The Biggest Winners

My wife was sitting on the couch, watching her favorite show that didn't involve random bursts of spontaneous singing, The Biggest Loser.  For those of you not familiar with the show, the basic premise is a large group of very large people are invited to a ranch where they train and eat like professional athletes in an attempt to lose weight, competition style, until one is finally crowned "The Biggest Loser."

I sat down next to her, and watched as two teams of morbidly obese people competed in a marine-style training relay race.  The winner of the contest was to receive phone calls to home.  Not a cash prize, but one infinitely more valuable to a group of people who had been separated from their homes for nearly two months.  As a sports fan, it would have been pretty easy to chuckle at 400 pound men and 250 pound women "running" thought an obstacle course.

But I didn't laugh.  It was actually pretty spell-binding.  At the end of the "race" as the exhausted victors stumbled to the edge of the water on the beach-bound victory tape, they mobbed each other with a teary eyed enthusiasm and unbridled jubilation that made me think instantly of one thing; a buzzer beater in March.

I looked over to my wife and said, "That."  She looked at me.  "That.  Is why I love sports.  THAT moment.  You don't get those moments many other places in life.  Not in the way that sports provides."  She nodded pensively.

More specifically, no other sport provides more of those raw, jubilant and heartbreaking moments than college basketball.  No other sport is so perfectly wired to deliver magical brief glimpses, slivers of snapshots when an ordinary kid can become immortal.  No other sport is built in a way that caters to the split-second that feels like hours while a ball hangs in the air; perilously dancing the fine line between jubilation and despair.  Nothing quite delivers life like college basketball.

Only in March can a tiny Iranian point guard named Ali Farokhmanesh from even tinier Northern Iowa become a household name (even if it is one largely mispronounced... oh how blissful it is to hide behind my keyboard).  Only in March do Bryce Drew and Tyus Edney transform from "cup of coffee in the NBA" guy to sports God immortal.  College basketball fans everywhere can recall the fervor and life of a Jimmy Valvano scrambling frantically for someone, anyone, to hug after their 1983 stunning last-second National Championship win.  That moment.  The raw powerful flood of joy lives on even more powerfully and long than the man himself.

I'm a happy guy by and large, no major complaints.  Hopefully you, whomever and wherever you are, can say the same.  My life's pretty good.  So let's admit together that we aren't disparaging our largely pleasant experiences as humans when we say "my life doesn't give me that very often."  The dramatic, gasp-out-loud unbridled, racing for someone to hug ebullience that can often only be safely found in the world of sports.  That's why we watch.  Not just for the excitement, not just for the diversion, but for the chance; the chance with far greater odds than holding a lotto ticket, that today, maybe, just maybe we will experience something we can truly call a memory.  That magical moment.

I played an interesting game with my mother a few months ago.  I challenged her to pick any year from 1984 forward and bet her I could name exactly WHERE I was during every Final Four.  In the blink of an eye, no matter how old I am I can always be fourteen years old, sitting in the roof of the Louisiana Superdome next to my father chattering feverishly that Michigan is out of timeouts, Michigan is OUT of TIMEOUTS long before the crowd around us has figured out what just transpired.  (Sorry Chris Webber but the law of instant jubilation and immortality must, by law, also carry the equal and opposite effect as well.)  Impressively or perhaps sadly, depending upon whether you harbor my or my wife perspective on the feat, I nailed every single year without hesitation.  When my Mom asked me how many of my college professors I could name, I couldn't quickly recall a single one.  No offense to my beloved UCF (ranked in the top 25 in football for the first time EVER today!), but the mind is an amazing device.  It anchors to what we love and only very reluctantly and under the intense pressure of age does it ever let go.  It is passion that forges in iron what otherwise is merely written on paper.  It is emotion that moves us once and never lets go.

It was then watching The Biggest Loser with my wife that I realized who the biggest winners are; those of us who through blessing, persistence or some combination of the two find something that evokes a passion and zeal inside of us.  Whether it's our job, an activity, our family or simply a hobby or diversion - something that delivers life.   For many of you reading, for many of "us", that passion surges back to the surface a little bit tonight on ESPN at 7pm.  

I sat next to my wife and watched the rest of the show with her.  As it finished, she turned to me and said "THAT'S why I love this show.  The exact same reasons."  I smiled at her and nodded, knowing we had each to grown to know the other a little deeper that day.  I gave her a kiss on the cheek as the closing credits rolled, and she looked at me and smiled.  She grabbed the remote and quickly flipped over to ESPN... after all, it is college basketball season.


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