When Basketball Was Postmodern

Well, March Madness is behind us, the NCAA tournament has come and gone, and spring rolls on. I'm sure you're wondering what postmodernism has to do with basketball and why people with degrees come up with such silly ideas anyway, but in this post I'm going to show you how it's done.

I was reminiscing about springs of years past and my freshman year in college in my last post, and I guess one thing leads to another. I'm now remembering my sophomore year, which was dominated by a long and snowy winter not unlike the one we've just had, only worse. The Eagles were singing "Hotel California," but we weren't having any of that dark desert highway business here. We got walloped by a late January storm and an accompanying deep snow that seemed to last for weeks. I had just gotten contact lenses and could hardly see for the glare; south campus resembled the Antarctic more than the Bluegrass. It was a year when spring could not have come too soon.

It was also the year our school won its fifth NCAA basketball title. I was a big basketball fan back then and still remember how disappointing it had been when Kentucky lost to North Carolina in the East Regional the year before. It's strange how vividly I remember that, but of course, it was a time of new experiences for me. The night we did win, in March of 1978, everyone poured out of the dorms in a spontaneous Dionysian outburst that involved yelling, dancing around, and jumping up and down and seemed to combine basketball frenzy with a sort of spring ecstasy. At one point, a random boy appeared next to us and lifted my roommate (who was not a small girl) off her feet and into the air. I still remember her expression, wavering between smiling and shocked. People were climbing the lamp posts, or trying to.

There was something akin to Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring," with its pagan energy, going on that night, though for sheer pandemonium the scene may have had more in common with Hieronymous Bosch. I didn't see any destructive acts, but there were some gravity-defying ones.

As it happened, I was taking a music appreciation course that semester (I think there may even have been a basketball player in the class). We had listened to things as varied as medieval chant, Henry VIII's "Pastime With Good Company," and Janis Joplin, but the most memorable recording was the one our instructor -- a good-natured sort who didn't seem to mind explaining polyphony to undergraduates -- played for us at the end of the year. We had been studying modern composers, and he played a piece and asked us to try to identify what it was. The dissonance and unsettled energy made me think of Stravinsky, and I was sure that's what it was. Our professor surprised us by explaining that it was a recording he had made of "you people" while standing outside his apartment the night UK won the tournament.

The sounds of celebration had resolved into a cacophony in which human voices and car horns and goodness knows what else were indistinguishable from the strings, horns, and percussion of an orchestra playing something postmodern and daringly experimental, with the spirit of "The Rite of Spring." You'd never have believed it, but it was terribly avant-garde.

I guess this says something about archetypal energy that manifests itself both naturally and in artistic productions; also something about how we are often a part of something without fully recognizing what it looks like from the outside. I'm grateful for that music instructor who had the wit to record what he heard, giving me, all these years later, an explanation as to why March is the perfect time for basketball tournaments. I've come to realize how often there's mythology inside the most ordinary things, something that never would have occurred to me that long-ago night, in my fish out of water days, united with my cohorts for a little while when basketball brought down the house.