I will tell you exactly how this happened, because I want it on the record that I did not plan it. Men’s game went to commercial — some app I have never downloaded was selling me a parlay on a sport I was already watching — and I hit the wrong button on the clicker because Denise had moved the clicker, and what came up was the women’s Sweet 16 in Birmingham, and before I could correct the situation a guard threw a backdoor bounce pass that her teammate caught in stride and laid in off the glass, and I just sat there.
I am sixty-seven years old. I have not seen a clean backdoor cut on national television since George H.W. Bush was running for reelection.
What I watched, over the next three hours, was a basketball game. I want to be clear about that, because I think the word has lost some meaning. There were five passes before a shot. There were screens that the screener actually held still for. There was a help-side rotation. At one point a player set a flare screen, and I had to pause the television and explain to myself that I had just seen a flare screen, in 2025, on a Friday night, on ESPN, in the year of our Lord.
Coach DiMaggio used to tell us, every practice, that basketball is a passing game played by people who would rather shoot. He’d line us up on the baseline and make us complete seven passes before a layup, and if you took a dribble in between, you ran. He died in ’04 and missed all of this, and I think about that sometimes — what he’d make of a sport where a kid can dribble forty-one times and call it offense.
Because that is what the men’s tournament has been, friends. I have watched every round. I have watched ball-screen, dribble dribble dribble, step-back three, miss, run back. I have watched grown men in shooting sleeves stare at the rim from twenty-six feet like they were trying to remember its name. The other night a kid took a contested heave with eighteen seconds on the shot clock and the announcer said “that’s just his shot,” and I thought, no, son, that is the absence of a shot.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at halftime. Ray coaches eighth-grade girls now in a town outside Erie because his wife made him retire and he lasted nine days. He said, “You watching this?” I said I was watching it. He said, “They’re running stuff.” I said I had noticed they were running stuff. He said, “My eighth graders run stuff. Nobody runs stuff anymore in the men’s game. They just hand it to the best guy and stand around like they’re waiting for the bus.” Then he hung up because his wife was making him take out the recycling.
I want to say something here that is going to upset some of the men I know. I am not converting. I am not buying a jersey. I am not learning new names against my will. But there is a kid I coach against at the Y on Saturdays — Petey Corrigan’s grandson, plays for one of those travel programs that has its own logo — and the kid only knows two moves, and they’re both him. He puts his head down, he goes left, he flips it up. That’s it. He’s twelve. Watching the women’s tournament I had the cold realization that Petey’s grandson plays exactly like the players I’ve been watching in March, and the players I’ve been watching in March make eight figures, and somewhere between Petey’s grandson and the Final Four nobody bothered to teach any of them to pass to the open man.
Coach DiMaggio would’ve loved the South Carolina team. He would’ve hated the broadcast — too many graphics, too much yelling about “moments” — but he would’ve watched the basketball and he would’ve nodded once, which from him was a parade.
I’m watching the men’s Elite Eight tonight. I’m not a saint. But if it goes to commercial, and Denise has moved the clicker again, I’m not promising anything.
Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.