a "rebound" was in order), and got to watch most of the second half of a great college basketball game. No. 14 UConn was at the Carrier Dome to face top-ten Syracuse, and the Orange made a great run early in the half, but the Huskies fought back and earned a 74-66 victory. 'Cuse's top guns, Gerry McNamara (4-of-18 shooting for just nine points) and Hakim Warrick (16 points and seven rebounds, both well below his season averages), played below par, but their squad was still very much in the game. Sophomore Charlie Villanueva (21 points, 10 boards) was huge in the second half, converting several transition and garbage buckets in crunch time. UConn also has a guy named Rudy Gay (he had 18 points), who is evidently the college basketball equivalent of Patriots cornerback Randall Gay--gotta be the worst-selling jersey in their respective sports. Anyways, here's the reason I bring up the game: besides Warrick and G-Mac, there wasn't anybody I would really care to watch, but the game was incredibly entertaining. It seems that in my immersion into the world of sports television, I've forgotten how much I love college hoops, even when UCLA isn't playing. This has been a tremendous college basketball season, with Illinois and Boston College both maintaining unbeaten records, Duke, Carolina, Wake and G-Tech all battling for ACC supremacy, and great games almost every day of the week. I've been missing out. Thus begins my three-part mission to rediscover college basketball:
1) Duke-Carolina on Wednesday night. The best rivalry in college sports provides its latest installment from Cameron at 6 p.m. PST on ESPN. After watching Coach K keel over and get back up to lead the Blue Devils to a rout of Georgia Tech, I'm pumped to see how they come out in this one. J.J. Redick has emerged as an all-around scorer, adding some driving finishes and pull-up jumpers to his already-deadly perimeter game. Shelden Williams continues to dominate bigger men on the interior, and his matchup with Tar Heel center Sean May could be the determining factor Wednesday. So much talent in this game, wow: May, Rashad McCants, Raymond Felton, Marvin Williams--all likely lottery picks this year or next--against Redick, Williams, Daniel Ewing and DeMarcus Nelson (and they should still have Luol Deng and Shaun Livingston, geez). Roy Williams vs. Coach K. I might just have to tape it and watch it in its entirety, because bible study takes place right smack dab in the middle, so that might be rough. Well, however it happens, the complete viewing of this game will complete part one of the mission.
2) Attend a UCLA game in the final month of the regular season. I've got several options, beginning with Thursday night against Arizona State and continuing to the final weekend matchups with the Oregon schools. In the meantime, we've got Arizona and USC, so it shouldn't be a problem to get to one of them. I haven't been to a single college basketball game this year (excluding the rousing exhibition game between USC and Occidental College), which marks the first season in forever that no games have been attended. That's not right. Too much local basketball to have any excuse for missing them all. Hoops mission, part two.
3) Take the time to truly enjoy the first weekend of the tournament. It's the best four days of the year, and I recall vividly the dedication with which I would watch as many games as possible during high school and college, especially when the Bruins were making their run in '95 (not so much when they got backdoored by Princeton in '96). I still have tapes from tournament games going all the way back to 1990, when UNLV dominated Duke in the title game, so the tourney has always been a part of me, and will hopefully continue to be so. Watching games in Harv's class, in the SSMRC (I had to think for about five minutes to remember the name of that place), in the gym, on campus (and not in class at UCLA), anywhere we could take a TV. This should be easier with all the TV's around here, so I'm looking forward to it. March 18-21, it's on. Part three.
So in the next five weeks, I will hopefully have completely regained my excitement for the game, and with football out of the way (at least until April and the draft), the path should be clear. I can't claim complete devotion, because the NBA season is still going (though you wouldn't know it by watching the Lakers the last few days) and the Chargers' off-season maintains a prominent place in my mindset (some thoughts on that definitely coming later this week), but I'm definitely looking forward to more of the college hoop scene.
Had the pleasure of taking in my first ever episode of "24" last night, which brings about two big things. First, I need to go back and watch the first two seasons on DVD and the first six or seven episodes of this season on tape sometime very soon, so that I feel caught up on everything that's going to take place the rest of the way. Second, I need to add one show to my list of necessary television viewing for the week (making the grand total two; if you don't know what the other one is, you've never read this blog before). Thankfully, this won't interfere with the college basketball thing, because the only games airing at 9 p.m. on a Monday are bad Mountain West games like Air Force-New Mexico and San Diego State-Wyoming. There was a time when Big Monday actually had good games at night, back when J.R. Rider, Tyrone Nesby, Sunshine Smith, Kebu Stewart and Keon Clark played at UNLV and dominated Big West competition. Even Kaspars Kambala (you have to be a huge fan to remember that guy) had a good game or two for the Rebels along the way. So yeah, basically all that means is that Mountain West Mondays won't be taking precedence over "24" anytime soon. Lots of characters in this show, so the review will be nice to try to get everyone straight, though I've heard that there is little continuity from one season to the next. Obviously, Keifer has come through all three, and he definitely seems like an easy-to-like protagonist. Looking forward to this.
Quick thought about relationships, based on the descriptions of George Steinbrenner by Buster Olney in that Yankee book I just finished (by the way, the Red Auerbach book is great so far, even for a Laker fan like me): George treats baseball like a Big Ten football coach. Ohio State is his favorite team, and George runs the show like he's Woody Hayes or something, overreacting to every loss like it's the end of the season. If you're coaching college football and you lose a game, you're pretty much out of the national championship picture, so it makes sense to pay attention to every single detail, every up and down, every trend shown by a player. If a quarterback is struggling, there's not a ton of time for him to work out the kinks, especially if there's a capable back-up waiting in the wings, so a college football coach has to be able to pull the trigger quickly and needs to get fired up about every loss and every screwed-up play. Joe Torre treats baseball like a baseball manager (which is actually his job, so that works out quite nicely). Torre knows that baseball has a 162-game schedule, that players will go through hot and cold streaks, that the team will win and lose, and that losses are not actually the end of the world. You can lose 60 times and still have an amazing season. You can get out seven out of every 10 times and still have a .300 average. Guys like Derek Jeter can play through a rough start to the season, because Torre knows he'll eventually figure it out. If Jeter were the quarterback at Florida under Steve Spurrier this past season, he would have been yanked after one game, but Torre knows how to do it. Anyways, this long-winded explanation of the difference between a football coach mentality and a baseball manager mentality applies directly to relationships. Someone who decides to get worked up about every single up and down, getting way too high over some happy thing and getting way too low about something that sucks--that's the football coach, and he's not ever going to be okay in a relationship. You need to take the Torre mentality: it's a long haul, there are going to be slumps and streaks, and as long as you're generally headed in the right direction (the Yankees usually seem to be headed that way), one tiny little bad thing isn't going to kill it all. I'd rather not suffer through 60 losses, but in the long run, if you end up winning 100 games, that's pretty darn sweet. I've been through my share of over-scrutinizing and hurt over some tiny thing that gets more than made up for in due time, and though I've understood the need for proper perspective for some time, it took this sports analogy to make the proper sense for me. I guess that's a statement on my mentality, that sports are needed for a relationship to make sense. Oh well. And by the way, that thought didn't really end up as quick as I planned, but I hope it still makes sense.
Off to a meeting that could very well determine the future of our show. Hope it ends up all right.