MARCH 7, MONDAY

BASKETBALL AS A MYTHIC EVENT

I saw the final game of the Southern Conference tournament on television Monday night. It was a hard fought close game that ended with a long distance heave by a Chattanooga player which went in, allowing Chattanooga to win by one point. It was a fight for dominance by two groups of young men moderated by referees who made sure they played by the rules. The victors were ecstatic and the losers in tears.

But the games on Sunday night seen in person were different from this final game last night seen on television. Seeing the game from court side was a completely different experience. The feel of the game started outside the Harrah’s Civic Center where the people were streaming in. There there was a holiday spirit of people who had driven to Asheville to watch the games and see the town. They were here with Furman or Chattanooga, Samford or Wofford, jackets and caps, middle aged couples and old couples who had been coming to tournament games for thirty years. These were the supporters, the fans, who were connected by strong college memories but had no connection to these schools today and certainly didn’t know the men who were playing.

I took a photo of one who posed with the statues in front of the civic center. Inside these fans sat mainly in the section of the stadium designated for their team and cheered all the way through the game.

There was also a student section behind each basket where the students from these colleges got more and more rabid, or more and more despondent, as the game went on. To one side of each student section was a student band for each team, who were part band and part orchestrated cheerleading sections.

And in front of the student sections were cheerleaders, maybe twenty women cheerleaders and ten men, for each side. But it was the women who did most of the cheerleading routines. The women cheerleaders wore very short skirts and tight tops with lots of spangles. Some cheerleaders had white pompoms in their hands.

There are a great number of time outs in a basketball game, both those called by the teams and those called by officials. When you are watching on television these timeouts are filled with television advertisements. The official timeouts are call specifically to be able to fit all the television ads into the time allotted for the game.

But if you are sitting courtside these time outs are filled with performances by the cheerleaders, first the cheerleaders for one team and then the other. And while these may be partially to fire up the fans to get them to cheer louder, they are also a display of acrobatics in which the women show off their acrobatic skills either by doing back flips along the court or by forming pyramids in which they lift one performer very high as she smiles broadly and waves at the audience. Being a cheerleader is the equivalent of being a star male athelete.

But as the evening went on I began to have the feeling that what we were alternating between was periods of intense masculine combat and periods of lightly veiled feminine erotic display both egging on a tribe of rabid followers. Somehow the masculine struggle to dominate and the feminine display of erotic presence seemed to enhance each other and enflame the fans.

When I think about it the very fact of colleges and universities having athletic teams that represent them seems very odd. Athletics have nothing to do with learning, and in fact, the very best athletes are not there to learn at all but to play basketball. And the very, very best are there only for the required one year of college before going to the pros. They are in college to develop their athletic skills before turning professional. And usually the athletes don’t even come from the states from which the state universities draw their students. They are almost hired hands, mercenaries, lured to fight for a particular university, or more likely to learn from a particular coach, who, himself is on the way up from university to university.

Somehow this seems to have a faint resemblance to the coliseums of the Roman Empire and the gladiators who fought each other in order to excite the blood lust of spectators.

And as the game wore on, with the teams evenly matched, as happened last night the fury of the fans at the referees and at the machinations of the other team rose as well.

And then suddenly it occurred to me that the furious onslaught of the Russians and the heroism of the underdog Ukrainians is somehow similar. The women and children are hiding or fleeing to safety, the men are staying behind to fight and we are all cheering them on. The more intense and bloody the conflict, the more the women and children are threatened, the more horrified and excited we get.

What if the women and children would stay and go out in the street and the men would disappear, what would happen then? There would be no fight, I’m guessing, and no deaths. The Russians wouldn’t know what to do. But instead we clear the court, have the fight and cheer on the heroic men, many of whom will die.

Leading the charge on the other side is Vladimir Putin, looking pretty ordinary, but imagining himself as Peter the Great, with an ego to match, restoring Russia to her rightful glory with a cheering section at home and the band playing and the women hoping their men will be victorious.

Somehow in either case there seem to be the extremes of masculine domination and feminine excited erotic response and support.

College basketball games are as American as apple pie. So there is no reason for anyone else to respond to this game as I do. To everyone else this is probably just a game. To me it was the replaying of the mythic masculine struggle for victory over evil, enhanced by the opposite feminine celebration of erotic presence and support, leading to the happily-ever-after marriage of the princess and the prince.

And I was suckered as well as I called my son after the game and we both enthused about the game. “Great game,” we both agreed.