What if basketball games weren’t won or lost?

By Moristotle

[Originally published 12 years ago, on December 30, 2009]

We’re going to a Tar Heels men’s basketball game tonight. I know, for those of you aware of my attitude toward spectator sports, it isn’t possible that I’m going. Nevertheless, my wife and I are going; we want to spend as much time with our daughter and son-in-law as possible and they told us before they came to visit that they would like to go if I could get tickets.

Who gives a tweet?

The University of North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team (I wonder why their coach refers to his players as "kids"?) played Duke University's team last night, at Duke. (Their coach refers to them as "kids" also.) For a whole month, apparently, Duke students had been living in tents outside the box office (in "Krzyzewskiville," after their team's coach) to purchase tickets to the event. I know, hard to believe that anyone, let alone college students (even graduate school students), would do that in order to get a ticket to an athletic event. But apparently it's true.
    North Carolina's chancellor, Holden Thorp, seems to have (or for a brief hour or two have had) the same attitude. The Raleigh News & Observer reported that he

spiced the build-up to Wednesday night's North Carolina-Duke basketball game with a trash-talking tweet..."Our students are talking about the future and asking smart questions instead of wasting time sitting in a tent."

    Then he was made to think "better" of it:

[A]t The News & Observer's behest, [Duke president Richard Brodhead, formerly provost at Yale, who isn't on Twitter] offered up this good-spirited response: "Hey Holden, someone hacked your Twitter account to talk trash. May the best team win. From the land of TRUE Blue, Dick.

The reference to "TRUE Blue," if you're not into college colors, seems to have been a suggestion that Duke's dark blue is superior to "Carolina blue" (in these parts that's a familiar name for a sort of baby blue).

By midafternoon, UNC was apparently doing damage control. Thorp's initial tweet disappeared from his feed, and a new, apologetic tweet appeared.
    "Sorry about the tent/Kville tweet," Thorp wrote. "Both U's have great students. I shouldn't have gotten carried away by our rivalry in basketball."

    Yeah, why not get carried away? Almost everyone else around here does.

What if basketball games weren't won or lost?

We're going to a Tar Heels men's basketball game tonight. I know, for those of you aware of my attitude toward spectator sports, it isn't possible that I'm going. Nevertheless, my wife and I are going; we want to spend as much time with our daughter and son-in-law as possible and they told us before they came to visit that they would like to go if I could get tickets.
    But since I don't go to basketball games, I've been thinking about this outing quite a bit. I've realized that not only don't I care who wins or loses, I don't even care that someone wins. I mean, what difference does it make, really? I'm not talking about alumni spirit or bragging rights. I mean, what difference does it really make?
    Right, it doesn't make any. If we could look past the winning and losing, we might be able to appreciate a sporting event in terms of physical prowess, grace, coordinated effort, etc. Fanaticism about who scores the more points spoils it.

How could winning and losing be neutralized? I don't suppose that they could stop keeping track of scores...Maybe if a game just ended arbitrarily at some point determined by chance? How might that affect spectation and everything else connected with the enterprise?
    It's possible that something like the following could happen:

1. Attendance would plummet immediately, until spectators overcame the fear that the game might end after, say, only five minutes and they wouldn't get their money's worth. Longer games and shorter games would even out according to the laws of probability. People would adjust to post-game plans' necessarily being tentative.
   
2. And bookmaking would take some initial hits, with a number of smaller shops going under because of having failed to understand the mathematics of the new odds. Was the "winner" the team that was ahead a greater amount of time, or the team that was ahead when the game abruptly ended? Or was it the team whose average points-ahead to time-ahead ratio was greater? Or did it even matter anymore who was ahead? Was there anything to bet on anymore?
   
3. Injuries would unfortunately increase a bit at first owing to players' losing sleep over their coaches' new strategies for approaching the game. Were they supposed to get a lead and sit on it or try to build the lead? What was that about the points-ahead to time-ahead ratio? Or had it become about something other than being ahead?
4. Most teams would lose at least one player, with many losing two or three or more, owing to the players' deciding to concentrate on academics, which had come to seem less daunting by comparison. Did it even matter anymore who "came out on top"? What did that mean anyway? Most of the former players would declare philosophy as their major.
5. When everything settled down, the fans who would be fans regardless would accommodate themselves to the change and carry on as usual. As would the gamblers; they have to bet on something. And the alumni, many of whom rarely give their alma mater a thought but for the rituals of winning and losing athletic contests. They'd all figure out what constituted "winning." Someone has to. They demand it.
   

Basketball games would not come to mirror life. They'd still not be for simply enjoying along the way (until they died), but would continue to be all about one of the teams' being positioned in such a way at the end that it could be said to have "won" or "lost."
    Basketball would continue to be more like religion than life.

Fanaticism

My friend in the library told me this morning that he was going to "watch some [basket]ball this weekend." He said he was still feeling a little down over our local men's collegiate basketball team's failure to reach The Final Four. (Next day's front-page headline of Raleigh's News and Observer was "Tar Heels Collapse." Note, this was the front front page, not the sports front page. Basketball is big in Carolina.)

I told my library friend that that was the trouble with being a fanatic: you'll be disappointed a lot.

Hmm, he observed, "there are around three hundred Division A collegiate basketball teams. Most fans are going to be disappointed."

Remember that "fans" is short for "fanatics."

I talked with another sort of fan on the commute bus a couple of days ago. She's a devout Christian, and we've discussed religion. She knows I am not a devout Christian, but a skeptical one at best. I told her about my reading of Muhammad Asad's extraordinary memoir, The Road to Mecca. I told her he is the man who wrote the 12-pound book, The Message of the Qur'an. I told her I'm reading the Qur'an, in Thomas Cleary's English translation.

Well, my commute friend (we are friends; we respect and care about one another) frowned and warned me to be wary of Islam. "The Qur'an isn't the word of God."

"You seem pretty sure or that."

She affirmed that indeed she was. And she said it again, "The Qur'an isn't the word of God."

That's the other kind of fan I was referring to. Both types of fan don't "believe all things," obviously. Basketball fans don't believe that basketball is just a game. (I'd add "stupid" to that, but then, I guess I'd be a sort of fanatic myself.) My library friend did agree with me, however, when I said that if fans could step back and adopt "a more philosophical view of life" they'd be a lot happier.

And, of course, my Christian friend doesn't believe all things. In fact, she corrected my understanding of Paul's essay on charity (love) in his letter to the Corinthians. "He's talking about human relationships," she said, "about being open and accepting."

I can accept that, believe it. But I still believe the larger (if incorrect) interpretation of "believeth all things." It might be necessary to overcome fanaticism.

And frequent disappointment. I wonder how often my Christian friend is disappointed. She's a lovely person (and a beautiful woman). I would want happiness for her. Aside from her fanaticism, she deserves it.