Season's bleatings

Madness of March takes on whole new meaning

March is usually the kindest month for sports fans, mixing promise and desire, stirring playoff races with spring exhibition games. This year that good feeling is hard to catch. This year, March just seems like Madness.

The drumbeat sounds from well beyond our little sports world, of course. News of impending war, of the lives at stake, of a fractious United Nations, of a receding economy, tends to push the balls and bats and pucks and nets into the margins of our minds. For a while after Sept. 11 the New York Times did away with its standalone sports section altogether.

But if sport is fanciful, a place to which we can escape, at least we should find relief there, some hint of false hope. Instead, we find this: In college basketball, at a time when the thrill of tournament victories, and seeding suspense, should consume the sports pages, one team after another -- from Fresno, Calif., to Olean, N.Y. -- has sanctioned itself because it couldn't play by the rules. The odious intractable face on all of this is Jim Harrick, the Georgia coach who was suspended this week, as the Bulldogs withdrew from postseason play. Harrick has been dogged by troubles and violations and questionable ethics wherever he has gone, and is the sort of figure who casts a pall over the game.

In baseball, at a time when every team should be trumpeting its pennant dreams, surveying its roster optimistically, the fields have been clouded by talk of ephedra, and by the lingering spring image of Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler being led off the field on a cart not long before his death. And ephedra may not even be the major leagues' most pressing drug issue; this week 16 White Sox players nearly refused to take a steroid test. It was a symbolic stand intended to show how toothless baseball's testing procedure really is.

In the NHL, during that sweet pre-Stanley Cup time when teams are fighting for a playoff berth, for the chance to make a run in the greatest of all playoff seasons, we have seen dozens of trades. Far too many of them were made with money, not playing skills, in mind. And in far too many of them, a rich (or at least solvent) team exploited a poor (or insolvent) one. The divide between the league's haves and have-nots grows.

In the NFL this week, amid all the free-agent buzz, eight officials were asked to resign, a development that only highlights the galling officiating mistakes that soiled last season's playoffs.

And if all this weren't enough Michael Jordan may have fewer than 20 games remaining in his career.

Oh, there are bits of happy tidings. Kobe Bryant is glorious in new fatherhood. U.S. skiers seem to be peaking. Dougie Gilmour is back in Toronto. A college kid has hit safely in 59 consecutive baseball games. And Villanova's upset of UConn adds some real intrigue to the women's NCAA Tournament.

In that pleasant frame we turn again to the men's college basketball tournaments. We ignore the many scandals, and savor the excitement of the conference championships. We think ahead to the release of the seedings and the bracket that begins our favored March ritual. We anticipate being on the edge of our seats in the middle of a workday, transfixed by an upset in progress. Then we check our listings and are reminded that this year CBS Sports has "contingency plans." If a war in Iraq begins the network will of course cover it, and will air the basketball games on cable stations such as TNN and Nickelodeon. A sports escape can only take you so far.

It's enough to make you want to cry out, "Wait 'til next year" and hope, however warily, that March 2004 will be a little less mad. Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides each week at SI.com.

 

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