On the day Stanford beat Arizona for the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship, its coach, Tara Vanderveer defended women’s basketball in the New York Times. “I don’t think anyone says, ‘Well, professional basketball, they’re bigger and stronger, so I’ll just want to watch professional basketball.”
Actually, I say that.
Bigger, stronger. Most importantly, better.
And I don’t watch men’s college basketball either.
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Vanderveer’s position seems to be that basketball is basketball and basketball fans should “appreciate” basketball equally in every form “for what it is.”
Like high school basketball.
Or, I suppose, biddy basketball.
Then Vanderveer’s team went out and won its national title after committing 40% more turnovers (21) than assists (15), and shooting 4-for-14 (.276%) from 3-point range.
If players’ skills aren’t important, why recruit them?
And if they aren’t skillful, why watch them?
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I think I stopped caring about men’s college basketball around when one-and-done arrived. The most gifted players left as soon as they could. The ones that stayed were less worth watching. The less I watched, the less I learned about the players. They less I learned, the less I cared about them. Soon, I could not name more than a player or two at the start of a college basketball season. And this for a guy who can still name entire starting fives – and a sub or two from colleges in the 1950s. Hey, who can still name more than half the starting fives in the 1960 Philadelphia Public League semi-finals.
Primitive impulses carried through the decades, like the elephants that bore Hannibal over the Alps, allowed me to root for certain teams whose players meant nothing to me, though even by the 2000s I had written a short story, while not up to Deborah Eisenberg level, had a catchy title: “The Fuck I Care About Wildcats?” But this year, never having lived – nor known anyone who’d lived in – Spokane or Waco, let alone attended Gonzaga or Baylor – what could I care about who bested whom. Catholics vs. Baptists, please. Win one for the Pope or John Smythe. You’ve got to be kidding.
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If you have no reason to root – if you don’t care who wins – you are left with enjoying the sport as sport. You can admire the level of individual skill and team performance. Sport is an art, my friend Budd says.
So would you rather watch the Baylor Theatre Arts Department perform Hamlet or the Royal Shakespeare Company?