Continuing with the best NCAA Tournament articles from the GMP Sports archives, Yago Colas admits he has a soft spot for the college game, one grounded in the knowledge that the players we’re watching these few weeks in March are not quite yet adults.
Everything that stirs us and causes us to cringe during the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament every year can be explained in this way: adolescents using adolescence to try to overcome adolescence.
A therapist once told me that it’s hard to work with adolescents because normal adolescent behavior closely resembles psychopathology. But adolescence isn’t just a disturbed, and confusing, time of life. It is a confused and confusing idea. Conventional definitions don’t help much either. The consensus is that it begins with the onset of puberty (a biological marker different for every individual) and ends with the age of majority (a legal marker identical for every individual in a given society).
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Everything that stirs us and causes us to cringe during the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament every year can be explained in this way: adolescents using adolescence to try to overcome adolescence.
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Even the roots of the word—the Latin adolescentum meant “growing,” “near maturity” and “youthful”—suggest confusion, and motion in multiple directions at once. And already, if you pick a sequence at random from one of the NCAA men’s games in the past two weeks, you’re likely to come up with illustration of the etymological image of adolescence.
Indeed, it’s a truism among NBA observers that the college game, and this time called March Madness, is a massive orgy of basketball incompetence—something like clearing out the Guggenheim to make space for an exhibition of children’s finger painting and performance art. And so, in a way, it is. The contrast this year seemed especially striking as the conference tournaments and first three rounds of the NCAA’s were taking place against the backdrop of the Miami Heat’s mercilessly full grown demolition of the competition in 27 straight NBA games.
On the other hand, the partisans of college basketball point to that same professional efficiency, emphasizing what they perceive to be its bloodlessness, to champion the cracks and fissures in ability that allow the mad emotions of March to blow throw in fits and spurts like geysers during NCAA tournament games.
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For my part, I think this dichotomous, partisan opposition between the NCAA and the NBA is a premise that actually obscures the deeper things that makes a college game worth watching. It might be because I spend so much of my working day around adolescents, and, in recent years, around adolescents who are also college basketball players, but, whatever the reason, when I see a college game I see not one pole in a black and white opposition, but rather a kind of mesmerizing eddy of adolescent veering and stability: one moment taking my breath away with its poised excellence, the next leaving me shaking my head in its tragicomic incompetence; one moment the earnest, unselfconscious performance of what a teenager imagines an adult should be like, the next an exuberant pile of puppies romping around because the round orange thing went through the bright orange ring, again.
I see, as I do when I stand in my classroom, the mixture of children and adults that cohabit the body of the adolescent, sometimes in painfully awkward conflict, sometimes with inspiring, transcendent grace.
For after all, there is not really virtue, not in my opinion, in having left behind the things of childhood, not entirely anyway. And, at the same time, almost nothing irritates me more than that nominal adult who has yet to master that the other human beings out there are real, have feelings of their own, and ought to be considered when we speak and act. But the adolescents, they are somewhere in between, they are on their way somewhere, clumsily exhibiting a mostly earthbound fantasy of acquiring the calm, accomplished, wisdom of maturity while retaining the energy and spontaneity of youth.
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So here are these college players bounding around like colts on the hardwood for our entertainment and for the profit of their schools, their conferences, the NCAA, CBS, and myriad manufacturers of apparel, of beverages, of automobiles, of the image of their own educational institutions. Most won’t go pro of course—the NBA will not be their “adulthood”—but they are each of them on their own worthy path to some version of adulthood and this game is somehow a little storm they’ve chosen to make part of that path. And all they’ve got in order to get through the storm—past youth, through adolescence, and along toward maturity—is the half-shaped but potent equipment of adolescence.
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The volatile emotional intensity that facilitates transcendent effort also generates the boneheaded foul and the sloppy turnover, the narcissistic belief in the boundlessness of one’s powers generates both the heroic buzzer beater and the doomed drive—1 on 5—into the paint in transition.
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Unfiltered emotion, intensity, awkwardness, budding strength, energy, talent, incompetence, apathy, self-consciousness, selflessness, narcissism, volatility—these are the unpredictable forces they must find a way to draw upon and shuffle into some sort of order so as to overcome a badly arrayed version of this very same combination of forces. The volatile emotional intensity that facilitates transcendent effort also generates the boneheaded foul and the sloppy turnover, the narcissistic belief in the boundlessness of one’s powers generates both the heroic buzzer beater and the doomed drive—1 on 5—into the paint in transition.
I’m not where they are anymore. I’m middle-aged and I’m glad to be over that particular patch called adolescence, which in my case began in some ways long before puberty and in other ways lasted long past my reaching the age of majority. But I still recognize it and encounter it from time to time within myself and so I have this great tenderness for the sheer immanence of the adolescent struggle that I find embodied on the college basketball court, for the battle unfolding in rapid real time, in single plays, to use only what one has at hand, even one’s very weaknesses, to make something durable and, yes, shining.
Photo: Chuck Burton/AP
