There’s a lot of shit going on right now with Vanderbilt basketball. My hammering of the hornets’ nest released a low-grade fug that everyone acknowledges was there all along, made worse by the whole “the future is now” problem. It may not make sense to judge our coach on the thin sample size of tournament games in March, as some have objected, but the problem is that we have seven losses already – four of them at home, where we’re never supposed to lose. It’s all well and good to say that winning twenty-some-odd games a year is worthwhile, but when we’re not winning, it’s not good enough to turn around and say that the postseason will redeem us…unless it does.
And ultimately, that’s the issue with a team like Vanderbilt. You can win games in the regular season, you can have big upsets (four straight times we’ve knocked off a #1 team in the country, and six of nine all time – and don’t forget the five straight wins against top-25 foes in 2007), but they don’t hang banners for a Very Good Season. Either you win the SEC regular-season crown (last accomplished in 1993) or you win the SEC tournament (last accomplished…1974? Maybe?) or you do something impressive in March Madness. I suppose you could run the table and win the NIT (1990) but that would be one hell of a letdown for a team that came into the preseason as a top-10 squad with rumblings of Final Four potential.
So in the end, you’ve got to win something. Like baseball winning the regular season and the tournament in 2007 (before getting ignominiously dumped out by Michigan). Like baseball winning the Super-Regional last year against an Oregon State squad that was inexplicably ranked above us for most of the season. You need an accomplishment.
And for my sports teams, accomplishments have been tough to come by. Cal did technically win a piece of the Pac-10 title in 2006 – and may be retroactive 2004 champs as well – but there was no Rose Bowl berth, so it hardly seems like an actual title. Vanderbilt basketball’s shortcomings once the calendar hits March are well-documented in this space. Vanderbilt football measured accomplishment mostly by whether they covered the spread on a top-25 foe, until this season – but nobody expects us to be challenging for the SEC championship and it would take a miracle on the order of turning water into Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old bourbon. And the Redskins last won a Super Bowl in 1991 – and have a total of three playoff appearances in the two decades since. At least Celtic could be relied on for something every year – a league title, or some sort of cup – but that was my most tangential connection of all, and even that went by the boards once Gordon Strachan left the bench. And as if to mock me deliberately, God has seen fit to grant Alabama not one but TWO national championships since I disavowed the Crimson Tide for anything but Auburn and Tennessee games.*
Which begs the question: why that? Why not something more substantive? How about getting Barack Obama in the White House? Well yeah, that was awesome, but it was substantively ruined by Prop 8 the same night. Passing the health-care bill? That was a shitshow, a half-assed job made necessary by the incompetence of Harry Reid and the continuing effort of the Village and their amen corner on cable news to call a spade a fucking shovel.
Well, what about me?
I don’t talk much about work here, for obvious reasons – in Silicon Valley, blogging about your current job is what’s known as a career-limiting move – but when I took this one, I had a simple plan. Year one – rookie of the year. Year two – most improved player. Year three – MVP. Year four – The Wolf, a la ‘Er Indoors at her job. (Or me back in DC that last year, to be honest.)
Well, to cut a long story short, it happened. About a month ago, I got called into the office and handed a letter containing an embarrassingly glowing review and a serious off-cycle raise, to the tune of almost 10%. It would be tough to come up with a more convincing case that I nailed the year-three target dead center. And I celebrated, sort of. We all went to dinner and didn’t skimp on the booze, I bought myself a fine bottle of St George absinthe and an expensive new pair of jeans, and – as is traditional now for any pay increase – a new Nerf gun (the aforementioned Jolt-EX1, which goes in my bag everywhere my laptop goes now).
But it’s not the same. Setting aside the years and years of humility bashed into my brain as a kid, it’s not the sort of thing where you wear the championship T-shirt around. I don’t have the HOLY SHIT WHOOP ASS songs on the iPhone playlist a la Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” or Led Zep’s “Good Times Bad Times” or M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” that went along with previous Vanderbilt successes in recent years.
Why not, though? Why not pick a couple of appropriately ebullient tracks to boom loud while throwing together the championship ensemble with the new jeans and the notional seersucker jacket** and hell, the Vandy Brooks Brothers button-up, and just swag out and enjoy the moment? Well, for one, it doesn’t emotionally feel like that big a deal – it’s not something that you see your other fans for the next few months and fist-pump and cheer about. And for another – the moment’s over. Year four is underway and it’s a monster, and there’s no time for sitting around woofing about how great year three went.
All of this dovetails nicely with the upcoming birthday. This isn’t the ancient world, where living to thirty-five made you a wizened old veteran – pretty much anybody can turn forty these days, happens all the time. It’s sure not the sort of thing I’m going to go around being pumped about for months afterward, the way you tend to at sixteen or twenty-one.
Championships don’t come around that often, not even vicariously (unless you’re the Yankees, or Duke, or Manchester United, and looked at from that angle it’s no wonder they attract so many bandwagoning sons of bitches). In the end you have to make your own championship. And celebrate accordingly. And it all comes full circle back to the problem of seeking external validation.
It should be obvious by now that imaging a new PC is a long, slow, tedious, agonizing process that takes hours and leaves plenty of time to talk shite on the internet.
* Yes, the Giants, but even though that was a landmark World Series win in 2010, and I was happy, and the wife even went to the parade – it’s not like I was ever stuck into them the way I was with any of the other sports I mentioned, even Celtic. I’ve been to maybe half a dozen games ever and I watch maybe two or three regular season games a year when I can be arsed, so I didn’t have the emotional investment that most of San Francisco had.
** Notional my ass, 30% off at Nordstrom.com. I bought that shit.