February Madness Reminds Us of Why We Watch Sports

By Ryan McGowan

February is the dark month in the sports calendar.  The Super Bowl is over, baseball hasn’t started yet (unless you count “Truck Day”), the NBA is just going through the motions until the home stretch, and the NHL is shut down for two weeks.  We didn’t even have the Pro Bowl this February to kick around.  I don’t consider Daytona to be a sport.  February is the sports equivalent of a six-month hookup dry spell which can only be cured by a visit from a certified slump buster.

For many people this year, the Olympics were their 2 AM chubby booty call.  Unfortunately, I am pretty much anti-Olympics (except for hockey and curling), because the Olympics are the kind of event that poseur non-sports fans really get into, ostensibly to show how worldly and sophisticated they are that they sit glued to their TV’s watching grown men and women who were cut in high school from the real sports dance on ice and perform 360-degree flips on a snowboard.  I’m not demeaning their sports—I’m sure I couldn’t slalom down a snow-filled mountain, except if maybe I were obnoxiously and heinously drunk, in which case I wouldn’t be surprised at anything I could do.  It’s just the pretentious “fans” that annoy me, and spite is a great motivator.

Which is why in February I like to turn to my own version of a clinging ex-girlfriend: the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association basketball tournament.  Readers may or may not know this, but I coach high school basketball at a small school north of Boston, and I have always especially enjoyed a good tournament atmosphere.  (In the interest of full disclosure, my team did not participate in this year’s tournament, having just endured a 2-18 “rebuilding” season.   On second thought, it was more like “reloading”, as in reloading for the inevitable plane crash that is sure to be the 2010-2011 season.)  With my own competitive interest in the tournament over, I have set out over the past week to fully indulge myself in February Madness.  It was either that, or concentrate more on work.  Pretty easy choice, really.

One of the reasons the tournament still holds such a fascination for me is the memories from my youth that it inspires.  As a kid, my dad often took me to regular season and tournament high school games, often culminating in a trip to the old Boston Garden for a triple-header of Eastern Mass championship games, starting with the smaller Division 3 teams and finishing with the mighty Division 1 powerhouses such as Brockton, South Boston, Central Catholic, New Bedford, and Durfee.  Every once in a while we got to see a local team from our area play out a Cinderella run to make it to the Garden, such as the state champion North Attleboro girls or the Bishop Feehan boys, who lost on the parquet to eventual New York Knick Rick Brunson and Salem High in 1991.  Either way, it was always a treat to be able to get to the Garden early and have your choice of seats—it was usually the only time we got to sit in the lower section.

And now that I’ve taught and coached at a number of schools around the area, tournament time is the only chance I get to catch up with coaches and kids I’ve worked with over the past 10 years.  When the pairings were released last Friday, I immediately scoured them to see the various schools I have connections to, and when they’d be playing.  Strangely enough, it looked like it was going to work out that I’d be able to attend a different game each night.  Welcome to High School Hoops Odyssey 2010.

Amazingly, my fiancée Jen was more than willing to accompany me on my quixotic quest, which definitely deserves a heartfelt mention in this column.  We started out on Monday night with the Everett (where I currently teach, but not coach) girls team, which opened the first round of the Division 1 North tournament at the much higher seeded Peabody, a school whose nickname (Tanners) represents a long history of leatherworking.  Somehow I don’t think it’s still a major industry in town.  Still it pales in comparison to Everett, a school which has the 49ers colors and uniforms (at least in football), Notre Dame’s fight song, and Alabama’s nickname (yes, Everett is the Crimson Tide).  Everett-Peabody is always an interesting game because of the two schools’ long-time (but currently dormant) rivalry in football, and the fact that Peabody tends to be the next stop for many upwardly mobile Everett natives who want to move out of the triple-decker that’s been housing their family since the Wilson administration.  Despite a valiant effort from the Tide, the Tanners prevailed by 15 or so.

Next on the docket was the Brookline girls’ team taking on the Quincy Presidents in a preliminary round game in Division 1 South.  Three years ago I was an assistant at Brookline, and it was in the middle of (yet another) rebuilding period, where we had a similar season to the one we just had this year.   Well, as high school sports tend to go, success is cyclical, and this year’s Brookline team appears to have some legitimate studs.  Go figure.  The matchup with Quincy is interesting in many ways, not the least of which is the contrast between two places that are geographically close but couldn’t be farther apart demographically.  While Brookline is home to many families who are wealthy, often Jewish, professionals, Quincy is a working-class and middle-class semi-suburb where people still refer to themselves as being from a specific neighborhood in town rather than Quincy itself.  However, since Brookline participates in Boston’s METCO program to bus inner-city kids to suburban schools (and Quincy doesn’t), the Brookline team had a decidedly different racial makeup than the Quincy team.  The game was a track meet, with not a lot of defense on either ends, and Brookline finally prevailing, 75-64.  Yay.

Wednesday and Thursday saw Jen and I attending games played by my alma mater, Bishop Feehan High School of Attleboro, a school that I both taught and coached at in my first three years out of college.  Being in touch still with the coaches for both the girls and boys teams, I try to make it a point to see at least one game each year.  Wednesday I saw the #9 seeded girls team defeat the #8 Sharon Eagles on the road by one in overtime, which featured a driving layup by a Feehan sophomore with about six seconds left in the extra period to win.  That win sent the Shamrocks to face the Division 2 South #1 seed, Fontbonne Academy, on Saturday.  Thursday night saw the Feehan boys’ team blow out Greater New Bedford Voke, 86-64.  Two kids from Feehan put on impressive offensive displays (29 and 28 points) and they ran away with the game.

Friday was a bonus stop on my odyssey, with the North Attleboro boys (my brother’s alma mater) having advanced to Round 2 of the Division 1 South tournament to face the #1 seed Madison Park, a Boston public school in the heart of Roxbury, a traditionally African-American neighborhood in the middle of the city.  Typically these games between all-white suburban teams and mostly minority Boston teams are contests of athleticism vs. fundamentals, and for a while it looked like fundamentals was going to win out—North Attleboro had a 10-point lead at 14-4 in the first quarter and was exploiting tons of Madison Park brain farts.  The game quickly turned, however, and MP showed they weren’t just an undisciplined streetball team, eventually winning 80-61.  Basketball wisdom: a team that can throw down nasty alley-oop dunks and make fundamental bounce passes and break presses is a team to be reckoned with.

Finally, on Saturday, I trekked back to Quincy to see the Feehan girls lose to the #1 seed Fontbonne by 8.  Good game, good season, lost to a better team.  Can’t ask for much more.

I realize that 99% of SportsColumn readers will have given up by now, having of course no reason to read my explanations of random Massachusetts high school basketball games.  Fair enough.  But if you are still reading, the point of my description of the 2010 Basketball Odyssey is simple: for all the negativity that we see in our professional sports on a daily basis, for all the Gilbert Arenases and T.O.’s and steroids scandals and greedy owners and ungrateful players and all the other stuff we love to complain about, it’s helpful sometimes to be reminded of why sports is so compelling.

Most people don’t make it out to see their local high school games unless they have a connection to someone, but it could be fun and refreshing to check out a random game every so often.  You might have the same reaction as I do when I go to the tournament every year—recalling fond memories of youth, being impressed by young people who step up in the heat of competition, and feeling sympathy for those whose athletic careers often just ended with that last-second loss.

Or you could stay home and watch Olympic hockey.  Which, as the Vancouver games showed, might not be a bad thing either.  But that’s a discussion for another time.  Either way, February doesn’t have to be a lost sports month after all.  You might, however, just need to go out and find it for yourself.