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Issue Date:  March 23, 2007

From the Editor's Desk

Some mad musings

All right, so here’s the confession: On the Friday of the Big 12 men’s basketball tournament, I sat in the newsroom and, I suppose, pulled rank by switching the channel from 24-hour news to 24-hour sports to watch the University of Kansas play the University of Oklahoma. In sports world cliché, the Jayhawks handily defeated the Sooners 64-47. I sat there as the rest of the staff (in the majority, truth be told, about as tone deaf to sports as any group on the planet) labored away. What I’m admitting to is that right there, in front of God and everybody, while most of the diligent NCR editorial staff went on preparing the next week’s edition, I spent most of two hours watching basketball.

There are many things that might lure one to madness in March, beginning with the jonquils in the backyard and the return of bird song and the promise of redbuds and dogwood blossoms and that kind of Midwest sky that is so deep and wide and blue you’d like to just fall into it. If there is a preternatural force, however, that can compete with such phenomena, it is college basketball.

So there, you know where my heart really is this month.

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The journalist part of me, of course, knows that there’s probably something really wrong with many of the “programs” that have recruited the young to entertain us. At the least they become something like indentured servants, devoting their lives to the pursuit of a spot in the Final Four and ultimately, the NBA. In exchange for their efforts, they’re supposed to get a college education, though that is the case for too few. Undoubtedly there are some true scholar athletes in the Division I money sports of football and basketball. But on too many campuses the open secret is that there is a double standard for star players. They bring in the bucks; they get preferential treatment. The upside is that people who have been especially critical of some of the practices of Division I athletics believe that sports can be done in a way that does not exploit students or compromise the mission of the academy. And they include former Catholic University of America president Jesuit Fr. William Byron, who served on the NCAA’s Presidents’ Committee, and author Allen Sack, who played football at the University of Notre Dame. They are among the experts interviewed by Joe Feuerherd (another self-professed March Madness junkie) to find out more about the prospects of running a clean as well as successful college athletic program.

~ ~ ~

A question: Anyone have any idea why so many Jesuit schools -- Georgetown, Gonzaga, Creighton, Boston College, Xavier, Marquette, and a few years ago, St. Joe’s -- have such good basketball teams?

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And an aside: Without discounting pleasurable times in earlier years in such East Coast venues as the St. Joe’s Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse and the Palestra on the University of Pennsylvania campus, I have a special fondness for the University of Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse.

It’s tradition goes back to the founder of basketball -- James Naismith coached there, though not very successfully -- and his name is given to the street on which the old barn of a gym is located. The place drips with tradition and long-standing ritual, and it is LOUD. It is so electric that even the non-enthusiast gets swept up. It is the place of my wife’s and daughter’s conversions. Before their first visits to Allen Fieldhouse some years ago, my wife actually did consider that what happened to me and our sons around this time of year was an incurable and indecipherable disease. But it only took one game at Allen Fieldhouse to open Sally’s eyes. One game. And she got it. Now Sally, lured to a KU game by our daughter, Rebecca, who was a student at the time, understands. She knows what it means to take a charge. She yells clichés like “Live by the three, die by the three.” She still thinks Roy Williams a turncoat for defecting to North Carolina. She believes this is Bill Self’s year to get KU beyond the first-round jinx.

~ ~ ~

And that’s NCR Sports Center for this year. The madness, I promise, will subside by month’s end.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, March 23, 2007

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