March Madness, #NotNCAAProperty, the meaning of March 19, and subbing out ‘Hoosiers’ for ‘Mighty Macs’: From My Pandemic Sports Diary
Welcome to neatefreaksports, my soft return to sportswriting that will trade in some hard truths. Let's start off with why I can no longer watch March Madness.
Be it resolved that this date on the calendar should be when sports fans show out to support social justice reforms in college basketball. If you just wanna watch the first weekend of March Madness, then you do you, by all means.
Please know, though, that like a post player who has a great box-out butt, you can use what you have to create space to acknowledge that this is when the iron is hottest for having eyeballs on a sport whose inequities and financial effed-up-edness have permuted in more ways than there are possible outcomes for a 68-team single-elimination tournament.
It is also an anniversary of two major triumphs by BIPOC and female ballers, who are so often the first to call BS on North America’s shamateurism-industrial complex1. Both of those moments have been made into movies — not necessarily good ones, but ones that carry less dog-whistling than the other classic Hollywood celluloid homily to the hardwood — so that makes it appropriate for this forum.
As a preface, whether ‘Division 1 athletes in profit-centre sports’ such as basketball and football should receive a salary is very, very complicated. Here is an explainer that plays it down the middle.
I fall more toward the ‘pro’ side of the argument for the simple reality that the athletes are expected to be pros. That ‘they get free tuition!!’ bargument2 that sadly still circulates in the comment sections ignores that they are actually pay for an oft-times subpar education with their time and effort. Blessed be anyone who can be blissfully unaware that teams exert control by steering players to certain academic programs — Coach, what’s my major? — at a life-stage that should be about breaking out of one’s bubble. Or that team activities are planned down to the minute and it is all OK because of an accounting trick called ‘countable hours,’ which effectively means a player on the University of Michigan men’s hockey team is not being an athlete when he is chilling in a hotel room in Alaska before an away game, thousands of kilometres from campus, instead of being on campus.3
That is why there is a #NotNCAAProperty movement started by the National College Players Association. That is why, if you like the college sports product as an alternative or a break from the pro leagues, you should signal-boost active players’ push to redistribute the revenue to the athletes who have the emotional and sweat equity in making the games, instead of digging in with tired, discredited arguments. Appeal to the better angels of your friends’ nature that, as Rutgers Scarlet Knights guard Geo Baker tweeted (via Deadspin).“The NCAA OWNS my name image and likeness. Someone on music scholarship can profit from an album. Someone on academic scholarship can have a tutor service. For ppl who say ‘an athletic scholarship is enough.’ Anything less than equal rights is never enough.” (emphasis mine)
The finances are effed. Big-time coaches make seven-figure salaries to essentially be CEOs of a less than $100-million company; assistant coaches get paid in the mid-high five figures, and there is an administrative department also making six-figure salaries to make sure every penny is spent. That is the real team. And the players are supposed to be content with being on scholarship.
Although it is an old movie, but I am imagining there would be nods if you showed the players the scene in North Dallas Forty (1979) where Phil Elliott / Nick Nolte says, “They’re the team! We’re the equipment!”
How much does that 1970s USSR-style bureaucracy bloat actually hurt having a college sports culture that looks like the country? What growth sports is the NCAA actually missing out? Believe it or not, hockey bros and bro-ettes and hockey fans are getting the shaft.
Research for an upcoming SportsLit podcast episode with an author who played club hockey in the American Collegiate Hockey Association points up how hockey gets crowded out by King Football. Only nine of the 61 Power Five football schools also sponsor a Division 1 men’s hockey team. Only two are outside of the midwest.
The guest played club hockey at Pac-12 member school. In 2019, the last year unaffected by COVID19, the athletic department had US$136 million in revenue, including $84 million from football. It ran at a deficit. It turns out 8-5 football seasons really don’t pay for themselves, to quote from a late ’90s Simpsons episode.4 A few years earlier, as our guest related, the club hockey team had $0 in its chequing account.
What will be the happier medium? And will there ever be a rainbow? Well, probably not.
And yes, I have a podcast. It is called SportsLit, and it has been around for 3½ years.
Till then, all roads lead to any self-respective progressive applying active critical distancing to the men’s basketball tournament. You do you, of course. There are various hate-watches one could get behind, but let’s save that for the beginning of the end.
The days of reckoning are coming up tout suite for the NCAA. It is a structure built on an intersecting code of shamateurism, systemic racism and systemic sexism, and all of those isms are falling fast. Perhaps that is just what happens every half-century or so when the generation moving into middle age is getting ticked off and there is activism afoot in young adults.
The clock is ticking on shamateurism, which is a form of systemic racism since, “Black athletes stand at the intersection of risk and profit.” Six states, with California batting leadoff as it so often does, have already passed NIL (name, image and likeness laws). Twenty-nine of the other 44 U.S. states have NIL legislation under consideration, although it will surely be diluted by lobbyists, easily bought off legislators and nit-picky court challenges by the NCAA. But it is happening. The time is at hand where progressives and corporatized liberals are making better memes, as Kalle Lasn5 predicted around 2001.
(And how out of touch do we look in Canada that nine provinces gave the Canadian Hockey League an exemption from paying minimum wage to their student-athletes, whom at last report, are not enrolled at the University of London Knights? Please do not take that to mean the Ontario Hockey League should not get some financial boost from the government to restart after COVID19. As a private-enterprise sports league, the OHL should just have to wait in line with everyone else.)Stray thought, but the political climate in the Excited States, and Canada, might be moving toward reforms in Big Sport being a ‘both sides of the aisle’ issue. Hear me out. It is an issue that fits with the politics and perspective of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and any number of Democrats.
The rub is that, well, the right runs on emotional barguments these days, as a look-over-here to take attention away from the truth that they’re for the oligarchy and the white fragility. But emotion is hard to sustain, and eventually people move on when they realize all their whining and sharing of weaksauce memes will not bring about the end of Cardi B’s career.
Eventually, congressional and statehouse Republicans in the States will need a winning issue of some substance to attach themselves to that makes it look like they actually care about the challenges of the little guy non-billionaire. Supporting NIL laws and fighting for athletes is a way to do it, just saying. And then sneak riders about public education reform and free college into the bills.Far from least, the first generation of activist-athletes with the world at their fingertips knows how to get ’er done. Sportswomen are very fluent at using their platform to push for equity in compensation and work conditions. For instance, on Thursday, Sedona Prince, a centre for the Oregon Ducks, tweeted a TikTok vid showing the gross inequities in the weight room facilities for women’s basketball players inside one of the NCAA’s bubbles compared to their male counterparts. The women got one rack of free weights, and it was not for a lack of space at the arena, as a quick pan by Prince with her phone indicated. As I write, it is trending on Twitter.
And it turns out the male basketball players in get the better COVID19 tests. Fairly sure a virus does not care about gender.
One who had not heard of Prince prior to today is that she is a named plaintiff in a name-image-likeness class-action lawsuit against the NCAA. Or how Prince came to transfer into the U of Oregon in the first place. She left the University of Texas at Austin after it absolutely botched the medical care during her recovery after she broke a fibula and tibia while playing for the nation’s under-18 team.
If you do not have time to click through to Dan Murphy’s article a ESPN.com, Texas rushed the recovery of an 18-year-old from a major injury with “significant impact loading” before those two leg bones had healed. Which led to Prince needing an operation. Which led to a reaction to antibiotics that came perilously close to Prince suffering permanent organ damage. And, of course, Texas tried to stick Prince with the medical bill, and of course, her family found out the Texas incarnation of those easily bought off legislators have made it “nearly impossible to successfully sue a public university.”
(Pay attention to that, since Ontario’s government, which is really just the Doug Ford Fantasy Camp for property developers from Vaughan, has also stealthily worked to make it impossible to successfully sue our institutions. Basically, first ministers in Canada often get good, albeit hard to sell, ideas from California, and inevitably take really really terrible ones from Texas.)
Incidentally, that ESPN.com feature story on Sedona Prince and her parents’ ordeal was found through her bio on the Oregon Ducks website. It might not stay up there much longer, though.
Point being, the athletes in university are making change and asking all the right questions. They have grown up digital and have the tools and techniques in a way that Generation X did not. In Canada, the BIPOC Varsity Association former by student-athletes and sports alumni at the University of Toronto is doing great work at effecting institutional change that will lead to U Sports teams having a profile that looks more like Canada in the 2020s.
So yeah, things are changing. What is a woke-ish hoophead to do at this time of year? You can always root for watching the world burn, although the chance of that is lesser this year since Duke is not in the men’s tournament. Or just follow the women’s tournament in allyship and protest.
Gonzaga running the table to complete the first unbeaten men’s season since 1976 Indiana would be great since Trump lickspittle Bobby Knight’s head would explode over his team losing its historic distinction. (Let’s get out in front of any attempt to apply an asterisk: even with COVID19 cancellations, if the Zags go to the final, they’ll still end up playing 32 games, one more than those ’75-76 Hoosiers, who finished 31-0. Gonzaga enters the tournament at 26-0 and it takes six wins to win it all.) Of course, if Gonzaga fails to win, we can still call them soft. Fallbacks!
Also, an angel gets their wings every time a team from a Power Five football school is clipped by a midmajor, unless it is an Ontario-adjacent traditional power such as Michigan or Syracuse.
Hey, I make the rules here.
Now for the 90-degree turn …
The initial spur for this segue was to write about three based-on-a-true-story basketball movies. Two of them are mediocre but watchable and connect to this date. The other is the OG March Madness get-hype movie.
The latter, of course, is Hoosiers (1986). There are a lot of “Hoosiers overrated” takes. (This one from 2017 is hook-it-to-my-veins worthy.) It is a white-fragility movie and a paean to the 1950s that Ronald Reagan sold Americans on in the 1980s while he was tripling the national debt and ignoring the AIDS epidemic, so yeah, it is time to let that one go.
It so happens that it was on March 19, 1966 that the Texas Western Miners, using only their seven Black players, defeated the all-white Kentucky Wildcats to win the national championship. A Hollywood version of that team’s story was told in the Disney film Glory Road (2006), which starred Josh Lucas and Derek Luke.
Six years to the day, the Immaculata Mighty Macs won the first women’s college basketball championship. A version of that story was told in Mighty Macs (2011), starring Carla Gugino as the team’s hall of fame coach Cathy Rush, with Marley Shelton, Ellen Burstyn, David Boreanz and Katie Hayek in the lead supporting roles.
Glory Road has its purpose. At the time of its release in ’06, the ’66 Texas Western Miners were not in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a team. After the movie, that honour came the following year, although it was too late for Bobby Joe Hill, the Texas Western point guard. Hill died in 2002.
As a well-read fan, I felt recused from seeing Glory Road. The Disneyifying of the sports movie genre is a rant all on its own. Also, upon the movie’s release, there were concerns about how fast and loose Hollywood played with the facts. It is OK to change some game details for pacing or drama. But the movie had Texas Western make a second-half comeback to defeat Kentucky. In truth, TWU had a firm grasp on the game after Hill stole the ball twice in a row for uncontested layups. Depictions of racist backlash by fans of rival teams were also invented, giving gaslighters everywhere an easy out.
Texas Western was a familiar text thanks to two respective pieces collected in The Best American Sports Writing series during the 1990s. The first, “Glory Denied,” by Bryan Woolley, ran in the Dallas Morning News in 1991, delineated how the hate that Texas Western players and coach Don Haskins faced really started after they won. Re-reading the now 30-year-old newspaper feature during the coronavirus pandemic stirs the echoes of the response after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008. Many were convinced it would never happen. Then it did, and the dog-whistles and the smears and the erasure started. Same as it always does, so keep your eyes peeled for it.
In 1998, Dan Wetzel wrote a Haskins profile (“Not Your Ordinary Bear”) for the Basketball Times. Wetzel, if memory serves, turned that into the book which was the basis for the movie.
The Immaculata Mighty Macs story is less well-known, since that is still the way with women’s sports. But the 50th anniversary of both their triumph and the passage of Title IX is on deck for 2022. Watching Mighty Macs (available on the free-with-ads streamer Tubi if you’re trying to wean off Amazon) is one way to get out front of the flood of retrospectives and say you knew the bones of the Immaculata and Cathy Rush before it was cool for anyone other than people who were there to know about it.
Immaculata was a nearly bankrupt private all-women’s college when Rush, who was working on a master’s degree while newly married to NBA ref Ed Rush, took on the thankless job of coaching a no-budget team at a broke-as-a-joke school whose gym had burned down. They played in skirts. Yet they won the national title as the No. 15 seed in a 16-team tournament, after flying standby just to get there. The Macs also had to play the quarterfinal and semifinal on the same day.
The movie can go hardship to hardship with the real thing. The shooting schedule, according to a 2011 Associated Press article, had to be worked around Katie Hayek, who portrayed the main basketball-player role, receiving chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The late-aughts recession also put a drag on director-writer Tim Chambers’ ability to find a distributor. His long game also meant maintaining a G rating, presumably in order to maintain family-friendliness. (A review from the late Roger Ebert noted: “When was the last time you saw a G-rated sports film?”)
Knowing what it took to get a movie made on $7 million into theatres and on to streaming platforms does not make the movie good, of course. Mighty Macs is formulaic, and the character development among the players is nonexistent. There is also one scene where Rush / Gugino goes farther over the line than any coach caught by the documentarians who make Last Chance U, having her players practise defensive footwork in a culvert during a heavy rain after a desultory defeat. That would be seen as abuse nowadays, even if the players did respond to the tough love.
Then again, Remember the Titans and Friday Night Lights used the make-’em-run-in-the-rain TV/movie trope, too.
Nevertheless, Mighty Macs got me. It has at least three genuinely affecting moments. Carla Gugino puts a sense of purpose into 1971-72 Cathy Rush that reaffirms that everyone wins with feminism. There are still many among us, present company included as I type this alone in a one-bedroom apartment, that equal participation is still subject to negotiation, and women often have to pay the price first in hard times. The Rush in the movie is a badass disruptor who has decided this is going to be non-negotiable and she gets her way.6
Impressionable people need to see that until it sinks in, the way anything in sports is practised over and over. It might not have been the case that Mighty Macs seemed dated by the time it came out in 2011. Their story might have just been better suited to an eight- to 10-part limited series. Audience tastes probably would have been more receptive, and it could have more nuanced, a Derry Girls with press-breaking drills and Philly accents.
That is just a thought, and it is one of a thousand and one that will appear in this space as we battle back from Big Rona and let the powers that be know that we want sustainable, socially responsible sports, with a cooled spectacle. (Sarcastic inner monologue: yeah, and I want the Vikings to win a Super Bowl in my lifetime.)
In any event, it seems like the NCAA is on the run, and it long past about damn time.
There probably should have been an introductory post that to address FAQs such as, “Who are you?”, “Why do you care so much about obscure sports topics?” and “what does this have to do with who I have going to the Final Four?”
All of that will be addressed soonly. For now, this is a sports newsletter for someone who has a broken brain that is tuned to nothing but the state of our sports and society. It will get better.
And succincter too? That would be good, eh.
There are going to be a lot of made-up names for institutions and terrible people. Get used to it.
“Bargument” — a word for the kind of one-liner people say around a bar that might end the discussion even though it relies on circular logic.
Read your John U. Bacon, fam.
I can hear most people who know me now: “How often will you do this?”
The publisher of AdBusters.
So to answer a Billy Madison-referencing question no one asked, “Who do you find hotter, late-aughts Carla Gugino or mid-1980s Gene Hackman?”