Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte Descends into March Madness

Good news! The TV ratings are up 4% for the first rounds of March Madness, those days when the basketball games simply stumble and tumble on top of each other, morning to night, all weekend long and beyond, bursting the bounds of CBS TV and heading into other ad universes, streaming on-line while the advertisers (Dell, Courtyard by Marriott, AT&T, E*Trade, Microsoft, Sonic restaurants, and Pontiac, among others) stream after them. And inside the ads are even more “games” like, for example, the Sonic video ad in which “viewers can click through to a game where they can fling tator tots into a guy’s mouth.” Throw in your basic office or college betting pool; add in the perhaps $7 billion in March Madness wagers (more than for the Super Bowl) and all those crowds heading not for the courtside seats, but directly for Vegas; stir in oodles of frenetic rooting and there’s no end to the fun until April 2 when it does end with the last team standing and — always -– the possibility of a ratings-trumping “Cinderella upset.”

Actually, I’m not thinking about some smaller team winning the tournament — it’s already impossible — but CBS itself. It’s the real rags-to-riches (or is it riches-to-riches), glass-slipper, Cinderella tale of this tournament, ditching its regular programming only to ride to ratings dominance. In a mere five years, it’s turned the NCAA’s college tournament into a corporate carnival that “generates more advertising sales than any other postseason sporting event including the Super Bowl.” (This year, the network is expected to absorb $500 million in ad revenue from TV alone, up a staggering 70% from 2000.)

But let Tomdispatch Jock Culture Correspondent pick up the tale from there and take you on one of his now-regular, every-two-monthly wild rides through another of the holy events of our sports calendar — and while you’re at it, just before you place your bet on where he’ll be heading this time, check out his most recent nothing-short-of-shocking young adult novel on high-school football, coach and peer pressure, and sports hazing, Raiders Night. Tom

Hoopla 101

Chronicles of Higher Education
By Robert Lipsyte

1. Opening Shot

“Success is a Choice.” — Rick Pitino of Louisville (seeded #6 in the South region for this year’s March Madness), first coach to lead three different teams to the Final Four.

This is the mud season of the sports calendar. While we await blessed baseball and its promise of renewal, here comes the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men’s Division I Basketball Championship — the Big Dance for sportswriters, the Bracket Racket for gamblers, a frat-rat party, a racist entertainment, and a subversion of higher education, perhaps democracy as well.

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