Tournament Epitomizes College Sports

The importance of the NCAA men's basketball tournament is apparent from the abundance of alliterative terminology that has, as a result of the festivity's popularity, become familiar jargon to many: March Madness, Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four.

Since the moment Rumeal Robinson's free throws secured a national championship for the Michigan Wolverines in the 1989 title game to the Horatio Alger-like heroics of Valparaiso's Bryce Drew, I've been an ardent disciple of college basketball. As a teenager, I was reduced to faking illness so that I could stay home from school to watch the wall-to-wall coverage of the action. This year I was fortunate enough to acquire tickets to the East Regional Final in Philadelphia.

In truth, my fanaticism for all things college basketball did not blind me to the pragmatic fact that the games played in Philadelphia's First Union Center (known affectionately to denizens of the City That Loves You Back as the "F.U. Center") weren't all that good.

Kentucky and USC played a competitive game, but it wasn't a sparkling example of high-caliber basketball, fraught as it was with turnovers and poor shot selection. Duke, in games against southern California schools UCLA and USC, did not display the overwhelming talent and efficient teamwork in vanquishing its opponents that earned them the highest ranking in America.

Rather than decimating the opposition with an oppressive defense, breathtaking speed, and lethally accurate three-point shooting, Duke dealt with the Bruins and Trojans as an older brother fights a younger one in a family room melee: placing a hand on the little pest's forehead and holding him at a distance while he swings useless roundhouses in the air. Without much excitement, the fight, and likewise Duke's games, ended.

Despite the absence of on-court excitement, the fans at all three games were very deliberate in their enthusiasm. Fans from the hills of Hollywood as well as Tobacco Road flocked to Philly in support of their teams. Kentucky fans hollered incitement feverishly at the young competitors, reliving the days of Adolph Rupp and UCLA alumni who were wide-eyed first-years when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was still Lew Alcindor. Pep band tunes were treated with the hymnal reverence, and suddenly I realized why, despite the lethargy of the games, despite having to briefly pause for acclimation purposes at the loge level before climbing to my last row seats, and despite the unlawful pricing of stadium refreshments, I still enjoy college basketball as much now as I did when I was 14. It's amateur athletics, and clichéd as it may seem, an amateur is literally an agent of love.

Professional athletics is ill. Baseball players are earning salaries in excess of many countries' GNPs. Football players have been embroiled in reviling courtroom exploits. Basketball players just don't care about their profession. It is becoming increasingly difficult for professional athletes in America to assert honestly that, as the NBA marketing department would want us to believe, they "love this game." And this illness is metastasizing: the Olympic Games now include professional athletes, whose behavior, in the cases of the United States Men's Basketball and Hockey teams, has been embarrassingly boorish.

Admittedly, today's student-athletes are becoming less student and more athlete. Arguing that school and sports are of equal importance in a star collegiate athlete's life is problematic, especially when, to take Big East Conference member Notre Dame as an example, games are often played away from South Bend, Ind., at such distant sites as Providence, R.I., and Miami, Fla. Some athletes, such as Duke star Jason Williams, a basketball player of limitless capabilities, are in effect under-paid professionals who are just biding their time before collecting their inevitable windfall.

But the fact still holds that a majority of college basketball players are, in the true etymological sense of the word, amateurs. They love to play the game, and play it for no other reason. And, as acknowledgment of this love, the season-ending tournament is a fitting tribute. College football refuses to admit this fact, and rather awards the championship arbitrarily. The basketball tournament is egalitarian, not because the NCAA falsely believes that all teams are talented enough to reach the finals (though there have been upsets to be sure, it's no surprise that Duke, Michigan State, and Arizona are again in the Final Four), but because it realizes that every player on every roster loves the game equally, and all their childhood dreams culminate in cutting down the nets at a championship game.

The Ivy League should realize this, too. Ivy League athletes are the avatars of amateurism. With little professional prospect combined with especially rigorous academics, one would be hard pressed to find a clearer example of student-athletes who play for the love of the game. In denying athletes the chance to express their passion in a conference tournament, as every other conference in the nation does, the Ivy League is worse than elitist. It is betraying the very spirit of amateurism and smothering the loving dedication of their athletes, and by extension, all its students.