Basketball Widow

Go Tarheels! I Think.

March 23, 2007 11:13 AM | 0 Comments

First of all, let me say that the guys in my neighboring cubicles at work are positively evil scam artists, who enjoy taking advantage of a poor, innocent Sports Widow. When I came into the office last Thursday for the first time following my daughter's spinal surgery, I asked them if they had been watching the Men's NCAA College Basketball Tournament, and they both nodded. I asked if my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was still a contender and they said the Tarheels were out. THEY WERE WRONG. THEY WERE MESSING WITH MY HEAD. THEY WILL HAVE TO PAY. On Saturday, I discovered that the Tarheels were playing USC, which is either the University of Southern California or the University of South Carolina (I'm not sure), so I decided to join my fellow sports fans and watch the last 10 minutes of the game.

I am trying a new technique, which is the opposite of method acting. As I watch these games, instead of drawing from personal experience, since I have so little when it comes to sports, I am trying to create an upwelling of enthusiastic fan emotion, working from the outside in. Here's an example. As I watch the teams, I yell: "Go Tarheels." "Defense. Defense." "All the way down, all the way down, all the way down the court, HEY." (This is a meaningless cheer I employed when I was on the B Cheerleading Squad in middle school, rooting for the Mighty Whippets, which are small, yippee Greyhounds.) Then, I taught my 9-year-old son Austin and 7-year-old nephew Grant, the sanitized version of our Carolina fight song, complete with a southern accent:

I'm a Tarheel born, I'm a Tarheel bred, and when I die I'm a Tarheel dead, so RAH RAH Carolina, RAH RAH Carolina, RAH RAH Carolina, Go to heck State (In this case, we substituted USC, which wasn't as lyrical.)

It was all going beautifully until I noticed that when baskets were being made, there seemed to be a lapse in the recording of the score. This is because, much of the time I unknowingly was watching an entirely different game on the full screen -- the Oregon Ducks were playing some other team -- and the screen only occasionally switched to the Tarheels. Most of the time, we were only seeing the score of the Tarheels game in the upper right hand corner of the screen, not the game. WHOOPS. Never Mind....Anyway, the Tarheels did win, which buoyed our spirits.