March 22, 2004
Excruciating boredom ...
... has been the problem with the endings of many of the NCAA tournament games as they became a foul fest. Two seconds of play, a foul or a time out, and a return to the same Burger King, Microsoft, Cialis or pickup truck ad. (The only funny commercial shows a guy in a pickup truck singing Shania Twain's "I Feel Like a Woman" as his friends edge away from him. Maybe he needs some Cialis?) Norman Chad relates:
No game changes its nature more than college basketball in its final stages. For the first 38 minutes, college basketball flies by like the Indy 500; in the last two minutes, it becomes a bumper-car concession. So first we get athletic, graceful, fluid motion up and down the court, then down the stretch we get stoppages piled on top of stoppages.(It's a jolting, out-of-character transformation -- imagine going to an Andre Previn concert in which he plays selections from Brahms, Chopin and Tchaikovsky for a couple of hours, then wraps things up with the Notre Dame fight song and Chop Sticks.)
Say what you will about soccer, but you don't see AC Milan going to the foul line every 20 seconds in the final minutes of a 1-0 match against FC Barcelona.
