Seven years ain’t that long

The young men who will play the game tonight in San Jose (10:15pm EST) were junior high or high school students when two other teams established the importance of their roles. They were the street game on-lookers when those older men established an unlikely rivalry between West Coast and Midwest. Tonight, fate has lent the ghosts of those 1995 teams a night to re-live…and perhaps change what happened. Even the match up of a number eight seed with a number 12 seemed unlikely a week ago. But in a mere seven hours, ten men will sweat California sweat and give hope to a legion of Missouri Tiger fans who seven years ago at this time were preparing to throw things.

I’ve never been much of one to throw things. It always seemed silly and slightly infantile to me. I once dated a girl named Tasha. It was a relationship with all the power and destructive intensity of a thunder storm on the Great Plains. It was born of a cold and warm front and ended in the destruction of several small trailer parks. She was a thrower. I still can’t remember why I thought it was at all romantic to buy her a blown glass–or maybe it was crystal–dolphin. But I can remember its demise…a slightly happy-looking dolphin smashing through a petty argument and into a thousand dolphin pieces. Tasha was a thrower and maybe that’s why it never worked out between us. I don’t like to throw things.

March of 1995 was a different kind of month. I was fresh out of a frustrating relationship with the daughter of a fireworks stand owner. I was just back from a hedonist’s adventure to New Orleans. And the Missouri Tigers were a mere 4.8 seconds from beating the team that would go on to become the national champions. I sat in the corner of a sectional sofa that my parents gave me. That corner held a lot of memories for me, some good, some bad. I had every hope that what I was about to experience would be something akin to what my brother caught me doing in that corner one night with the girl down the street.

The complicated possiblity that Missouri would actually be “in” at that point in the game was too much to handle. I was clutching a plastic/rubber shark. It had traveled with me back from New Orleans, out of a grenadine-colored drink called the Shark Attack. I was giving the little son of a gun a real workout. As UCLA Bruins’ Tyus Edney took the ball (we didn’t know at the time that his coach had told him that the game was his to win or lose), I clutched the shark by its tail.

Edney might as well have been on wings. He flew down the court and laid up the ball. It drifted over a set of Tiger fingers. One person later said if Grimm had cut not cut his fingernails that morning, the game would’ve belonged to the Tigers. As the ball slipped through the net and Tiger Juilan Winfield started to cry…I let little sharky fly. I threw that son of a fish harder than I’d ever thrown anything. It sailed across the house. I don’t think I ever apologized to it or the roommates I almost beaned in the noggin.

According to published reports, Edney now plays ball in Europe. Team Benneton or something. He’s in Barcelona for a game tonight and plans to turn on his TV at 4:00am (Spanish Time) to see what happens.

At the same time, Missouri Fans around the country will tune and try to fix what has been broken in their hearts for the last seven years.

Few of those young men who will hit the boards tonight will truly know their fans’ emotion. Those young Tigers have a whole new set of emotions to experiece tonight. We as fans will watch them play and hope that we can share that excitement and mainline adrenaline with them. They will make their own history and try not to care about what happened seven years ago. And we as fans should encourage them to play their own game.

But as we watch that clock tick toward 4.8 seconds, we will feel that tightness in our chest, that sweat on our upper lip, and the pain in our hands as we clutch whatever is within clutching distance. And if anything even remotely similar to what happened in 1995 occurs, the people around us better duck. Seven years ain’t that long and two heartbreaks in seven years is enough to turn a weakling like me into major league hurler.

I’ve got to go look for my shark.