The Game Within the Game

My neighbor is a huge booster of Seton Hall Pirates basketball, and on a couple of occassions, he's been generous in treating me to a game or giving me tickets that he's not planning on using. His seats are terrific - center court just three rows up from the court, so you're very close to the floor. You can hear Seton Hall coach Bobby Gonzalez screaming at the referees and the players complaining that they didn't get a call. Being that we were fifteen feet from Gonzalez, I can't help but think he ought to stick to language befitting a coach from a Catholic university, but we'll get back to that later.

Something that I always noticed, that was recently featured in an article in the New York Times, was the precision and execution around each of the time-outs. It looked like something from a NASCAR pit-stop. The timeout would be called, and then a series of lackeys (team managers, perhaps?) would scurry over setting up small chairs in a perfect circle as the coach took a knee and diagrammed a play. Simultaneously, cups of Gatorade and towels were distributed and collected when the horn sounded ending the timeout. Within seconds, the players were back on the floor and the chairs were off the court.

The other interesting thing about college basketball timeouts is the "on-court entertainment" which is featured to dazzle the crowd. This takes the form of t-shirts being fired from a high-velocity cannon (R.I.P. Maude Flanders) or dance routines from cheerleaders and other collegiate dance troupes. Now I understand the desire to emulate the routines that are done in the NBA, but I have to say that a lot of these routines are awfully provocative with overt sexual overtones. I can't help but see the priests that are standing with the team looking out to center court wondering if the cheerleaders' pelvic gyrations were part of what Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley had in mind back in 1856 when he founded a Catholic college and a diocesan seminary ministering to the Diocesan community.