Go Orange!

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

 

My father was a longtime Syracuse University basketball fan. He did his graduate studies at Syracuse, and for most of my life, a Syracuse blanket and pennants hung in the hallway of our attic (fan that he was, he was also tasteful enough not to hang it where most people could see it). He would listen to their games on the radio while he worked, and would watch them play on TV weekend afternoons. He wasn’t a stereotypical sports fan, though he watched most big games and could speak about the teams and players with a level of proficiency that always surprised me.

Instead, he was a microbiologist who studied water disinfection, helped develop the first water treatment facility in the world that uses granular activated carbon to disinfect water and then convinced Cincinnati to actually build his system. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for close to 40 years, and traveled the world researching and speaking about water. He woke up regularly at 4 in the morning in order to get started on his day’s work. I mean, he watched the Super Bowl in dress shirt and suit pants, for god’s sake, but he knew what the important plays meant to the outcome of the game.

He followed other teams besides Syracuse, particularly the Cincinnati Bearcats and their long struggle to get past the second round of the NCAA tournament. But he really lit up when Syracuse was playing. So this past weekend, when my partner Zac told me Syracuse had won a semifinal game against Connecticut in the Big East Conference Tournament after SIX overtimes, I paid much more attention than usual when presented with sports updates. This was my father’s team that played an additional 30 minutes over the usual amount, stretching a game that started at 9:30 in the evening to almost 1:30 the next morning. Syracuse guard Jonny Flynn played 67 minutes out of the game’s eventual 70 minutes, and a total of 8 players fouled out on both teams by the time Syracuse won.

Of course I understand, this was just one game. Nothing monumental hinges on college basketball, and usually, I feel a mild hostility towards interest in sports (and mild tends to be an understatement). But I couldn’t help imagining what my father would have said if he had seen this game, how his own work ethic would have informed his understanding of what the players were pushing themselves to do, and what they had accomplished by the end of the game. I thought, watching game highlights on the internet and the growing exhaustion overtaking the players on both teams, that my dad would have been having a blast. He would have popped some popcorn to go with his bedtime glass of milk, and he would have stayed up watching TV until the very last minute of the very last overtime, watching those orange jerseys move up and down the court, watching the orange tee-shirts in the stands. Atta boy! he would have yelled at the TV again and again.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast bureau chief of POTB and you can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com