Basketball turns into a family affair

We followed the game on television in the suburbs and out on a sea island, through streaming video in Prague, and by text message in the mountains of Switzerland. None of us had the view that my brother had, blogging from the press box, front and center in Raleigh, but more than thirty of my family tuned in while Davidson played Georgetown last Sunday in the NCAA tournament.

We are a sports family anyway. My uncles and father can tell you the stats on most of the starters in the tournament stretching back to high school; they’ve followed the games of these players throughout their college careers. My cousins and brother all played high school sports and keep track of stats too. Even I played basketball on an intramural team in graduate school (after music school, so I could break my fingers with impunity).

But we watched the game, not because we are die-hard basketball fans who watch every game, or because we thought this little team would turn into the Cinderella of the tournament, but because of my brother. He’s the youngest of our generation, the last in college, the one who has taken his sports knowledge and his ability to write and turned it into a job at his college where he works for the Davidson sports information desk, where he runs a sports blog with hundreds of hits a day, and where he has turned his efforts into a job after school too (he’ll be joining an NFL team as a media intern in May). We watched the game for him. And boy am I glad that we did.

Because it was a fabulous basketball game. The first half made me despair - Georgetown is a big, rough team, and they kept Davidson’s star shooter, Stephen Curry, away from the ball by siccing three (3!) players on him. By the end of the first half, Georgetown was up by 11. But the Davidson team came out of their locker room after the break and in the second half they knew what to do, and they did it, beating Georgetown by 4 points. When the game was over, it was late night here in Prague. Caroline was long asleep and Will was snoring. I jumped on our bed and started hopping up and down yelling the unbelievable news. Will was too fast asleep to appreciate the rip-roaring wonderment of it all, so I started to call the family.

I knew they would understand.

Next weekend my brother will sit at the Sweet Sixteen press desk in Detroit and live blog the game between Davidson and Wisconsin. We’ll be there with him, watching in any way that we can. And Will? He's promised to stay awake too. I suspect he sees it as an easier fate than being trampled upon by a pregnant person round about midnight. He's probably right.