San Jose, Calif.
Put away your hankies, OK? Gritty to the final breath, Cinderella again died a gallant death in the NCAA Tournament. Big deal. Spare me the tears.
Hey, I love March Madness as much as any guy in your office pool, but can we kindly stop the insanity?
After he lost 61-58 to Kansas, a basketball superpower rich in tradition, talent and all-important funding, guard Jamaal Tatum of scrappy Southern Illinois seared a hole in my chest with a dare-me stare.
All I asked was if Tatum and his fellow Salukis for one minute allowed themselves to truly believe they could actually win this tourney.
“I definitely believed we could win. We can play with any team in the country. That is not arrogance or being cocky. That’s confidence,” Tatum said Thursday, the chip on his shoulder growing bigger with his every defiant word.
With all due respect for Tatum’s never-say-quit spirit, can we please get real?
At last count, there were 336 colleges, give or take a school you could not find on a map, in the mad chase to win the national championship, spending oodles of dollars on hoops, selling alums a beautiful lie and firing coaches for failure to make the tourney’s field of 65.
About 250 of these fine institutions of higher learning are suckers chasing a dream that can never, ever come true.
You will see 96-year-old John Wooden climb a ladder and cut down the nets again as a coach before Southern Illinois, Butler, Colorado State or the University of Denver ever wins a national title.
But that does not stop the runaway arms race in college basketball, or prevent otherwise intelligent university presidents from buying wholeheartedly into a myth.
The reward for coach John Calipari if Memphis somehow wins the tourney is a $400,000 bonus. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to fill the Mississippi River with liquid gold and divert it to his backyard?
After recruiting a new coach from the state of North Dakota, a fine state but maybe the last place on earth you’d look for basketball help, CSU president Larry Penley wasted no time Thursday in putting unreasonable expectations on Tim Miles, saying, “We expect him to win not only our conference, but we expect him in March to be at the NCAA Tournament, where we’re not today.”
Dream on.
The reality? In the past 40 years, only one school not currently a member of a power conference has won it all, and that was 1990, at the Final Four in Denver, where the Rebels of Nevada-Las Vegas ran wild.
But nobody will remember it as a Cinderella story, because many old skeptics seem convinced that UNLV was too good to be true. While coach Jerry Tarkanian has been accused of many things, the allegations never included the wearing of glass slippers.
Look at it this way.
If Larry Bird, a hick from French Lick and quite possibly the finest country shooter to ever lace up his sneakers for a mid-major basketball program, could not quite lead Indiana State to the top in 1979, then Tatum and Southern Illinois had absolutely no shot of winning it all.
Every dog has its day. The Salukis got one more than they had any right to expect, scrapping for two victories at the NCAA tourney in the name of David and Goliath.
Holding the rock in his hands, with Southern Illinois trailing Kansas by three points and 10 seconds remaining on the scoreboard clock, Tatum bravely launched a long jump shot, with dreams of sending his team’s remarkable season to overtime.
“The last shot I took, I practiced numerous times in the gym, late at night, early in the morning, between classes,” Tatum said. “It felt good.”
But the next sound you heard was the shattering of glass slippers.
Whether your name is George Mason or Jamaal Tatum, the fairy tale is doomed to fracture.
At the NCAA tourney, the script never really changes. Cinderella always dies in the end.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
