Easter Sunday in Raleigh

In the St. Pete Times:

The drive back from the games in Raleigh ended with a police escort into town past toilet-papered trees. The lights of the team bus swung toward Belk Arena and landed on 500 cheering fans. The first hug Richards got was from his history thesis adviser.

At the Brickhouse, with satellite trucks outside, the crowd hollered and yelled every time the Davidson highlights played on ESPN. Then came the clip of Curry in the postgame news conference. The people looked up at his face and the place went hush.

“You should’ve heard all the horns honking,” she told me, “here in this little town.”

The Rossiters in the NYT

Pete:

“We know how much they care about us,” his son Steve said in a phone interview from Davidson. “But they really like coming to Davidson and Siena. They enjoy it as much as we do.”

From going to Steve’s Davidson games, the Rossiters befriended a local couple, Bob and Barbara Hoffman, whose house they stayed at on their visits. They met them at the Brick House, a restaurant where the crab cakes are tasty and the elder Rossiter enjoys a few Brick Lights.

“Now that my career is sadly over, I can join him with some Brick Lights and watch my brother play,” Steve Rossiter said.

Who watches, and why

Stephen Brunt of the Globe and Mail of Toronto:

Sport is part spectacle, part escape, part religion, part communal experience. Without a rooting interest, it doesn’t mean much, and a rooting interest detached from hearth and home and life experience isn’t the same as one with organic roots. The foundation of the business is that people care, that they attach themselves to a city, to a uniform, to a history, and often hang on to it for their entire lives, through championship dynasties and long, long walks in the desert.

There is still appeal and value in that, in immersion in something larger, in simply being part of a crowd in an arena or stadium, caring about the same thing at the same time ...

Was reading for something else, came across this, made me think of here.

Reading the Sunday NYT II

Here’s something I sometimes think about: March 2008 wouldn’t have been what it was had it happened in March 1998. That’s because it couldn’t have been shared the way it was shared.

I’m not talking about general sporting fandom. I’m talking about us. We experienced those 10 days not as taken entertainment but as shared experience, and it happened not only in Raleigh, Detroit and Davidson, but also in e-mails and texts and on DavidsonCats.com.

So here’s Harvey Araton looking ahead to the next decade in sports:

Digitalization is the watch word for sports industry power brokers and planners, seducing and scaring them as they stampede into the great electronic unknown. Some worry that a fast-changing home viewing experience -- 3D television, in particular -- could make pro sports more of a studio event than a public spectacle. Others wonder if sports could be the new decade’s print news media, reconditioning consumers with online alternatives that diminish traditional revenue streams.

The teenager in the basement -- torn between home-team loyalty and fantasy-league reality, monitoring the televised game with laptop humming and cellphone vibrating -- is the face of a multifaceted future.

Digitization means niche-i-fication, exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. How We Watch is changing, TV, movies, sports, everything. Over the last 10-plus years, with Davidson basketball, that’s meant going from watching the ticker on Headline News to watching the score on ESPN.com to listening on Teamline to watching on DavidsonWildcats.com. It’s never been easier to follow Davidson basketball from wherever you happen to be. This is especially useful within this community, I think, a relatively small group of people, many of whom at some point came to Davidson, from somewhere else, stayed for four years, and then for the most part left and went, again to somewhere else.

It’s gotten to the point where I’d almost rather not have the game on TV because then I can’t watch it on the Web. Then that game belongs to, literally has been bought by, someone other than Davidson College. If it’s on ESPN, or ESPN2, or ESPNU -- fine, I’ll go find a TV and I’ll watch the game like that. But if it’s on some more regional and less available outlet, like SportSouth or Fox Sports South or MASN or something, and I’m still down in Florida, it’s that much harder for me to watch the game. I either end up watching it on some sketchy Web platform -- like many folks here, I think, I watched the Cornell game on my laptop screen thanks only to some Cornell student in Ithaca pointing a camera at his TV and then streaming the image onto justintv.com -- or I end up not being able to watch it all. A TV network is a middle man that’s increasingly unnecessary.

More than that: The reason I follow Davidson basketball the way I do is tied up tight with my relationship with the place, by which I mean the actual place, yes, 28036 and 28035, Belk and the Brickhouse, but also the people within the wider community. And I sort of look at a TV network, any TV network, as a third party, a foreign entity, infringing on that relationship. Granted, TV brings other advantages, direct and indirect, i.e. exposure, i.e. recruiting, i.e. some measure of mass media seal of approval, i.e. now you, the wider you, has seen us, or at least the simple TV representation of us, which undeniably somehow makes us feel good, validated, there. I’m thinking here also of Ricky from Michigan. He came to DavidsonCats.com because he saw the team on CBS. He stays at DavidsonCats.com presumably because of the community he’s found.

I guess it comes down to a question of: Is the point to share it with just each other or with so many others?

Missed this one

Steve on Steph: “Stephen’s even better than most people think he is.”

Three things

1. People were surprised when he did what he did as a freshman. People were surprised when he did what he did as a sophomore. People were surprised when he did what he did as a junior.

When will people stop being surprised?

2. Here’s what I wrote the week after he decided to leave school and go pro:

Stephen made the logical decision. He made the prudent decision. He made a serious decision, and he made it in a serious way.

Some people were bothered by it. Some people thought it was the wrong decision.

Does anybody still think that?

He made the smart decision.

Over these last couple months, though, at the combine in Chicago, then in his workouts in Charlotte, New York, Washington and Sacramento, the better he played, the smarter that decision became.

3. I think part of why I’m so looking forward to tonight is that it’s not at all an end to Stephen Curry’s Davidson story. It’s like everything else: a continuation.

The way I see Davidson College’s ongoing basketball narrative, it starts at Exit 30, always has, always will, at Belk, at the Brick House, on DavidsonCats.com, but then it radiates out from there, to the alums playing in Belgium or Germany or France, to the folks watching games on the video feed on laptop screens in Boston or San Francisco or Corpus Christi, to that red-lettered string of engaged, interested observers on the top of the message board.

Next year, there presumably will be a night or two or three when there’s a game at Belk, and Matt’s got a game up in Elon, and Stephen’s got a game in Chicago or Miami or Minneapolis, and any number of the fistfuls of the program’s pros are playing games overseas.

And there will be a group of people, maybe relatively small but certainly with purpose, who will care about all of those things.

It speaks, I think, to what’s been built over the last 20 years.

And back in Davidson ...

From the St. Pete Times:

The drive back from the games in Raleigh ended with a police escort into town past toilet-papered trees. The lights of the team bus swung toward Belk Arena and landed on 500 cheering fans. The first hug Richards got was from his history thesis adviser.

At the Brickhouse, with satellite trucks outside, the crowd hollered and yelled every time the Davidson highlights played on ESPN. Then came the clip of Curry in the postgame news conference. The people looked up at his face and the place went hush.

Brick House last night

The big city

Saw Peter Wagner at the Brickhouse tonight. He said some 400 (!) people were signed up for the pre-game get-together Tuesday afternoon at 4 at Local West at 33rd and 8th. Tip time of course is 7 at the Garden.