Tourney week - the best there is

JIM ROSE Rose Beef

You can have Ohio State weekend, you can have the week of the Rose Bowl, you can even have Spring Break. They don't compare. They don't even come close.

This is, without a doubt, the best week of the year.

The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament starts Thursday, and as any basketball fan knows, the weekend that follows holds the greatest multi-day sporting event in existence. From the very second Pat O'Brien takes the podium on Thursday morning to the minute he staggers off it in a basketball marathon-induced daze late Sunday night, there are more great moments and amazing finishes than a hundred Super Bowls could ever produce.

But the part of this week that makes it so great - the part that is almost as much fun as the actual games - takes place well before the first game tips off. It's the part that thousands and thousands of people on this campus alone have already participated in during the past two days.

The picks. The pools. The beloved bracket of 64.

Let's face it, March Madness wouldn't be nearly as mad were it not for the Sunday-night-to-Thursday-morning frenzy that we're smack in the middle of and that, for a few glorious days, essentially renders the rest of the sports world moot. There's nothing better than pouring over the brackets, filling them out step by step, rushing to tell your friends about the brilliant upset you've pegged in the first round of the East Regional ... and then grabbing a new sheet to do it all again.

It's not enough to just enter a pool. You have to fill out as many brackets as you can possibly find - each with different winners, of course, with the idea that some permutation of picks will increase the chances you'll be right in at least one scenario. That way, when you're discussing the first-round upsets after the fact, you can say with some certainty, "Oh yeah, I had San Francisco over Utah in the first round," or, "Of course Northern Arizona was gonna knock off Cincinnati - I had that in my pool."

This year, it's even more exciting around here, with five teams from this state getting into the field for the first time ever. Michigan, Michigan State, Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan and Detroit are all invited to the Dance. So everybody has someone to root for.

It's better than football's bowl season because 64 teams, not just two or three, have a chance to finish in first place; it's better than hockey and baseball because everyone is talking about it.

The anticipation comes to a boil on Thursday, when the actual games get underway. So just in case you needed a reason to skip class on a dreary day in March, beginning at around noon this Thursday there will be four of them every couple hours.

And once it starts, it just keeps getting better. There's nothing like the first weekend, when the games never stop and the upsets seem to pour in every few hours. Of course, the down side to all of this is that by Friday afternoon, most people will be eliminated from most of the pools they've entered, but hey, that's part of the fun, too.

Right now, students at this university are in a unique situation. For little kids, this week is about heroes and future dreams; for grown-up types, it's about remembering tournaments of years ago. But for college students, it's about classmates. It's a brief but magical time when the guys on TV, playing in the biggest tournament of them all, are in the same stage of life as you are - or even, on occasion, in the same Kinesiology lecture as you are.

The men's basketball team is on a roll, and it's led by some special players - players who so far in their careers seem to thrive in spotlight situations.

And right now, the spotlights are warming up. By Friday, when Michigan faces Davidson in Atlanta, the lights will be hot and the action will be furious. And even though not everyone can head across the country to watch the Wolverines - or the Spartans, or the Eagles, or whomever - everyone can, in the meantime, feel a tiny part of it by watching the games with a few filled-out brackets on the table nearby.

-Jim Rose can be reached at jwrose@umich.edu

JOHN KRAFT/Daily LSA sophomore Bert Nahmad and Engineering sophomore Kunal Bhalia go over a newspaper's men's college basketball bracket yesterday.

03-10-98