The buzzer hadn’t been done buzzing for ninety seconds and the chyron at the bottom of my television was already running a graphic about which of the losing team’s freshmen had ‘opened conversations’ about their future. Opened conversations. The kid was still in his uniform. His mother was still in the parking lot waiting for the shuttle. And ESPN had a logo for it — a little suitcase with wings, animated, presented like a weather alert.
I have been writing about basketball since the rim was a rumor, and I have to tell you, friends, the saddest sound in sports right now is a college coach finding out from Twitter which of his players is leaving him. Used to be a kid would walk into the office. Used to be there’d be a handshake and a couple lies told over coffee. Now it’s a graphic. With a suitcase. That has wings.
Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program back when men wore neckties to bench-coach a JV game, used to say that a roster was a promise. He’d say it real quiet, the way he said most things he believed, and then he’d go yell at a sophomore for an hour about footwork. He died in 2009 and I am thankful every day that he did not live to see a sidebar on a sports network listing twelve nineteen-year-olds who are ‘evaluating their options’ before the floor has been swept.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at quarter to eleven last night, which is two hours past Ray’s bedtime, just to ask me what an NIL collective is. I told him it’s a group of dentists and Buick dealers in a chat thread who pool money to pay a 6’4 wing from Lithuania to wear their school’s uniform for eight months. Ray was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Duke, that’s just the Yankees.’ And you know what? Ray Kowalczyk has never once been wrong about anything important, and he wasn’t wrong last night either.
The thing that gets me — and I want to be careful here, because it’s not the kids’ fault, none of this is the kids’ fault, the kids are doing exactly what every adult in their life has told them to do — is that we used to have a thing called a senior year. A senior would walk out of the tunnel one last time and the building would stand up. Now we have what amounts to a reverse draft, conducted on Instagram, in which a young man’s last college game is announced retroactively after he’s already in a Buick driving to a different state.
I knew a kid named Petey Corrigan who played four years at a small Catholic school nobody’s heard of, averaged six points a game, set picks like a man trying to put his shoulder through a barn door, and graduated on time with a degree in something practical. Petey is now an assistant principal in Erie, Pennsylvania. He owns a house. His knees don’t work. He calls his old coach on Father’s Day. I am not telling you Petey’s life is better than the kid in the suitcase graphic — that’s not for me to say. I’m just telling you Petey exists. Existed. Is a person.
Meanwhile the bracket app on my phone now has a feature called Portal Watch, which sends you a push notification every time a player from a team you picked enters the open market. I picked Drake to win in the first round, and at 11:47 last night my phone buzzed and informed me that two Drake players were ‘exploring opportunities elsewhere,’ which is a phrase that should never appear in a sentence about a 20-year-old who scored eight points in a basketball game. They hadn’t even been eliminated yet. They were ahead, by the way. They won.
I don’t want to be the old man yelling at the cloud. I want to be the old man yelling at the specific, identifiable individuals who decided that the back end of a college basketball broadcast should look like the trade deadline on cable news. I want to know who the suitcase guy is. I want a name. I want to ask him, gently, in person, what he thinks his grandfather would say.
Denise is bringing chili over for the late games tonight. She says it’s from a podcast. I asked her if the podcast had a suitcase logo and she told me to get my own dinner.