Basketball of any variety has never been a top priority on my list of sports to watch live or on television.
If playing with the remote control I stumble onto a National Basketball Association game that is tight and has two minutes to go, I might hang in for the next 15 or 20 minutes to catch the ending which inevitably takes that long.
As a player, I spent one season on my high school team in my final year scoring an incredible two points, which, to my credit, would have been three. But they hadn’t yet introduced the three-point shot at that time.
So it came as quite a shock last month when I joined 15 other friends for a golf junket to Palm Springs, California, landing the same day the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament was starting.
South of the border this is the biggest thing, to use the oldest term in the world, since sliced bread. I could not believe how a basketball tournament could turn a nation upside down. Sportscasts on television listed everything else in sport as an afterthought.
Everything was March Madness, March Madness and more March Madness.
The newspaper had a front-page picture of a chosen game with 15 or 20 stories, plus more pictures on the sports pages.
Upsets, and there were several, were the talk of the town. Basketball was on the television sets at every golf course we played at, at least until the Sunday when Tiger Woods looked like he was on the way to another PGA victory only to be forced to wait until Monday because of a thunderstorm in Florida.
They offered feature stories on college basketball players most Canadians would never have heard of, including some of the 27 Canadians who were actually a part of any of the 64 teams that made the tournament start.
Now, I will admit that many years ago I happened to be in Las Vegas by chance on the night of the March Madness final. That was a Monday night and the sportsbook in our hotel was jammed with basketball fans. They had something like 25 television sets and 24 were on the NCAA final the other devoted to horse racing because there was one guy there to bet the ponies and couldn’t care less about the cage action.
That part I can understand because it was the final. They had started with 64 squads and pared it down to just the final two.
But this time the excitement seemed just as high and they hadn’t even started the trek to the final which, incidentally, comes up this Monday (April 8) in Atlanta. That I can’t figure out because up here, outside of Toronto and the avid Raptor fans, basketball is just not that large in the interest department. At least in my mind it’s not.
I will say, though, that for the four days we played golf, television and newspapers gave the basketball tournament more coverage than Calgary radio station The Fan 960 gives the Calgary Flames. Hold it, we can’t go that far. That station’s coverage of that hockey club is little more than an embarrassment to the radio game.
But Palm Springs media outlets did offer extensive coverage of the basketball affair only to be knocked off the front page of the sports section on the Monday because of a huge fight that followed a NASCAR race the day before.
And there, again, the coverage of stock car racing, well motor racing in general, is much greater than we get north of the border. But I think that sport deserves the greater coverage while I wouldn’t put basketball on the same page, if you will.
Anyway, the purpose of the trip south was a golf junket which saw the group play four different layouts. Mind you, the Palm Springs area boasts more than 130 courses so we only got to see a small portion of what is offered in that area.
However, two of the tracks I would highly recommend if you happen to be in that part of the United States and like to be like me and break 100 on occasion. Eagle Falls is an immaculate layout and only 6,140 yards from the white tees, and I think was the most fun of them all. At a resort called Desert Willow, they have 36 holes of municipally-owned golf that looks more like a private layout. I preferred the Mountain View 18 to the one they call Firecliff. But to be honest, golf is not cheap in the Palm Springs region. However, it was nice to take a break in the hot sun.
Today’s joke is about the RCMP officer who stops an elderly man and says; “Do you know you were speeding?” The older man replies: “Yes, but I had to get there before I forgot where I was going.”
