Gary will be returning with a new blog on May 4. This week, he’s asked RCN’s John Leone to guest blog. RCN-TV viewers should recognize John from the Lafayette College basketball broadcasts on the Lafayette Sports Network.
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Another season of March Madness has come and gone and we were again reminded of why so many are so attracted to The Game. While it may not completely explain the meaning of life, when it is played right and for the right reasons, it certainly offers some useful clues. How sad that, at least in some corners, the real “Madness” had as much to do with the sudden finality of a season spent as it did with those elements on the periphery of the game that threaten its core and its fabric. Basketball purists may be the first to take my point, but I fear that in the prevailing culture “purist” means “old”, and the underlying message is bound to be lost in an age of mass media, mega money, and me-first mentality. In the current climate, it’s hard to recall a time when programs were simply teams, when events were games, and when all of it was less for the ESPN highlight reel and more for the real love of it all. The underpinning of integrity that makes the game at all worthwhile is weakening, and in danger of becoming as obsolete as a perfectly executed bounce pass.
Of course, none of the national attention for the game is a bad thing except for the perspective that is invariably lost as succeeding generations of coaches and players have come to believe that “the game” is an end unto itself, leaving untapped the vast reservoir of learning that once accompanied it. After all, haven’t we been told that it’s all about the journey? There was a time when losing the right way had almost as much value as winning. This loss of perspective has diminished the value of both. As the stakes have risen, the cost of losing and the rewards of winning have, in many cases, driven coaches and players alike to do whatever it takes to engineer an outcome, eliminate risk, and compromise their own integrity to achieve the only prize that matters: win on the scoreboard, and win the adulation and dollars that follow. I am still old-school enough to believe that winning right matters and winning right can still happen even on the largest of stages.
The game itself, when played right, is a thing of beauty that can invoke the same visceral reactions that one might find in a ballet or musical score – choreography, timing, spacing, imagination and creativity, speed and grace, power and skill. We should trust it, embrace it, and allow it to nurture young lives the way it once did – through the same lessons that both winning and losing teach. Any worthy endeavor that engenders the kind of emotional and physical investment that The Game does deserves better than what it’s becoming. There may be a place outside of the current structure for the power conferences and “programs” that choose a different course, but the NCAA needs to reexamine its futile attempt to regulate the basketball fiefdums that have been created on major college campuses nationally. The days of the letter sweater and the mantra of being “true to your school” are as dead as Julius Caesar (thank you Officer Jim Malone) and those concepts, to the likes of Kentucky and Syracuse, are lost in a paradigm of pseudo amateurism.
Too much of a good thing has caused a kind of basketball indigestion that has sullied the college game, and in response, the NCAA is using a garden hose to try to extinguish a forest fire of rules violations that are neither entirely enforceable, nor really apropos given the big business that major college basketball has become. There was a time when a fully subsidized college education awarded on the basis of basketball skill would be compensation enough for a college player. But it’s a tougher argument to make these days when at least a couple of the starters at Kentucky will use their time in Lexington as a springboard to an NBA salary of between $1 and $3.5 million after one semester-plus on the campus, and their presence there in real time helps the school bring in millions more.
The Coach as teacher, mentor, and role model is another staple of the game that is an endangered species. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski tried to give this some perspective a few years ago when admonishing his power conference coaching peers: To paraphrase Coach, don’t let it blow your mind to know that there is some guy out there at a Division III school (or maybe an Ivy or Patriot League school) who can outcoach you seven days out of the week. The system has evolved in a way that has given rise to coaches who more resemble Gordon Gekko than Norman Dale. The sad part is that had Coach Dale not won in 1952, we may never have heard of him. Would losing that Indiana State High School title have rendered his lessons any less valuable or valid? Would the experience have had less meaning for his players?
These days, in a no-holds barred effort to land the next great high school player, coaches and their staffs seem increasingly willing to shelve their personal integrity and engage in tactics that would make DC politicians blush. Too many of the nation’s academic institutions have become warehouses for basketball aprenticeships that are too often one or two years in length and that have little or nothing to do with academic integrity. In fact, circumventing the rules governing academic progress has become a modus operandi on far too many campuses. Coaches and the institutions that hire them know – or at least should know – the rules by which they are willing to play. When the proverbial stuff hits the fan, it’s almost comical to hear administrators suddenly turn into Casablanca’s Louie Renault, shocked to learn anything underhanded may have been going on. I was born and raised in Syracuse. I enjoy SU basketball. I admire and respect Duke and what those teams have done on the court, along with North Carolina, Kansas, and the rest. I don’t blame John Calipari – not one bit – for his way of winning championships at Kentucky. The system is what it has become, and as Albert Einstein once said, “you have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else”. Unfortunately, the “game” in this case has become recruiting, and the rules stretched beyond recognition.
Jim Boeheim recently stated that he isn’t a policeman, he’s a basketball coach. It’s a statement that sadly presumes that the game has passed him by, and that is more an indictment of the game at that level than it is of the coach. The NCAA responded by saying it wants him to be a policeman. My takeaway: the state of the art resembles little of what it once was, and continues to move in the wrong direction.
As for the purity and beauty of the game, it seems someone has scribbled a mustache on the Mona Lisa. And Diogenes is still a 16 seed.
Diogenes searches for an honest man. Painting attributed to J. H. W. Tischbein (c. 1780)