I watched two of the First Four last night on a television old enough to vote. Got up off my chair four times — twice for snacks, twice because I was actually moved by something. Two teams from places you have to find on a map, playing their hearts out in front of a crowd that had driven eight hours to be there. Couldn’t tell you the final score now if you held a gun to me. Could tell you exactly what one of those kids’ mothers looked like in the eighth row.
The First Four happens in Dayton, Ohio because Dayton is the last city left that does not believe itself too good for what it has. They put up a sign. They open the doors. They sell popcorn. The popcorn is fine. There is no parlay-app cartoon goat hovering above the parking lot. There is just a parking lot.
The bracket apps had already updated by the time I brushed my teeth. The teams that lost last night don’t exist anymore — wiped out of the database faster than Coach DiMaggio used to wipe a chalkboard with the back of his hand. He used to say a man who plays a game and then disappears from the box score is still a man who played a game. Try telling that to ESPN’s bracket optimizer. The optimizer does not return calls.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:30 last night, which I should mention is also 11:30 his time, because we live four blocks from each other. “You watching this?” he said. I said yes. He said, “The kid with the headband — he’s playing like he means it.” Then he hung up. That was the whole call. That is a sportsman.
Meanwhile the prime-time boys won’t get on the floor until this afternoon, and they’ll do it after a forty-eight-minute pregame show that includes a segment called something like “The Madness Index,” in which a man in a vest assigns each team a vibe score from 1 to 100. There are graphics. There is a horn. There is a former point guard saying the word “energy” eighty-one times in a row. There is, every commercial break, an ad in which an animated goat tells you Bryant minus the points is a lock. The goat sounds confident. The goat is 9–and–14.
Petey Corrigan, who used to officiate eighth-grade CYO games for fourteen dollars and a slice of pizza, would have died for the chance to officiate a First Four game. He’d have died for it. He told me once that the games nobody watches are the only games that mean anything, because the men playing them know nobody is watching and they play hard anyway. Then he asked me for the fourteen dollars.
I’m told one of those kids on the floor last night is averaging 23 a game and is, as of this morning, in the transfer portal. He has not announced a transfer. He is still on his team. He is in the portal preemptively, the way you might leave the back door unlocked while you walk to the mailbox. Coach DiMaggio is rolling so hard in his grave they’re going to have to re-pour the headstone by Friday.
But that kid played 38 minutes last night. He played them in Dayton. He played them in front of his mother in the eighth row, and a crowd that drove eight hours to be there, and a fat old sportswriter in his garage who got up four times. Whatever happens to him in April, in May, in some collective somewhere with a logo on the wall — he gave Tuesday night everything he had, and Tuesday night doesn’t owe him a thing back. That’s the contract. That’s the last clean contract left in this sport, and they sign it every year in a 13,000-seat building in southwest Ohio while the bracket apps look the other way.
Denise is making chili. She heard about it on a podcast. The podcast is called “Bracketology With Brent” and Denise does not, to my knowledge, watch college basketball. The chili is excellent. I’ll be in the garage.