I, too, have no idea what is going on here. Four Catholic schools made it to the NCAA tournament this year, and, three days in, all three Jesuit schools have been bounced. Who knows what Palm Sunday has in store for the Augustinians of Villanova. Not only did the Jesuits lose, but they lost badly. In tremendously embarrassing fashion. What, growing up, was taught to me as the foundational element of the Catholic School approach to hoop—fundamentals and perimeter, motherfucker—doesn’t really go well with BC’s 22 turnovers or Gonzaga’s 2–13 from downtown. Awful. Both teams blew huge leads and just stank, stank, stank. The Upset Church was founded on the rock of terrible Jesuit play in the second round.
These collapses, along with The Zags’ self-destruction last year, make me wonder if, despite St. Joe’s in 2004, maybe Catholic teams do better as underdogs. I mean, the Church is based on loving the underdog, on opening the doors to the down-trodden, etc. So maybe they need this correction, having grown fat and opulent like the Spanish Church in the lead up to the Second Republic. Don’t forget that Jesus himself was the ultimate underdog—brother was killed by the Roman referees just as he was about to cover the spread against the top-seeded Pharisees, after all.
Maybe we loved the Zags as the ultimate Cinderella since, in being Cinderella, they played to our (racist) fantasies about Cinderellas—the good looking (white) kids who do everything right and just work harder, instead of showboating or getting blue chip recruits drunk and/or laid. But now that the Cinderellas are entrenched (and, we see, far more diverse than we’d let our fantasies dictate), it forces us to imagine every hoops team as made up of guys who work really damn hard. I’m not entirely sure, but that sure sounds right. If that’s the case, then, who’s the new lovable, scrappy underdog? Teams from the Patriot Conference? Does that, then, just reframe the racial politics involved here?
March 20th, 2005 at 19:22
ok…so at least you feel me on the racist connotations of the cinderella basketball team. i must be hanging with the wrong crowd.
you think jesus watches march madness?
March 20th, 2005 at 20:55
Summer, we’ve all seen Hoosiers. There’s definitely something incredibly racist about rooting for cinderellas, I think. And even though Catholic schools have created some of the best African-American athletes in the US (mainly out of HS—lookit the quality coming out of Mt. Carmel, etc., in Chicago), the “Catholic School baller” is still the pasty white kid who can drain threes all day and never commits a turnover.
Part of my point about Gonzaga’s being no longer a cinderella is that it justifies their racial makeup now—they’re a high-seed, so it figures that they’re not an all-white dynamo.
But the funny twist is small TBCs like Hampton and Delaware State. Who wasn’t rooting for the Hornets to upset Duke?
They may be the exceptions, though, that prove the rule. I’m not yet sure.
March 20th, 2005 at 20:56
As for Jesus watching March Madness… I gotta wonder if this Catholic implosion is in part retribution for Jesus’s being pissed that Notre Dame and DePaul got left off. But why would he take it out on the Jesuit schools, leaving Villanova unscathed?
March 30th, 2005 at 19:20
man, you can’t make jokes about that footprints poem.
i grew up in the midwest and that shit was everywhere. you couldn’t crawl under a desk without dislodging a footprints mousepad or a fricking footprints picture frame with a picture of someone’s fat dog or baby in it. every time I hear that I get flashbacks and fear sweats.
[sweats.]