Category Archives: NCAA Tournament

Life, NCAA College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, Philosophy, positive thinking

Addition by Distraction

When Wichita State guard Fred VanVleet’s last second heave bounced helplessly off the rim in the final moments of a historic and emotionally draining loss to Kentucky, it was over.

referees-iowa-state-north-carolinaWhen the refs of the Iowa State – North Carolina tilt got together shortly after the horn sounded, for what felt like another long NCAA Tournament commercial break, and decided that yes, in fact the math of delayed clocks starts and timeouts evened out, it was over.

Just like our upcoming Spring Break, my sister-in-laws pending nuptials, my son’s just-underway baseball season and that movie you have been dying to see.

These are all distractions, and they will eventually end. Many of them happy, of course, but what lies beyond?

We use these distractions, these things, these events in life as markers and moments to look forward to, to enjoy, knowing full well that nothing can last forever, but being just a tiny bit saddened when the reality sets in that the moment has indeed passed.

Time stops for no man, as they say.

Now, you can take this one of two ways. You can be saddened by this fact that everything ends and spend your days locked in nostalgia and reliving the past.

Or, you can choose to enjoy each moment for what it is. You can be here, now. You can choose to actively be present in your life. Immerse yourself in the good and the bad of it all and let the negativity and drama wash away.

As the great Dr. Seuss said, those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. (I could be paraphrasing here.)

This is life and too much of it is spent on the trivial details that don’t really matter. The hard part is we rely on distractions to help us pass the time. We go from New Year’s to NFL Playoffs to College Basketball and March Madness to Baseball and Spring Break to summer cookouts, concerts, vacations, football of all levels to the Holidays. And then we repeat.

Mostly, we’re just trying to get through the day until the day becomes the end of the week. And we’re passing along through this life without truly getting the point.

Now, I do not pretend to know what the point is. And I’ve spent several hours writing about it in a variety of similar ways. I am still working on it. And that’s just it; you never really stop working on it. Life is kind of a long education.

So for the friends and readers who get tired of the motivational, introspective mumbo-jumbo I’ve been producing, that is perfectly understandable. I’ll give you the same advice I give myself, friends, family and colleagues all the time: choose something else.

Change your distractions so they are not subtracting from your life. Let your distractions be additions to your life.

Case in point: if friends on Facebook are annoying you with selfies and negativity, then hide them. Defriend them. Do whatever you gotta do. But at the end of the day, that is a you problem. It is their page and they can post 400 pictures of their kids, their vacations and as many happy quotes as they want. You don’t have to look at it.

Same goes for Twitter. If you don’t like my stream of Disney World construction photo retweets, surfing photos and random sports commentary that is perfectly OK. I’m a weird dude, and I am OK with it. But if you are not, then stop following me. We can still be friends.

But we tend to lock in on things and get stuck on repeat, focusing more on the other party (and what they do not even know they are doing to annoy you) than our own issues. In these cases, our distractions become our obsessions.

It is a fine line we toe between rooting for our favorite college basketball team to win a game – and getting into fisticuffs with a fan from a rival team…during dialysis treatments.

Distraction is being more than curious about what happened to the Malaysia flight that has still yet to be found. Crazy obsession is pretending to fly the plane like a five-year-old in his backyard on cable news.

We are constantly battling these two sides of ourselves. Distractions give life spice and variety, something to enjoy, something to look forward to, something to focus on. Hone in on them too much, though, and we become wild beasts obsessing over the material goods of the world.

Sadly, much the world has become about the material.

It occurred to me, somewhat rather recently, that the past few years have been nothing but a growth stage for me. I did not particularly think I had much left to do in the ways of growth, but I have felt as though my heart was physically expanding, my head hurting with new thoughts and new ideas, knowledge that I did not know I did not have.

And all this time – at least the past two years – I’ve been writing to myself in many ways. Trying to remind myself of what I value or at least what I should, what I need to keep valuing and what I need to let go, all for the sake of finding a positive path for myself and my family on this crazy road of life. It calms me and helps me remember that your destination is not a collection of trinkets, but instead of memories of time well spent collecting life.

Others, including some of those who are or were once quite dear to me, seem to disagree. And of course, to each his own. We can only control what we can control, which is just ourselves.

If you are bothered by the fact that someone you know has changed, then you miss the point. We all should change. Who wants to remain stagnant? Change implies motion, staying the same means there is nothing new to you, and I’m not a fan of reading the same book twice.

bakerGo onward, upward; get new experiences. Old friendships should serve to fuel new adventures, not rehashing old mistakes and slights. Either you can move on, forgive and forget or you cannot. But it does no good to remain in the status quo.

Not long after Wichita State had it’s perfect season ended at 35-0, redshirt sophomore Ron Baker, who had a fabulous game, blankly looked at the press and gave a great explanation of dealing with the loss to Kentucky.

“You’re going to go through some humps in your life, kind of like this one. It’s tough to see us go out like this,” Baker said. “At the end of the day, someone’s got to go home.”

It’s somewhat of a strangely put together quote, with a tinge of sadness, yet a grounded sense of optimism. And really, it’s true. You hate to see it end – whatever it is. Coming home from vacations are rough, the loss of a long friendship is rough, the end of a season that you’ve poured yourself into, is indeed tough.

But life is not over, it continues on. How you approach the next distraction, where you place it on the scale of overall importance can affect you for a large portion of time in this life. And I have somehow arrived at a point where I have mildly convinced myself that as long as it is, it is also quite short.

I like Kevin Bacon’s idea, frankly.

This is a party. Let’s dance.

 

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Dr. Seuss, Duke, Jim Valvano, Kentucky, March Madness, NC State, NCAA Tournament, The Meaning of Life

The Tournament of Life


And so begins perhaps the greatest 48 hours of our sports year. Sixty-four teams, 32 games. In the next two days, we’ll have basketball for 24 hours. It’s wild, it’s chaotic. Your bracket will be busted, but it matters little right now, because you think this is it: the year you pick ‘em all right.
(Um, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you won’t pick them all right – well, unless your bracket looks like mine, of course.)
To quote Seth Davis, “I love the smell of Madness in the morning!”
Let’s be honest, we’re all just swimming in giddiness right now. Like a kid on Christmas morning. I’ve got that Bill Cosby smile happening at the moment, the one where your head bounces from side to side, with a permanent smile plastered across your face.
I don’t know if it’s because of the pools, the actual filling out of the brackets, the madness, the sound of the buzzer, the anticipation, the fact that every team has a chance to have One Shining Moment or something else entirely, but there is always – always – something magical about this Thursday and Friday in March.
It’s a way of life, really.
As a kid, I’d sneak into school with a hand-held radio, run the headphones up through my sweatshirt and listen to the games all afternoon in class. Trick was to appear as though I was intently listening to whatever was being said by the teacher. He or she sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown, but I nodded like I understood – and appreciated – the insight. In truth, I was in The Pit, or in Dayton or San Jose or wherever the game I was listening to was broadcasting from.
Oh yes, I’ve used the “Boss Button” – the button you would hit that would pull up a fake Excel spreadsheet at your desk in case someone walked by while you were watching the games. I’ve called in sick. I’ve gone to the games (when they were local).
I’m guessing many of you have done the same. There’s just a palpable hue in air, a feeling of great expectations and anticipation. What’s this year going to be like? Who’s going down? Who survives? Who advances?
Watching the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary Sunday on Jim Valvano’s 1983 NC State team was a reminder of this logic. Survive and Advance. The Wolfpack had to win the ACC Tournament just to get in – then went through a ridiculous stretch of overtime thrillers to keep surviving, keep advancing. They had to beat Ralph Sampson and Viriginia a second time, not to mention Houston and Phi Slamma Jamma, which was the 1989-90-91 UNLV of the early 80s.
There have been Cinderella’s, like NC State, and there have been years of total domination, too: UNLV in 1990, Duke seemingly every third year, Kentucky in ’96. Nearly every year memorable, every year magical. For the longest time, I could tell you every Final Four team in each season beginning with 1980.
The point is, people from all walks of life, from all over the country, young and old, get into this tournament. Maybe it’s the all-inclusive nature of the Big Dance. Maybe it’s the drama or the vulnerability of rooting for 18-22 year olds to be perfect for three weeks when they can barely keep themselves organized for three hours. Perhaps it’s the fact that really, every game is a Game 7 in the NCAA Tournament. There really is no tomorrow if you lose.
Today, my daughter’s school celebrates the life and writings of the great Dr. Seuss. And my favorite book is, has and perhaps might always be “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” The very real message in the book still rings true. About life’s ups and downs, the fact that you control your own destiny, that sometimes you’ll be going so fast in life you are out of control, and other times, you’ll realize you’re going down a dark and dangerous path. Sometimes there will be negativity, others people will be essentially singing your praises and rooting for you to win.
The message: you can do it, you can accomplish it, because you control your fate due to your ability to steer and guide yourself anyway you choose.
And really, isn’t that just a microcosm of what the NCAA Tournament is? Isn’t that really what life is? It can be done. You can survive and advance.
We choose and chose the lives we lead, the families we have (or don’t), the significant others, the jobs, the cars, the clothes, the house, the city we live in and the friends we surround ourselves with. We chose our the college we went to, the classes and major, whether or not to study for an exam.
These are our picks. Life is our real bracket.  
Really, we fill out the bracket of life as we go along our own tournament. Sometimes there are upsets, sometimes the favorite wins by 30. And maybe that’s why March Madness resonates with us just a little bit more, because it’s comparable, relatable in ways we don’t even realize. The only difference is, we can change our picks as we go.
Some days we are the No. 1 seed, others the 16. One moment, we’re a mid-major, at times, we feel like we’re from a power conference. We’re tournament-tested and prepared, then suddenly, we don’t look like we should even be in the field. One day, we’re sponsored by Nike, the next, we look like we’re sporting homemade uniforms and our name is misspelled. We’ve hit game winners, we’ve been blown-out. We’ve accidently called a timeout with none left. We’ve hit a shot as the buzzer sounds.
And truthfully, we like it this way. It’s unpredictable, just like this tournament. We never know what’s going to happen. And the options are endless. Each day, we survive and advance. Sometimes, it’s a struggle, other times, we look like we’ll run the table.
We’re all really just playing our own Tournament of Life, looking for as many Shining Moments as we can create for our highlight reel. We just have to keep filling out our bracket each day.
Surviving. Advancing. Hoping. Dreaming. Competing. Playing the game.
Let’s just enjoy the madness of it all.
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