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.

Onward

I’m feeling anxious and melancholy right now for a number of reasons. Davidson’s exclusion from the NCAA tournament is not one of them. This season, the Year After, started in earnest with a four-point loss on the home court of one of the best teams in the country, on national TV, in which Stephen had 44 points, after which my phone rang with a call from a friend in the basketball business, who started the conversation by saying: “Whoa.” We saw gyms full and records fall. We saw a win in the program’s old second home in the city of Charlotte. We saw a win in the world’s most famous arena in which the buzz was for one of ours. One man moved from Oregon to Davidson to watch his alma mater’s basketball team. A man and his son from Florida with no connection at all to the school bought season tickets and started flying up from Tampa for Saturday games. Two kids from Michigan drove all the way down, just for a game at Belk Arena in January, and then turned around and drove back. Bob Knight called Stephen Curry the best passer in the history of college basketball. Now comes the NIT. Davidson has been playing basketball for 101 years. Only 15 of those years have ended with national postseason play. More than half of those 15 berths have come under Bob McKillop. This is one of them. This is the fifth in a row. That’s never happened before. It is the continuation of the most consistently fine time to be a fan of Davidson College’s basketball team in at least the last 40 years and maybe ever.

Going for four

Tommy Bowman:

Davidson will start its bid for a fourth straight Southern Conference title Saturday as the heavy favorite.

The Southern Conference Tournament will begin at McKenzie Arena -- commonly referred to as "The Roundhouse" -- on Friday and end with the title game and ESPN television coverage on Monday.

Davidson has the nation's top scorer in Stephen Curry and a first-round bye. The Wildcats recovered from back-to-back losses to The Citadel and Butler a little more than a week ago to win their last three regular-season games and lock up the No. 1 seed in the SoCon's South Division.

"It was a great experience for us the last three games, the last week of the season, that allowed us to show some resiliency from a couple of setbacks," Coach Bob McKillop of the Wildcats said.

The shrinking space

There was a video this morning on the right side of the Weekend Watch on ESPN.com’s college basketball page. It is now curiously unavailable. I wish it was still there because I was going to say something about it.

I’ll say it anyway.

It was a phone interview with Stephen, no picture, and the guy from ESPN who was interviewing Stephen, I forget who it was, said something along the lines of how Stephen should hurry up and heal so he could play against Butler because that would make the “family” of networks happy.

I wish I could quote here but that was the gist.

It bothered the fuck out of me.

One of the things that most interests me about sports in America here in the early part of the 21st century is the space between game and show. The space between sports and entertainment. It’s getting smaller. It’s getting fuzzier.

Think MMA.

Boxing? No.

Made-for-TV cage fighting? Yes.

Think steroids in baseball.

All you hear about is how wrong it is, and how it’s shaming the game, and how baseball as we knew it is dead, and you see old-man sports columnists shaking their old heads and wagging their fat fingers, and you see A-Rod asking for forgiveness and pretending to cry, and you see his teammates standing there trying to be appropriately solemn about the whole charade.

Know what else you see?

Crowds.

Big crowds, big crowds that couldn’t get enough of the show, bigger crowds than ever before, at least until the economic slowdown. It was the economy that finally made some of the foam-finger-buying, hot-dog-inhaling, fantasy-baseball-playing people stop coming. Not the steroids. All the steroids did was make the show better.

The Super Bowl is a TV show. The NCAA tournament is a TV show. The Super Bowl I have no problem with. Those actors are getting paid. March Madness? Not so much. That’s the setup and there are too many dollars involved and there’s too much inertia by now for any of the people in positions of power to even think about changing it.

For Davidson, because of last March, obviously, and for the first time ever, that space between sports and entertainment -- it shrunk.

The games are shows.

If you’re the school, you understand that, and you take the good with the bad.

Having a man from a TV network tell a 20-year-old college junior to please get well soon essentially so more people would watch that network’s noon-to-2?

That’s part of the bad.

Maybe I’m just grumpy.

Maybe I tend to overthink these sorts of things.

Or maybe the video is no longer there because I wasn’t the only one who thought it was pretty fucked up.