An Incompleat Taxonomy of March Madess Characters

Every single year I watch less and less college basketball and know fewer and fewer players on any of the teams and think I could not possibly care about the NCAA Tournament and then I watch a few minutes of a game and get hopelessly sucked in because a team I’ve never heard of whose mascot is a disconcertingly accurate marmot or cartoon rendering of a blacksmith whose plush face has features a horrifying rictus has an ungainly 6’9” center with a wispy mustache wearing what appear to be prescription shoes who is somehow getting buckets off an NBA lottery pick and I am back in. 

A delightful air of mystery surrounds the tournament. The sport is simply too large and unwieldy for anyone to master, and with one and dones and players transferring it is hard to keep track of who is even on the big teams anymore to the point where the eight foot person on Purdue has a different name every year. The tournament thrives from its veil of ignorance; there are entire schools no one has heard of and players no one knows that arrive fully formed at the tournament with their whole thing that they have spent the last five months workshopping in dusty conferences at the margins of their sport until they are on the court desperately trying to beat a name brand school before blowing three consecutive attempts to inbound a ball.

The NCAA Tournament is where the weaknesses of college basketball as a product– that it is generally very bad basketball when compared to the professional leagues– work exactly in its favor because no one cares what the games look like or how they are played as long as they are close and there are upsets. Teams, even those with future NBA stars, melt down. They miss shots. They commit atrocious fouls. There are probably cumulative hours of NCAA tournament play each year where someone who is months away from starting dental school is ineptly throwing James Harden step-back threes in the general direction of the rim and instead of being aesthetically revolting it is exciting because the opposing team has a 5’9” point guard who is wearing what appears to be a giveaway t-shirt underneath his jersey and refuses to miss. I understand the NBA people who, even putting aside the monstrous elements of college sports, hate college basketball on an aesthetic level, but in the tournament it is precisely the maddening and inexpert play that allows strange teams filled with unorthodox zones or unexpectedly lumpy players to rub elbows with the glamor teams and makes everything so entertaining.

The ephemeral and unexpected nature of the NCAA Tournament means that we will see players appear that we have never heard of and become legends for several hours or maybe a week or two before fading back to obscurity. The top of the line March Madness guy is a large, unexpectedly doughy oaf who is the best player on the team, somehow throwing dazzling passes out of the post or throwing up preposterous layups and hook shots. The second best is a very short player who catches fire from three. The next best is a freaskishly tall player; there’s at least one in every tournament, and since the NBA has stylistically negated gigantic, earthbound centers, it’s always nice to see a reminder that being enormously tall is an advantage in basketball as this guy lopes around and drops the ball into the basket or swats opposing shots into the stratosphere while only sort-of jumping. It is also very important for a successful NCAA tournament to have players who favor atrocious semi-formed facial hair, unnecessary accessories, or unorthodox hair styles destroy a big-time basketball program while the opposing coach writhes in agony.

While novelty powers the NCAA Tournament Experience, there is also a comfort in familiarity. Though college basketball’s overwhelming discourse revolves around movement-- top players leaving for the NBA after a year and the constant churn of transfers-- any moment of continuity helps, so a lesser type of enjoyable NCAA tournament character are players on perennial tournament teams that come back year after year until they appear as the most wizened and grizzled 24 year-olds on the planet. There are also the coaches who appear every year with the same rat-based yell faces, the same hoarse screams, the same cronenbergian combovers straining over undulating head veins. Generally if you recognize a college basketball coach, there is no joy greater than seeing him tossed from the tournament like rotting produce.

The reassuring sight of Brad Underwood's combover that looks like a 
tarantula that is grasping onto a half pound of ground chuck

There’s a sports radio cliche that everyone roots for upsets the first week and then wants to see the big programs after that, but that is not true for me. I want to see the upsets in the first rounds and then not much else because the schools I’ve never heard of coming out of nowhere and the various unexpected basketball weirdos they produce forms the only necessary part of the tournament. The whole event’s appeal for me is that it is a few days of chaotically delightful sports nonsense that happen on a weekday while you are probably supposed to be doing something else. After that, it’s just college basketball.

THE CUBS INTRODUCE THE ARTFUL MONEY-TANK

The MLB owners ended their lockout only after the rounds of fruitless late-night negotiations, the secret last-minute provisions, the endless shots of baseball players in casual conference-ware walking determinedly across parking lots, and the universal derision aimed towards commissioner Rob Manfred for being Rob Manfred. After the bitter labor fight, Manfred and the league decided to placate angry fans with the only gesture that can delight twenty-first century sports consumers: a relentless flurry of Big Time Deals. Within several days, teams began a whirlwind of signings, trades, and player movement that have come to overshadow sports themselves and by now have their own rituals: the Auspicious Reporter Tweet, the Eyeballs Emoji, the Dribbling of Incomplete Information, the Let’s Go Bicep Emoji Tweet, and finally the Jersey Over Dress Shirt Press Conference. I’m not going to pretend I’m above this as I monitor the rumors and hoot and holler with everyone else because for some reason sports transactions hit an incredibly satisfying part of the brain even if the hit is brief and ephemeral and it is clear that the Cubs are going to continue to stink.

At the very last second before the lockout, the Cubs locked up pitcher Marcus Stroman to add to their beknighted rotation. Then they emerged from seemingly nowhere to sign the star Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki. Suzuki, one of the top hitters in NPB for the Hiroshima Carp, inexplicably eschewed a number of contending teams to sign with the Cubs. He is the best possible kind of signing for this Cubs team because he arrives as a mystery who can exist as pure possibility. There are no MLB stats to quibble with that always come with worrying indicators that any success is bound to regress to the mean and no emotional baggage from being annoyed with him on the other teams; Suzuki currently exists only as insane NPB stats and videos of him hitting exquisite bombs and the hope that somehow he could become a superstar to replace the World Series heroes that the team so cynically jettisoned at last year’s trade deadline.

Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki is a fan of Mike Trout 😂 💙

(via @Cubs) pic.twitter.com/wLTMs1Pjee

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) March 20, 2022

The big splashy moves that the Cubs made don’t make any sense because if the Cubs wanted popular, expensive, and skilled players they could have simply re-signed even one of their World Series stars. Instead, the Cubs appeared to be poised to rebuild, to gleefully throw themselves into the shitter and hope that a few of the teenagers they traded for will be good in several years while charging major league prices to watch some minor league flotsam. Other than those two signings and a few cromulent major league veterans to completely avoid embarrassing themselves, this is what they are doing. Unless it turns out that the 30 year old guys who unexpectedly had a few hot months are actually somehow good now, that Frank Schwindel is somehow the second coming of Miguel Cabrera, and that all of their underperforming holdovers all of a sudden start playing the best baseball of their lives, the Cubs will be a very bad baseball team. But if the Cubs are tanking, at least they put a little bit of art into it, throwing us a couple of bones with Stroman and Suzuki while watch Baez in Detroit, Rizzo in New York, and Bryant in some sort of phantom zone. Until those jerks trade Willson Contreras.

A TOAST

Matt Berry has the gift of a sonorous baritone voice that he wields expertly to make himself sound like a spectacular dipshit. I first became aware of him watching grainy downloaded bootlegs of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a British show about a schlocky horror novelist whose 1980s supernatural hospital drama has been resurrected and intercut with interviews with Marenghi and the cast and featuring deliberately awful acting, clumsy effects, and atrocious dialogue. Berry played Dr. Lucien Sanchez, the sidekick for Marenghi’s character Rick Dagless M.D., whose job is to gravely ask questions and fight supernatural forces with karate.

Berry also had a wonderfully strange sketch show called Snuff Box and is great on the vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows, but my favorite thing he has done is the bizarre theater comedy Toast of London. He plays boorish actor Stephen Toast, who desperately attempts to work in a surreal London thespian world of deranged plays often opposite his sworn nemesis Ray “Bloody” Purchase, nonsensical voice-over roles helmed by sneering producers one of whom is named “Clem Fandango,” the concept of “high winds acting,” and various directors all played the same guy who at inevitably threaten to murder him. But Toast of London is not really about anything more than an excuse for Berry to pronounce words in a ridiculous way and for people to have silly names. It is the type of show where a joke is that Purchase greets Toast by saying “well well well” to him with the camera dramatically zooming in on every “well.” 

It is rare that a camera move gag lands so well, but one of my favorites in recent years comes from the master of the camera zoom joke Hong Sang-Soo.  The quick pan and zoom to the woman in the car looking miserable after her friend angrily calls her stingy and storms off tearily during the road trip in the movie Night and Day is funny even without the context of the pathetic quasi-love triangle. 

Seven years after the last episode of Toast of London, Toast has returned in Toast of Tinseltown, where Stephen Toast has come to Los Angeles in the belief that he has a role in a Star Wars film. The Hollywood setting gives him a new tableau of strange characters– the first thing you see is in Toast of Tinseltown is Larry David playing a JFK conspiracy theorist who is teaming up with Clem Fandango to berate Toast who is incredulously narrating his audiobook. But Toast of Tinseltown does not go Hollywood. The show was filmed in London and (with some exceptions, including a mysterious and annoying roommate played by Fred Armisen and his housekeeper who is not all she appears to be played by Rashida Jones) largely features British actors doing variously successful American accents. This creates an even more surreal Hollywood artificially created on British sound stages that feels of a piece with the earlier incarnation’s grotesque London.  Hollywood is so fetid and filled with weirdos that even with Toast's baseline befuddlement and malevolence, he is occasionally the voice of reason.

The change of scenery has thrown Toast of Tinseltown off a little bit, unmooring Toast from his usual haunts for the most part and adding in awkward Zoom cameos, but the basic Toast rhythm of him finding himself in a terrible acting job filled with deranged people with ridiculous names and then making it worse by being an unaware, malicious (Berry would probably pronounce this mal ISS eee us) buffoon, and that is exactly what I needed.  There is a hospital drama where Toast is paired with an international pop star who breaks into an unexpectedly bawdy rap, there is an almost hallucinatory trip to the desert, there is a dream-like meeting with a Hollywood legend in black and white, there is (of course) Clem Fandango adapting to a California lifestyle seemingly engineered to irritate Toast.  

Toast of Tinseltown came out early this year in Britain.  I have no idea when or if it will be available to watch legally here.  I managed to track down a low-quality bootleg version because I could not wait, just like how I had watched the original series on a youtube feed where the entire thing had been shrunk to a small corner of the screen to avoid detection.  Though it's not ideal, there's a certain charm to watching it this way, almost reminiscent of the effort it took to track down weird cult stuff before the internet trained us to expect everything to be easily available instantly and all of the time.  Hopefully, it will be available soon on one of the streaming platforms so I can see what happens when on the version I saw the video cut out and just showed a blurry, red Toast head superimposed over the screen, but perhaps that is the way it is meant to be seen.

Bulls Fans Have Been Waiting Nearly 25 Years For A Guy To Do Turnaround Jumpers Again

Every time DeMar DeRozan goes to the line in the United Center, he is  serenaded with MVP chants.  Certain NBA numbers-mongers would say that he has virtually no chance of winning, towered over by several big men who are all having better seasons.  But DeRozan, who has been brilliantly carrying a Bulls team hobbled not only by the franchises's traditional suite of knee injuries but also missing two players who broke their wrists after getting clotheslined at the rim, has cemented himself as a Chicago sports legend by getting as close to replicating Michael Jordan's offensive game as humanly possible at the exact moment that the city has been thrown into a Jordan-crazed reverie by a ten hour documentary where ESPN let him swill tequila and say fuck at his myriad basketball enemies when they are shown to him on an iPad.

The threes-and-layups architecture has taken over the NBA and I can't complain too much; the style of play and the rules changes that make it illegal to bludgeon players with their own ripped-off arms has generally made for a more entertaining product than the hideous trench basketball of the Jordan heyday.  But it is still nice to a player absolutely punish an opposing team with the fadeaway jumpshot, a technique that DeRozan has been stubbornly clinging to as the master of a forgotten art.

For me, the midrange turnaround jumper was The Shot.  It was how Jordan amassed his points, by posting up an opponent sixteen feet from the basket and shooting over him over and over and then barraging him with a variety of unhinged insults.  Every once in awhile, a player would emerge as a Jordan Stopper or, even worse, a Self-Proclaimed Jordan Stopper, and more often than not, he would find himself on the losing end and then have to listen to Jordan derisively laugh at him while wearing the largest suit ever created for a 6' 6" person. 

It was not Gerald Wilkins's fault that the media labeled him the "Jordan Stopper" but I can't imagine a worse fate for an otherwise anodyne 1990s NBA player than becoming a Named Jordan Adversary

The Shot became the calling card for so many star NBA scorers as a proving ground.  I used to gauge whether a college wing could get off The Shot as a good barometer of whether they could get off enough space to be able to score in the NBA, even though I have no idea what I'm talking about but it seemed like a good sports opinion to lay on someone unfortunate enough to be drinking beer near me during an NCAA tournament game before they were forced to detonate a smoke bomb and vanish to a stool next to a less annoying person. 

I believe that there are two reasons that the midrange turnaround jumper became less prominent.  One was the rise of basketball analysis on the internet which included actual spreadsheet perverts demonstrating how inefficient the shot is and then a bunch of people who half-understood it but wanted to sound smart also parroting this line by admonishing midrange shooting without nuance and also constantly shoehorning in inescapable references to Game of Thrones, a television show I have never seen but could probably credibly explain the entire plot of because I wanted to read about whether Jimmy Butler was getting All Star Momentum in 2013.  The other reason is that, let's face it, the turnaround jump shot in the hands of anyone short of an actual master can be a hideous abomination, and there were years in the early 2000s of Headband Guys fruitlessly bricking isolation eighteen-footers at each other for minutes at a time while getting sourly scolded by Hubie Brown.

The Bulls have had several very good players since Jordan, but DeRozan is their first star player who has managed to ascend to the aesthetic of his game.  He is doing this with a hail of fadeaway jumpers, and in the fourth quarter he is throwing them in like the basket is magnetized.  At the end of a game, teams are sending two or three guys directly at him and he is still cruising to his spot just off the free throw line where everyone in the building knows he is going to, throwing up three or four pump fakes (this is a unique DeRozan signature), and baiting an opponent into bumping into him while he hits another shot.  It does not matter.  He doesn't miss.  He is on a scoring streak matched in a Bulls uniform only by Michael Jordan.

DEMAR DEROZAN 🥶

CLUTCH ONCE MORE pic.twitter.com/6CJ2scs7U4

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) February 25, 2022

The Bulls didn't need a reasonable Jordan facsimile to be fun again.  They needed good players and for the front office to be made up of normal people and not weird head guys constantly accused of doing John Le Carré-style espionage.  Bulls fans would be delighted with DeRozan having his marvelous season with a more modern array of moves.  But for middle-aged Bulls fans, seeing a player dragging the Bulls back to relevance whose game is a Proustian sense memory of the team's annual humiliation of Patrick Riley is an added delight.

THESE MOTHERFUCKERS LOVE CANCELING BASEBALL GAMES

It's been clear for the past few years that there was not going to be a full Major League season in 2022 as the owners became increasingly brazen in their anti-baseball agenda and the players signaled their growing disgust with barren free agency periods and multiple franchises refusing to field competitive teams.  But the way it ended, with a smirking Manfred making the Animal House oh boy is this great face at reporters while gleefully wiping out the first week of the season, made for a grim coda to the week of parody negotiations by owners who came down to Florida specifically for the purpose of canceling games.

Rob Manfred's job is to go out in front of reporters and tell them how the players' recalcitrance is preventing games from being played even though the lockout is a unilateral imposition from league ownership that they could lift at any time.  Manfred is not even a fun villain.  He exudes the tedious menace of a middle manager.  Somehow he is boring and humorless enough to submarine whatever point he is making without ever ascending to the stiff dignity of a person it would be funny to see Rodney Dangerfield shove in a pool.  And yet, Manfred needs to be out there because the alternative is for baseball to put one of the owners, a conglomerate of blotchy oligarchs who consist exclusively of financial criminals and sons, out there to weep about how paying the Collective Bargaining Tax would leave them destitute or by gnawing on something.  The only owner who seems to have any sort of public personality is a slimy hedge fund guy implicated in insider trading who openly feuds with his team's players on twitter for Doing Thumbs.  

All sports commissioners share the important job of having fans call them a piece of shit while the team owners berate the staff of their yachts but the disconcerting thing about Manfred is that he seems to enjoy it.  Unlike Roger Goodell, who carries himself like an embattled governor and loves to do Investigations and talk about Resiliency In These Uncertain Times or Adam Silver whose role seems to be to try to keep team owners from publicly clashing with the NBA's celebrity superstars egregiously enough to affect the league's profits, Manfred seems to exist completely outside the sport.  He seems like he'd be delighted to lock out workers in any industry.  While Goodell imbues the NFL with a ridiculous air of importance as an American institution on par with a government department and Silver sees the NBA as a lucrative television product to sell around the world, Manfred's relationship to baseball seems completely abstract.  He is a dour henchman.

Every time you see this Manfred guy on television it is because he spends 90 percent of his time sourly shitting on baseball or introducing some asinine new rule to fix the game by shaving fifteen seconds off a mound visit.  He says this while his bosses put their games exclusively on regional cable networks that are involved in intricate carriage rights disputes that mean that no one can even watch the games and while they call for increasing the number of playoff teams to an amount that is beyond the number of teams actually trying to field a competitive team.  Maybe baseball is so slow and long that it has always been destined to become a relic of a sport like horse racing, boxing, or even bowling but it sure would be interesting to find out what would happen if it was not controlled by group of people who treat the players, fans, and the sport itself with such contempt.

THE WINTER OLYMPICS SHOULD BE MORE FLAT

The Olympics may be a cesspool of scandal from grasping middlemen but there is one outrage that no one else has the courage to expose and that is that the so-called "Winter Games" disproportionately take place on mountains.  I have done the rigorous research of looking up the 2022 Winter Olympics on Wikipedia ("Bing Dwen Dwen's astronaut-like clothes imply that the Winter Olympics embraces new technologies and create possibilities") and more than half of the events required athletes to fling themselves down mountains or on ramps located on mountains.  This is a preposterous situation.  The Winter Olympics should add more flat events.

As a Midwesterner, I resent the association of winter with bluff people in neoprene suits and goggles jauntily flying down mountains.  Many of us experience winter as an endlessly bleak grayness  where the beauty of fallen snow is almost instantaneously rendered into beige sludge accented by dog piss and where the only thing we can rakishly throw ourselves down is maybe a pile of garbage that someone made into a small hill in a park.  Imagine if more than half of the Summer Olympic events involved athletes barreling down a hill in a soapbox derby car or hurling themselves off of a cliff in one of those extreme sports squirrel suits.  These are not the Mountain Olympics.  I am absolutely not a crank to demand that the IOC think about people who live thousands of miles from the nearest elevated surface and spend months standing on train platforms where slush hits them in the face horizontally while they huddle under one of those ineffectual heaters when they are determining which games to label as "winter."

Sure, the flat regions have ice skating, hockey, curling, cross-country skiing, and cross-country skiing while shooting a gun.  That's enough for you, is what the IOC says while handing the rest of the events off to a bunch of Alpine maniacs who recreate by trying to smash their heads into an ice wall while finishing a course three tenths of a second faster than their opponent with whom they have an inscrutable feud over who gets to be the Bad Boy of Bobsledding.  But I refuse to accept these scraps.  It's time for people form lowlands, flatlands, and basins to come together and demand Competitive Snow Shoveling.

Anyone who has ever lived in any sort snow-prone area has spent a depressingly large part of their life shoveling snow off driveways, sidewalks, and around cars that, when moved, people invariably throw a bunch of old chairs, buckets, tomato cages, religious figurines, etc. in to save their spot in a ritual that every cold city in this country claims is some sort of charming regional practice even though it is an inventible consequence of snow and street parking.  Who would not tune into the Olympics to see which country produces the persons who can claim they are the greatest at shoveling?

Competitive shoveling would work by giving athletes a uniform volume of identical snow to clear in a timed event.  People can compete by themselves, in pairs, and in semi-pairs where only one athlete is shoveling and the other person is yelling at them.  For the first several years, we would be witness the beginnings of the sport where shoveling athletes had not yet figured out the optimal techniques, equipment, and body shape for competitors so the first few years would be the shoveling equivalent of those Van Damme fighting tournaments where a karate guy is fighting either a sumo wrestler or a boxer or a guy who is channeling the fighting spirit of a lemur and rolling around in disconcerting ways.  Sports fans the world over deserve to hear an announcer grimly noting that a shoveler caught up on some ice caused by a tire tread is not going to want to lose valuable tenths of a second there or finding out that the greatest snow shoveler on the planet is a grumpy 54 year-old Estonian or a prodigy from a tropical climate.

It's time to end the domination of the Winter Olympics by dashing snowboarders and lunatic ski jumpers and give people who spend their time trudging through giant piles of snow while saying "dammit" under their breath more space in the Olympic Games by timing how well they can shovel several cubic feet of snow for my entertainment.