The Madness of March

Houston's rise in NCAA tournament brings back long-ago memories

Note: Much of this essay was first published in March 2023, when I had far fewer subscribers and was hopeful that the University of Houston men’s basketball team would make it back to the Final Four. Alas, they didn’t, but they did on Sunday, causing me to revisit and update this piece.

Left: The cover of the University of Houston men’s basketball media guide for this year. Right: A vintage Phi Slamma Jamma poster produced by Bud Light that used to hang in my college dorm room. (The drinking age was 18 at the time.)

March is always a transitional month. The climate gets into a wrestling match pitting winter against spring. Clocks move forward and screw us all up. The freelance work starts to emerge from months of hibernation.

In sports, football begrudgingly cedes most of the airwaves to baseball, hockey, and basketball — sports for which I have varying levels of interest. I love baseball, still don’t know how hockey works, and am not that interested in pro basketball.

College basketball, however, is a different story, especially in March. For three decades, I have been part of my wife’s college basketball loving family — one that bleeds UNC. When the Tar Heels are playing well, all is right with the world; when they’re not, Jill and my in-laws are in alternate states of denial, defeat, and disgust.

That is why, after decades in a hellscape when trying to rooting for my alma mater, I’ve been so surprised by the revival at the University of Houston, which advanced to its second Final Four in four years on Sunday. More than 40 years after the heyday of Phi Slama Jamma and 33 straight years without a NCAA tournament win, the Cougars have now reached the Sweet 16 six consecutive times — the longest current streak in college basketball.

UH’s ascent comes with a mix of hope trepidation and fatalism to a longtime fan. This is the team’s seventh Final Four appearance; Houston is the only program to make it that far that many times without winning it all.

The Agony of Defeat

In sports, I hold lifelong grudges. I still have one against the Pittsburgh Steelers more than four decades after they defeated the Houston Oilers in back-to-back AFC championships in the late 1970s. And I have a continued animus toward North Carolina State after Jim Valvano’s team defeated the UH in the NCAA championship in March 1984. The annual clip of Valvano running around, looking desperately for someone to hug, brings acid reflux with it every time.

The UH-N.C. State game, one of the biggest upsets in college basketball history, took place during my freshman year in college. It was the height of Phi Slama Jama, a term coined the previous year by Houston Post columnist Thomas Bock to describe a team that used its athleticism to dunk on anyone and everyone.

UH made it to the championship the following year, losing to Georgetown, and then began a three-decade slide into mediocrity. By the time I moved to North Carolina in 1993, I was years removed from paying attention, preferring to focus my limited attention span instead on the Houston Rockets, who were then were led by UH’s Hakeem Olajuwon.

Because my focus was on pro football, baseball, and basketball, I didn’t realize the depth of what I was getting into when I moved to North Carolina. At the time, NASCAR and the Charlotte Hornets were the only professional games in the state, and college sports — specifically basketball — were and still are kings.

The year I moved to Reidsville, UNC had just won its second national championship under legendary Coach Dean Smith. When Jill and I got together, she refused to go out with me during the ACC tournament unless we could find some place to watch the game.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, although I found myself facing a steep learning curve given my DNA was injected with football before I left the hospital. Some would claim the same happens with college basketball in North Carolina, which has four ACC teams — UNC, N.C. State, Duke, and Wake Forest — within two hours of each other.

The rivalries — especially Duke and UNC — run deep, so much so that they were parodied in this commercial that aired during March Madness games this year.

The End of an Era

I arrived at UH as a freshman in the fall of 1983, having finished the summer after high school graduation working at the Texas City Sun. My first front page byline appeared in The Daily Cougar on the first day of classes; by year’s end, I had spent so much time working for the campus newspaper that the university “gently encouraged” me to go to a community college.

My best friend from those days was Brian, a sportswriter and English lit major who came from an upper middle-class family and all of the stereotypical shitshow issues you can attach to that. Brian was five years older, a semi-reformed stoner and the only person I knew at the time who seemed determined to stretch a four-year degree program into a decade-long experiment.

Brian and I shared interests in music, books, and sports. He was also a girl magnet, and a mentor in that department for what to do (and, sadly, not to do). For more than two decades, he was the older brother I never had.

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The night UH lost to N.C. State, the entire newsroom got loaded on cheap beer while filing on-campus reaction stories. Given we both were from the Houston area, we were used to our teams disappointing us. It was one reason Brian started rooting for the Dallas Cowboys — “I have to have at least one team that wins,” he said.

The following season, 1984-85, I was working in Texas City and Brian was logging time doing agate (the small type that used to be on the statistics and standings pages) compilations for the Post. After filing my stories, three or four times a week we would talk late at night using the Sun’s Houston line, which we had to avoid long-distance phone charges when we called any place north of the Texas City city limits.

After UH’s loss to Georgetown in 1985, Houston entered a dark era, not winning a single NCAA tournament game for 33 years. But the program has seen a resurgence under Coach Kelvin Sampson, ironically coming at a time when ACC programs — UNC included — have struggled to match past successes.

Finally, after several years of lobbying on my part and UNC’s early departure from the tournament, Jill has agreed to root for Houston this year. Sweetening the pot for us both: UH faces Duke — a heavy favorite to win it all — in the first Final Four game on Saturday.

Remembering a Friend

Over the years, Brian and I remained friends, moving from job to job and place to place through our personal ups and downs. We both married and had kids. We both left newspapers and went into communications. I moved out of Texas, got divorced, and remarried; he separated numerous times from his wife and stayed in Houston because he was afraid he would lose access to his sons.

Still close, we remained in touch, but the calls became less frequent. On occasion, we still would catch up on a late night, reminiscing and talking about the things we mutually loved, and we always chatted before the NFL season started to give our predictions. Given I lived in the D.C. area, Brian razzed me about Washington’s football team and the Cowboys’ ongoing superiority.

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In the summer of 2005, Brian and his wife separated again. Although I reached out, we didn’t talk for several months, which felt strange because the Houston Astros were en route to their first World Series and we had been to so many baseball games together. I left several messages on his voicemail at work with no response, which came as a surprise because it meant there would be no NFL preview chat.

I figured we would talk before Washington played Dallas on Monday Night Football, the 15th such meeting between the two teams. After Washington won 14-13 against the heavily favored Cowboys in what was dubbed “The Monday Night Miracle,” I called his work and apartment and left messages without a response. A few days later, I left for a conference in Las Vegas.

While there, I got a phone call from Sandra Santos, a UH classmate and mutual friend who somehow tracked me down. Brian had died by suicide; it was his second attempt. He had been on medical leave from work and had died alone in his apartment.

Brian’s death, at 45, was soul crushing, in part because I had not realized the depths of his depression. It took me a long time to realize there was nothing I could have done, especially from 1,200 miles away.

Since then, I have made a conscious effort to reach out to those I care most about in this life, no matter how far flung from each other we are. I’m know how lucky I am to have a terrific extended family, a motley crew of folks biological and otherwise that I speak with regularly.

I think of Brian often, especially around this time of year. Almost 20 years after his death, I still ask all the questions one asks. As I get older, I think of other friends who have been lost along the way. It’s a reminder to take the time to seek out someone you haven’t thought of in a while.

Because you just never know.

Here’s to you, Brian. I hope this year, as I do every year, that UH can win it all.