Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume VI

Part VI: Uncharted Waters

Part I: Baptism in Dirty Water

Part II: The Fall from Innocence

Part III: Yellow Badge of Courage

Part IV (In Progress)

Part V: The Way it Was

"At some point you are not what you were, and then you are nothing. It's at this point people start putting themselves together, once you have had that year where you do too much of something - drink, play video games, feel sorry for yourself, brick threes, fumble - feel terrible after, and then do too much of that something again." - Brian Cook, via Mgoblog

It had been years since I had hugged my little brother. That night, though, ended with my brother and I instinctively embracing each other. It felt like that's exactly what I was meant to do that night, exactly where I was meant to be that night - a feeling I haven't felt in a long time.

Moments earlier Trey Burke crossed half court, the seconds seemingly ticking down on Michigan's best season in two decades and a glorious tournament run up to that night, as Kansas had spent the first thirty-eight minutes of the game picking apart Michigan's flaws in what appeared to be an onslaught towards an easy Jayhawk victory. Mitch McGary collided with a Kansas defender and tumbled to the hardwood. Canadian import Nik Stauskas could only watch from his home behind the three point line in the corner. Columbus, Ohio's own - another inconceivable story line in and of itself - Burke boldly stepped up from an improbable distance and launched a thirty footer. The orange ball seemed to hang in the basketball heavens for an excruciatingly anxious moment, Michigan's Final Four hopes and my heart hanging in the balance. The crowd fell into a ghastly silence. Team captain and symbolic victory cigar Josh Bartlesein anticipatorily jumped up from the Michigan bench as the ball hit its crescent, apparently having more confidence in Burke's thirty-footer than I, as my heart sunk gut-wrenchingly deep into my stomach. Indeed, that thirty foot prayer seemed to be sent from the heavens directly to me. The sports gods knew I needed this one bad, probably more than I had ever needed a basketball to drop through the net before.

When it did finally sink, it was hard not to think, at that moment, that Michigan's improbable comeback was explicitly tied to the comeback I had embarked on earlier that day. That the cosmos had somehow mysteriously aligned the events of that day with me in mind.

Five minutes of overtime later, Michigan was headed to the Elite Eight for the first time since 1993. Uncharted waters. Earlier that day, I walked into St. Mary's hospital with my dad and signed up for an intensive outpatient rehab program for alcohol abuse. The red flags had been there throughout the years, usually with me unwilling to notice them. Things had gotten pretty bad this year, though, and after a particularly bad bender the week before (of course it was losing the B1G title to Indiana in the closing seconds as I watched in the seats of Crisler that triggered this bender), I knew it was finally time to ask for some help. You just know when it's time to finally be honest with yourself. Uncharted waters indeed.

I went for a long drive after I left my brother's house that night. At one point I screamed in ecstasy alone in my truck; I felt happy for the first time in a long time, as if things had finally turned a corner for me. The events of the day were a lot to grasp between the hospital meeting and the miraculous Michigan comeback culminating in Trey Burke's all-out takeover of a game, solidification of his status as the National Player of the Year in college basketball. I blasted the country music and just let it all sink in.

It was all so improbable, from Michigan's win to my brother and I embracing. But I couldn't help but feel like it was all meant to be that way. As always, sports and life had converged in a moment all-too real to be coincidental. I watched the next three games with my brother at his house as well, and those were probably three of the best nights I've had in years. My brother and I had grown apart over the years just a bit - a lot of that probably due to my drinking and his not - so it felt like a new chapter for all of us concerned: my brother and I on a new chapter of our relationship, Michigan basketball on a new chapter as they annihilated the Florida Gators en route to the Final Four for the first time in two decades and then marched onwards to the National Championship game, me in the midst of beginning my own new chapter in the early days of my outpatient program.

Sometimes a game is more than a game.

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume V

The Way it Was

Part I: "He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have Any Timeouts!"
Part II: The Fall From Innocence
Part III: A Badge of Honor

"Yet another of those little sparks of optimism lit me up and led me to believe once again that if things could change for the team then they could change for me." - Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch


Things had started to turn sour for me that winter of 2011. College was somehow over in an instant and my friends were a long way away. The beautiful summer in the Petoskey woods with the girlfriend was over and she was a long way away, too. My Indian Summer was over, without warning. I was trying hard to navigate the post-grad world I was suddenly thrust upon - desperately trying to find a feeling of home in my new Chicago residence, a long way away from anything I had ever cared about.

I made frequent trips back to Ann Arbor that year, seeking the comfort of home I was unable to find in my new home, The Windy City. There are a lot of memories of late-night bus and train rides - usually including a pepsi bottle with a splash of whiskey - and in those memories my anxiety always seemed to dissipate the closer I got to my real home, Ann Arbor.

There's a walk I remember vividly from that time. I had taken a bus from Chicago, my then home, to Ann Arbor. I was on the trek once again to visit the girlfriend, who I was starting to become unhealthily and (ultimately) disastrously dependent on - though I didn't recognize that until years later - as my own depression was starting to rear its ugly head during those cold months. As the college sweetheart hit the books that Friday afternoon I went for a long walk through the streets of my former home.

During college, I often went for walks through Ann Arbor to clear my head, to get away from the roommates, to relax from studies, to walk off a hangover, to find some calm, sometimes just to walk. I guess as I departed my girlfriend's house that day, I went on that walk searching for that feeling of home Ann Arbor had provided me those four years of college, searching for a peace of mind I hadn't been able to find since moving to Chicago. The search for that home feeling failed, however, and the realization that Ann Arbor was no longer my home - no matter how badly I hated that fact - sunk in deep.  Down South University - the dividing line between million-dollar university buildings and dilapidated college houses; down South Forest street - where beer cans and patches of snow littered collegiate front lawns; through the Oxford neighborhood, where impeccably manicured sorority houses loomed; I felt homesick for Ann Arbor.  I desperately missed my girlfriend, my college house, my family, my college friends. Many times I had found reassurance walking those streets in my time in college, yet this one wasn't working. Instead, it only seemed to confound my confusion: how had things changed so fast?

I had lost my cousin in a snowmobiling accident a couple weeks prior that winter of 2011, a thought that had weighed heavy - like a cumulus snow cloud above me- on my mind over the past weeks. During that walk through Ann Arbor, as the wheels of that monstrous snow storm began to churn, I pondered the burdens weighing heavy on my mind. The funeral I had attended that short time ago left me lamenting the brevity of life, and life's precarious clock lingered with me like a sour aftertaste. As young deaths are wont to do, it left me questioning a lot of things: whether I had made a wrong turn somewhere down the road, particularly in regards to the career I had recently embarked on.

A phone call from a former college roommate interrupted that walk, and I headed towards the old college house in pursuit of a drink or two. This phenomenon was becoming a problem in its own right as I never cleanly transitioned from the hard-drinking college lifestyle to the adult world I was suddenly thrust upon. I once again abandoned the flurry of unresolved turmoil going on in my soul in hopes of drowning it all in a glass of bourbon.

Things would get much worse, and then worse again, before it got any better. But I have a particularly happy memory of that weekend. The mind is a funny thing, with an uncanny ability to suppress the negative memories and retain only the positive ones. I remember all those thoughts I had during that walk through Ann Arbor that weekend, but the defining memory in my mind is a basketball game.

The day after that walk, Zack Novak and Stu Douglass - the faces of the new direction of Michigan Basketball - led my Michigan Wolverines out of the tunnel and into the first NCAA Tournament game for Michigan in over a decade. I watched that game at Charlies, my old college bar, surrounded by my girlfriend and my old college friends. Novak and Douglass rained threes on the Tennessee Volunteers that day in a downright massacre of a game.

 Soon I would be back on a bus bound west for Chicago. But for those brief couple of hours and into that night, everything was back to the way it was.

Indiana

I sat in Crisler for a while afterwards. The only time I've sat longer in a sports venue was my senior year, when we lost to Ohio State in my last ever game. On the drive home from Ann Arbor, I started to think that it was me, rather than Michigan sports, that was causing this depression. I started to wonder whether the two were discernible. It seemed very real that the worst losses of the past year - Bama, this Indiana game - coincidentally synchronized with my worst nights. It didn't matter which it was, though. This was my worst-ever night.

"Home to Villa in the League Cup quarter-final replay was probably my worst-ever night, a new low on a relationship already studded with them. …

Part of it was my own latent depression permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that the things did not stay bad forever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn't ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper, and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and this miserable half-life, forever."

- Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume III

Yellow Badge of Courage

Part I: "He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have any Timeouts!";
Part II: The Fall from Innocence

"Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow, and very real hatred?"

- Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

In sports, as in life, the low points are what make it possible to appreciate the highs that much more. Those seemingly never-ending losing seasons, the humiliating defeats at the hands of your arch-rivals, sitting in half-empty stadiums during the futile seasons, whiskey-drenched nights when you swear you're finished with the team once and for all: we fans take an odd satisfaction in these trying times; we wear those low-points on our sleeves like badges of honor - for our fandom had been tested to the limits and we had remained devout in our allegiances. For nearly a century, Boston Red Sox fans traced their entire identity to the pride that came with years of defeat and ground balls that trickled through first basemen's legs. It was easy to be a Yankees fan; but there was more pride in being a Sox fan, because they had stood on trial and never withered.

As the nineties gave way to the aughts and as I grew older, I began to grow more self-aware of my fandom. In turn, I began to realize that I had no badge of honor to speak of. My fan upbringing had occurred during the prosperous Lloyd Carr era, with few defeats at the hands of Ohio State or Michigan State to speak of; that, and my other team, the Red Wings, had experienced success unprecedented in the hockey world. I was not the Red Sox fan in this metaphor, I was the spoiled Yankees fan. And that didn't sit well with me. In this way an odd hint of jealousy snuck up on me. My fandom had come of age alongside my childhood best friend Steve, a Michigan State legacy and lifelong fan. Steve had gone through a fan's trial - the nineties and early aughts were not overly kind to Michigan State - and had come out the other side ardent in his loyalties. He seemed to have that badge of honor I desperately coveted.

The solution seemed simple, as Michigan Basketball stood in the shadows of Crisler Arena's dark ages. So I returned to Michigan Basketball after a period of indifference, this time more fervently than ever. In the subsequent years, my fandom matured as I was relegated to cheering for NIT Championships, as I suffered through countless beat-downs at the hands of Michigan State, and as I cheered in a sparsely populated and dilapidated Crisler Arena. But there were rewards. This was a relationship I had never felt with Michigan football. After all, it seemed everyone and their brother in Michigan could claim they were Michigan football fans. But I took pride - pretentious as it may have been - in being one of the few who truly cared about Michigan basketball.

By the time my senior year in high school rolled around, Michigan Basketball had become more than just a means to an end; our relationship had blossomed into something much bigger. Around this time I began to withdraw from the life corollary to the strictures of Catholic school life in what I perceived to be then a dead-end town. This is not to say that I ceased my social life, but things were beginning to feel stale; I was beginning to learn that there was more out there in this world than the shirt and tie routine of a narrow-minded Catholic high school. I spent many a night drinking whiskey, pouring over pages of Dylan lyrics, driving aimlessly down the streets of my hometown - sometimes I just wasn't ready to go home - growing more and more in awe of what lurked outside my bedroom window. But nothing represented my expanding world more than the Michigan Basketball student section.

I watched in awe of the Maize Rage that winter of my senior year. Here were students not much older than me dressed in silly outfits, cheering wildly, probably off to guzzle down a few beers after the game: they seemed liberated. I grasped that they lived in a world that had a lot more to offer than my small town ever could. I idolized that student section, watching them in my growing knowledge that not every road was going to lead home anymore. Soon I would be on my way, too.

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume II

This post will be installed in segments. This is part II. 

Previously: "He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have Any Timeouts!"
         

The Age (and Fall) of Innocence

We're all made up of flaws. One of my primary flaws as a youngster was a short temper, prone to rages that my mild-mannered adult-self could never understand. There were some post-Michigan football game temper tantrums when I would throw baseball trophies into the wall in my room, or stomp my feet on the bedroom floor. But there weren't many Michigan football losses in those days.

I come from a large Irish family. My childhood is chock-full of jovial gatherings of many aunts, uncles, and cousins with merry conversation and spirits enhanced by free-flowing whiskey and beer. And it was a Michigan-loving Irish family, in which "The Victors" was sung at every Christmas gathering as far back as I can remember.

Not all of those memories of the Irish family gatherings are lighthearted, though; there's one particular dark spot that stains my collective memory. It was March of 1998, and the Wolverines Hoops squad - led by the likes of Robert "Tractor" Traylor, Maceo Baston, and Louis Bullock - was a victory over UCLA away from the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament. Mind you, this was 1998, mere months after Michigan football had gone undefeated and won a National Championship, so I wasn't exactly accustomed to losing at this point. As the game clock wound down, the otherwise festive atmosphere was interrupted by some tears and some unremembered object being thrown against my living room wall. The room grew quiet as my aunt's and uncle's jaws dropped, as they watched me storm through the living room and storm up the stairs, yells echoing off the stairway ceiling.

What I've discovered over the years is that there is a direct correlation between the stock you put into the outcome of a sporting event and how well your life is going at the time. In the fall of 2011, for the first time ever, I found myself unable to feel much sadness over a Michigan football loss - too much had gone wrong in my own life for me to care much about a game; I watched friends post on social media sites about their sorrow over a Michigan State loss and felt jealous, because it meant things were pretty much fine and dandy in their own lives. What this means, of course, is that my life was pretty damn good when Michigan lost to UCLA in that NCAA tournament game. I had no significant real-life problems to worry about in my nine or ten year old life, which made made it easy to feel rage and sorrow after a sporting loss. Aside from being forced to eat my vegetables at the dinner table and having to do my homework before running off into the backyards with friends after school, sports losses were the biggest issue in my life. It was an age of pure innocence. It could never last.

In my own life and in Michigan basketball, I could have never anticipated the windswept world that awaited up around the next bend in the road. One of the grand tragedies of life is that, in our youth, we yearn to be grown up, unaware of the true glory of kid-dom and unaware of the realities of the adult world. In the same way those were the last years of pure unadulterated innocence for me circa 1998, those were the last years of innocence for Michigan Basketball as well. Things were about to come crashing down in tumultuous fashion for us both. I would soon enter the strange times of junior high school, and then the treacherous world of high school - the tragic realities of the world becoming clearer and clearer with each passing step I took. And in similar fashion, shortly after that loss to UCLA when I stomped up my parent's staircase and threw a temper tantrum in my childhood bedroom, news outlets began to speak of scandal deep in the dark rooms of Crisler Arena that would plunge Michigan into a dark time.

Recent Sports Quotes

"This moment probably occurs at some point in your 20s, probably around the time you notice that, oh wow, most of the players in the game are younger than you are. That weird mind-flip. It's not that you stop loving, hating, or marveling over players. It's that by the time you're, say, 27, the open-horizon feeling of childhood has started to dwindle. You're beginning to lose that glimmery deep-down belief that everything is possible. You're playing sports less seriously than you used to, if you ever played sports seriously. You knew when you were 16 that you were never going to be Michael Jordan — of course you did — but a future in which you had become Michael Jordan was still available to your imagination; it was impossible but not irrelevant. Now it's both. You hit 30, 35, 40, and the life of a professional athlete seems more and more remote. It's one of a million pasts that never happened rather than a future you can dream about."

"God, let me watch sports like a 9-year-old forever."

- Brian Phillips, Grantland: Who Moved My Cheese?

"I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution."

- Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball

This post will be installed in segments. This is part 1. 

Previously: Life and Loss with the Red Wings

After getting rained on during my evening jog through these suburban neighborhoods - the domestic houses silent in the lazy Sunday dusk - I secluded myself away for the evening. I opened yet another tin of chewing  tobacco - another weekend away from booze, at least - and listened to the freezing rain patter on the rooftop and the February gales whistling through the treetops behind the house. A basketball game from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois glowed from the television screen, teams in bright orange and bright yellow executing layups at opposite ends of the court in the calm before the storm. It felt like a mid-winter's dream: I had spent years upon years of my life waiting for this moment, but it didn't feel real.

There I was, rapidly approaching the quarter century mark of my life, feeling like an old man: full of nostalgia and regret. Late November of 1992, when I was but a little tyke, was the last time a Michigan basketball team held the national number one ranking. That could all change that Sunday evening as I watched from the basement of the home I grew up in. It was supposed to mean something. Or so the sports media pundits would have you think. Any true basketball fan knows that a number one ranking in February means nothing. Yet it did mean something. It was a weight that followed me that night on my jog through the streets of my hometown, to the couch where I listened to the sounds of winter outside as I caught my breath from the bitter cold, through the narcotic high as the chewing tobacco sunk in.

What meant something wasn't any number one ranking, though. It was the twenty years in between number one rankings.

Baptism in Dirty Water:"He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have Any Timeouts!"

Life's narrative begins at our first memory. For me, that was the night my baby brother was born. I don't remember when my parents walked me to the Kapler's house next door as they departed for the hospital, although I know now that happened. I don't remember what games we played, or what movie we watched, or anything, at the Kapler's house that night. I  don't even remember my mom ever being pregant, really. But I remember quite distinctly how I couldn't sleep that night. I wanted to go home. I must have known something life-changing had happened. And I remember the sticky heat of that June night, when the Kapler's walked me across their green front lawn to my own house next door  in the middle of the night. My life would never be the same as soon as I walked into my house that night, for the first time ever as a brother.

Sports fans have similar moments - that first ever memory of when sport came into their lives like a new baby brother. For me, it was the Webber timeout.

There's a hazy, smoke-filled memory of a gathering at my new house; there's something important happening on the television screen - antennae sticking out and all in those days - glass mugs with some sort of brown substance in them, people a lot bigger than me congregated around the television set. Its sort of like one of those very late night bar memories where your memories are fuzzy and don't fit in any order. I'm under a table, or peeking from behind a couch, or something like that. The sports announcers on the television are shocked. The people in the room groan in unison, like they all found out someone just died. Chris Webber had called timeout.

My family's comically oversized computer, brand new in 1994, came with a complimentary Sports Illustrated: 1993 Year in Review CD-Rom. The images from that video compilation are as fresh in my mind today as they were in '94, as I watched that video hundreds of time, truly fascinated with this sports thing: Bama's George Teague stripping the ball from Miami in the Sugar Bowl, Mario Lemieux announcing his diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, America's Team, The Cowboys, winning the Super Bowl. But most prominent is the incredulous cry of the announcer, "He takes a timeout! They Don't Have any timeouts!" as Chris Webber found himself trapped in the corner amidst defenders cloaked in Carolina blue. The seconds were ticking away on the Fab Five era and on the national championship game, and Webber formed a "T" with his hands whilst tucking the ball under his arm.

Those words mesmerized me: : "He takes a timeout. They don't have any timeouts! Technical foul! Technical foul!"

There probably never was a boy more affected by the words "technical foul" than me. Over the years, those words ringed in my head during those endless classroom hours as the nuns scrawled Geography terms on the blackboards, the old radiator fumbling away in the background. I thought about Webber's facial expression after he called that timeout; pure sadness and regret was an emotion my five year-old self had never known. I spent countless after-school hours in front of the basketball hoop in my driveway, imagining I was Chris Webber during that moment. I desperately wanted to correct the frown on Webber's face, and I always pretended I was him going up for the last second shot. And I smiled, as if my play in my driveway could alter the course of fate. I hated that look on his face - it was just so sad.

It seems almost fitting now that a frown would play such a pivotal part in my sports upbringing: a baptism in dirty water.