Daylight Saving stole an hour out of my Sunday and I didn’t even notice it leave, on account of I was on the couch watching conference championships and somebody named JuJu Watkins was in the middle of doing things with a basketball that I have not seen a man do in this country since George W. Bush’s second term.
I’m not here to be a convert. I am too old and too tired to convert to anything, including a multivitamin. But the SEC final was on, and the Big Ten final was on, and the ACC, and the Big East, and at some point around five o’clock I sat up off the couch like a man hearing his name called and I said out loud, to nobody, “these girls are playing basketball.” Then I sat back down, because my hip does not like sudden things.
Meanwhile the men’s bracket reveal show ran four hours. Four hours. For a piece of paper. They had Charles Barkley on a couch, and a guy in a vest holding the bracket like it was the Magna Carta, and a graphic that spun around like a slot machine, and at the end of all of it Auburn was a one seed, which any sober person could have told you in nine seconds.
My old coach Vince DiMaggio used to say the game’s the game, kid — the haircuts change and the shoes change and the announcers get worse but the game’s the game. He said this to me one time when I asked him whether women could really play basketball, and he looked at me like I had asked him whether water was wet, and he said, “Holloway, are you stupid, or are you being stupid on purpose.” That was 1973. Coach DiMaggio is dead now, and so is most of his patience for nonsense, and yet here we are in the year 2025 still pretending it’s a question.
Hannah Hidalgo had eight steals in a game last week. Eight. Pete Maravich didn’t have eight steals. Pete Maravich didn’t even have a steal as a statistical category, on account of nobody bothered to record them when he played, on account of he wasn’t getting any.
Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night. Ray played triple-A ball for a season and a half in the seventies and has been an authority on every sport ever invented since. Ray said, “Duke, are you watching this?” I said, “Ray, I have been watching it for nine hours.” He said, “They’re setting screens.” He said it like a man witnessing a miracle on the side of a highway. He said, “Duke. The screens are legal.”
Now of course ESPN has noticed, in the way ESPN notices things, which is to say with a hashtag and a sponsored graphic. It is Women’s History Month, which means they have a tile and a slogan and a corporate partner, probably a bank, and at some point this week a sideline reporter is going to interview a kid from UConn about being a role model when what the kid wants to talk about is a backdoor cut. They will run a spot called “She Is The Game,” and somebody at the agency that made it will get a bonus and a small ceramic award.
I do not need ESPN to tell me what I am watching. I am watching basketball. I am watching screens that pin a defender for a full second and a half. I am watching post entries from the elbow. I am watching a kid run a high pick-and-roll with the patience of a married man in a hardware store. The men’s tournament is going to be a parlay-app commercial with a few possessions of basketball wedged in between, and the women’s tournament is going to be basketball with a hashtag stuck on top of it, and only one of those things is salvageable with a butter knife.
I am not making a larger point here. I’m a sportswriter, not a sociologist, and the difference is that one of us gets to leave the office. I’m just telling you that an hour got stolen out of Sunday and I would gladly trade them another one if it meant I could keep watching whatever it was JuJu Watkins was doing in the second half.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s from a podcast.