I walked into Murphy’s around two o’clock Saturday with the simple, almost embarrassingly old-fashioned goal of watching a basketball game. There were six televisions. There were probably forty men. There was, by my unofficial count, one set of eyeballs aimed at any of the screens, and they were mine.
Everybody else was looking at a phone. Hunched over it like they were defusing something. Every fifteen seconds somebody at the bar would jerk upright and shout a sentence that meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t downloaded an app in the last six months. “Come on, McNeese over by four and a half.” “I need the under in Ole Miss for the cash-out.” “Baby, baby, baby, second-half three-pointers, give me daylight.” Grown men. With kids. With knees that don’t work.
Ray Kowalczyk was at the corner table holding a phone in each hand like he was landing a 727. He had a six-leg parlay across four games and one of the legs was a Drake player whose name he was pronouncing three different ways depending on whether the kid had the ball. Ray hasn’t watched a full forty minutes of college basketball since 2003, but he could tell you that this young man needed exactly one more assist and a made free throw to send Ray’s seventeen dollars into one hundred and forty-two. He explained this to me twice. I had not asked.
Coach DiMaggio used to make us watch tape on Sunday mornings before church. He’d run the projector himself and stop it on a single frame and say, “Boys, look at his feet. The feet tell you everything.” I thought about Coach DiMaggio at Murphy’s on Saturday because somewhere on one of the six televisions a kid from a school I’d never heard of had set the most beautifully patient down-screen I’d seen in a month, and the only person in the building who noticed was a retired football coach drinking a club soda. The feet told me everything. There was nobody to tell.
The kid behind the bar — couldn’t have been twenty-three, sleeves of tattoos that looked like a children’s encyclopedia — leaned over and asked if I wanted to “get on something.” He said it the way a Jehovah’s Witness asks if you’ve considered the literature. I told him I was just here for the game. He looked at me with what I can only describe as polite anthropological interest, the way you’d look at a man who showed up to a wedding with a fax machine.
Here is the part that broke me. The televisions themselves are now in on it. Down at the bottom of the screen, while actual human beings ran an actual offense, there was a little ticker informing me of the live odds, the spread movement, the player props, and something called a “SGP boost.” During free throws they cut to a graphic of a cartoon lion holding a parlay slip. I am not making this up. A cartoon lion. CBS used to put up a graphic that said HOOSIERS 42, PURDUE 38 and that was the entire conversation. Now the screen looks like the dashboard of a fighter jet being flown by a man who owes money.
Around three forty-five something genuinely incredible happened in one of the games — a kid threw in a runner from about twenty-six feet at the buzzer to send it to overtime — and Murphy’s did not react. Not a flinch. Two seconds later the same room exploded into a noise I will hear in my dreams, and it was because somebody named Tre had just gotten his fourth rebound, which apparently completed the back end of a same-game parlay involving a guy in Spokane and Ray’s brother-in-law in Toledo. They hugged. Two of them hugged. Over a fourth rebound by a man none of them could pick out of a lineup.
I sat there with my club soda and I thought, all right, fine, this is what it is now, the game is the soundtrack, the betting slip is the show. But then for about ten seconds in the second half a point guard from a 14 seed picked a press apart with a behind-the-back pass off a curl, and somewhere underneath the cartoon lion and the parlay screams and the TVs yelling at me about a SGP boost, there was still a basketball game being played by young men who are very, very good at it. Coach DiMaggio would have stopped the projector. The feet told you everything.
Denise is bringing chili over tonight for the late games. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to watch on the small set in the den with the sound on the broadcast and my phone face-down in the kitchen drawer where it belongs.