My grandson Ethan came over Wednesday after school, sat down on my couch, opened his phone, and asked me if I had a take on the SGP for the late Friday game. He is eleven years old. I asked him what SGP stood for. He looked at me the way I used to look at Coach DiMaggio when Coach DiMaggio asked me what a microwave was.
SGP, it turns out, means same-game parlay. It means you bet on six things to happen in one basketball game and if all six of them happen you win forty-three dollars and if five of them happen you win a coupon for a free hot dog at a convenience store that does not exist in our state. Ethan explained this to me with the patience of a man explaining a will to a senile uncle. I told him to go play outside. He told me it was raining. I told him that didn’t used to matter.
The Sweet 16 starts tonight. Eight basketball games over two evenings. There was a time in this country when that sentence was the whole pitch. You did not need to add anything to it. You said “Sweet 16 starts tonight” and a grown man canceled a dentist appointment. Now the sentence comes pre-loaded with seventeen ancillary products, and somewhere underneath all of them, if you dig, there is supposedly some basketball.
I watched four minutes of the pregame show on Wednesday for the play-in. I am not making this number up. In four minutes I heard the word “parlay” five times, the word “props” three times, the phrase “live look-in at our betting desk” twice, and the name of one actual basketball player exactly once, and only because he had pulled a hamstring and they wanted to update the spread. There was a guy in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen of odds. I have seen friendlier hostage videos.
Ray Kowalczyk called me about it. Ray watches every minute of the tournament because Ray is a sick man and we love him for it. Ray said the sideline reporter on the late game Sunday went up to a kid who had just hit a game-winning three with two seconds left and asked him, and I want you to read this slowly, “Did you know you also cashed the over?” The kid is nineteen. He had just made the biggest shot of his life. The first adult who spoke to him afterward congratulated him on a gambling outcome. Ray said the kid handled it well. Ray said this with the weariness of a man whose entire weekend has been a slow march into a Caesars Sportsbook commercial.
Now look. I am not above admitting that the basketball, when you can find it, is good. The basketball is mostly the same as it always was, which is twenty kids running very hard at each other for forty minutes because they want it more than the other twenty kids. I watched a kid from a school I’d never heard of go for thirty-one points the other night and bow his head during the timeout because his coach was yelling at him about a defensive rotation, and I thought, well, there it is, that’s the thing, that’s still the thing, they have not figured out how to monetize that one specific thing yet, give them a year.
My old neighbor Petey Corrigan came over last night to watch the late game with me. Petey is seventy-six and his eyes aren’t great anymore so he sits about four feet from the screen with a notepad and writes down each player’s name as they check in. He does this every game. He has done it since 1971. At one point CBS cut to a graphic showing the live odds on the next made free throw and Petey turned to me and said, “Duke, what does it mean that the free throw is minus one-eighty?” and I told him it meant we were finished, the country was finished, get your affairs in order. Petey wrote that down too. He thought I was being literal.
The games tip at seven. I will watch them. I will mute the pregame and the halftime and any segment with a man in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen. I will write down the names of the kids myself, in pen, on a legal pad, the way Coach DiMaggio taught me, because somebody has to. Denise is bringing a casserole. She says it’s from a podcast.