Central Florida-Duke Ending Was a Sound That Can't Be Forgotten
What I’ll remember more than the one shining moment, this year, is one dull shiv to the rib cage.
What got cemented and seared for me wasn’t Zion the Magnificent, or Tremont Waters’ game-winning layup to lift Louisiana State over Maryland in the East, or Carsen Edwards scoring 42 for Purdue against Villanova, or Gonzaga’s Brandon Clarke going gonzo (36 points, eight rebounds, five blocks) against Baylor.
What got hammered home wasn’t Iowa coming back from 25-down against Tennessee, although that was something, or Virginia, a year after becoming the first No. 1 to lose to a No. 16, trailing No. 16 Gardner-Webb by double digits in Columbia.
It wasn’t Anteaters sticking their noses in Kansas State’s business, or Oregon’s surprising trail-blaze to the Sweet 16, or Tom Izzo screaming at a player, or the way three-point assassin Fletcher Magee handled himself after going 0-for-12 against Kentucky.
What will forever resonate about this NCAA Tournament is the sound of uncontrollable sobbing.
Sobbing so raw and real you can’t get it out of your head.
It took four days for the tournament to find its foothold but it took hold Sunday night, on TV, a couple hours after the game.
A film crew was allowed into Central Florida’s locker room after the team’s gut-wrenching loss to Duke.
Coach Johnny Dawkins stood, stoically as he could, and addressed his players about the life-lessons that could not be understood at this painful moment.
One of the players who needed consoling was the coach’s son, Aubrey, who had scored 32 points in defeat and watched his last-second tip-in chance to win roll off the rim with a cruelness that won’t soon be forgotten.
“It was up there forever, I felt like, in slow motion,” Aubrey recounted later of his shot.
But the story of this post-game scene wasn’t visual, it was audio.
The coach’s heartfelt effort was washed out by the kind of crying you hear after the loss of a loved one.
These were newly-grown men, moaning and groaning in complete, unedited and abject anguish.
The scene then cut back to the TNT\TBS studio, where four co-hosts sat stunned in their seats.
Yeah, us too.
Jimmy Breslin, the great and gritty New York tabloid writer, always said, for the best story, “Go to the loser’s locker room.”
I’ve tiptoed around my share of post-game sad scenes in nearly four-decades on the sports beat.
It’s the toughest job as a sportswriter, picking your way through someone else’s carnage.
I’ve been called a rat and an ambulance chaser.
I remember trolling through the cramped, losing locker room of the Los Angeles Rams after a tough playoff loss.
Some of the players held “Cabbage Patch Dolls” they were given, as Christmas presents, by owner Georgia Frontiere.
I thought that was the saddest thing I’d ever seen related to a sporting event.
Read More
But then came Sunday and UCF.
My first thought was, “Screw you, March Madness.”
Why?
Because, this was the most cynical approach I had ever taken to The Tournament.
The NCAA had finally lost me, frankly, with its wide web of corruption, admissions scandals, FBI probes, two-faced hypocrisy and crass commercialism.
I was going to see this tournament for what it was: a bunch of expensive suits bought with cheap labor.
This was the year of the wire tap, the year college basketball so made the milk curdle that it seemed inevitable the field of 16 would represent a collective rap sheet longer than Tacko Fall.
LSU has advanced minus its coach, Will Wade, who was allegedly caught on audio trying to buy one of the players still playing in the field.
Houston Coach Kelvin Sampson was chased out of Oklahoma by scandal and North Carolina marches on after skating through the biggest academic fraud on record.
USC was so impressed it hired North Carolina’s president to help extract it from its present set of stinky circumstances.
Kentucky…please, that school has cheated more than Felicity Huffman at an ACT testing center.
Two of the three schools John Calipari has taken to a Final Four have had to vacate their appearances.
Auburn—say no more--is coached by Bruce Pearl and Florida State and was once dubbed by Steve Spurrier “Free Shoes University.”
Michigan State is up to its ears in slimy green, Oregon basketball recently got served with two-year probation and Texas Tech is certainly no stranger to an NCAA infractions committee.
Indict and advance.
Duke pretends to be pristine as it launders one-and-done players through the system while searching for the perfect shoe in the sweatshops of China.
I promised myself I was not going to get emotionally involved in this year’s tournament of shameless cross-promotion for Game of Thrones.
But then Central Florida lost a tough one and a locker room boom mic caught audio of players wailing and drowning in sorrow that comes only with realness and rawness.
And then Johnny Dawkins said, “The feeling shouldn’t go away right away.”
Because, good or bad, you get out of this what you put into it.
There I was Sunday morning thinking this first weekend wasn’t all that exciting.
And there I sat Sunday night with sobbing sounds I can’t get out of my head.
So yeah, screw you, March Madness.
