INDIANAPOLIS
— When the ball was thrown up for Florida and Virginia Tech at just past noon,
so began in earnest a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
men’s tournament that is certain to be unique. The squeaks of sneakers, the
fierce competitiveness of a survive-and-advance competition and the March
Madness-branded basketball court were familiar, but little else was as 16 games
in six venues in and around Indianapolis were to be played Friday.
اضافة اعلان
The
atmosphere was as extraordinary as the efforts undertaken to put on a 68-team,
19-day tournament during a pandemic that in its nascent stage last March wiped
out the NCAA’s nearly $1 billion cash cow.
Vast arenas
— like the football stadium where the NFL’s Colts play — or quaint venues like
historic Hinkle Fieldhouse or Farmers Coliseum on the Indiana State Fairgrounds
were occupied by only a small fraction of their capacity.
There were
neither bands nor cheerleaders, giving most games an ambience of an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) summer
tournament where the stands are filled mostly by parents and hard-core fans.
Without the
roar of the crowd to spur them on, players often could only turn to their
competitive juices for a jolt of inspiration. And thrilling moments — like a
late 3-pointer by Virginia Tech’s Nahiem Alleyne that forced overtime — were
mostly muted in person without the usual soundtrack of a crowd’s throaty roar.
A number of
teams — Georgia Tech, Kansas and Oklahoma — were without key players this
weekend after they tested positive for the virus. And Virginia, which is
scheduled to open the tournament Saturday, is not even certain to play after
spending the last week in quarantine after dropping out of the Atlantic Coast
Conference Tournament because of an outbreak. The team flew to Indianapolis on
Friday.
Ohio State,
the second seed from the South region, was knocked out not by the virus, but by
upstart Oral Roberts, which stunned the Buckeyes 75-72 in overtime for the
first upset of what is shaping up to be a turbulent tournament, on and off the
court.
Not long
after that, Oregon State, the 12th seed in the Midwest region, upset Tennessee
70-56. It was Oregon State’s first tournament win since 1982.
“Everything
is unusual about it until you get on the floor,” said Lucas Williamson, a
senior guard at Loyola-Chicago, whose players were thankful to play before some
of their fans, who drove down from Chicago, for the first time this season. “Once
you’re on the court, you’re just playing basketball.”
Chaos on the
court would be a welcome distraction for the NCAA. Its president, Mark Emmert,
and the organization have been under attack in recent days by the players, who
have been quarantined, tested daily and isolated in hotels for nearly a week
before taking center stage.
Just as one
tempest — a social media campaign urging the NCAA to grant athletes the right
to profit off their fame — began to simmer down Thursday, another one cropped
up: the unequal treatment of women after an Oregon player, Sedona Prince,
posted on social media a video of a few dumbbells that constituted the workout
area for women’s teams at their tournament, which is to begin Sunday in Texas.
Then Friday
came news that while the men were administered polymerase chain reaction tests
for the coronavirus, the women were given the less reliable antigen tests.
Even before
all that, six referees were sent home for violating virus protocols by having
dinner together.
In downtown
Indianapolis on Friday morning, fans who did travel here wandered the streets —
many with their mask on their chin — for a tournament that in normal times
would have left the downtown district teeming with people. As Arkansas fans
began to trickle into Bankers Life Fieldhouse, the home of the NBA’s Pacers, they
began to congregate in pods.
Instead of
games stacked on top of each other — normally teams are lined up in the tunnel
waiting to take the court as soon as the preceding teams have cleared it —
there was a 30-minute gap between contests so the benches could be disinfected
by at least a dozen workers wearing clear-tub backpacks of sanitizing spray
that was dispensed through hoses to douse the seats.
Teams did
not really have benches, but a series of 34 chairs spaced out in a grid to accommodate
the members of each team’s travel party, who have undergone daily testing for
at least a week and will continue to do so until the team is eliminated.
Broadcasters at Hinkle sat alone, across the court from the scorer’s table with
20 rows of empty seats behind them.
“The energy
is not the same,” said Sharron Mack, who came from Gainesville, Florida, and is
a close friend of a Florida player. “Less fans, less energy.”
She added of
the pandemic: “A lot of people are afraid to be out and enjoy themselves. If
you come to a tournament like this, you go for the pleasure of it. This
prohibits a lot of that.”
For at least
one game, though, the atmosphere changed markedly, when an energetic group of
Georgia Tech students were on their feet for tipoff, doing their best to
inspire their team, whose best player, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) player
of the year Moses Wright, had tested positive. (A teammate, Jose Alvarado, wore
Wright’s number.) The students chanted, “Let’s go, Jackets,” drawing a finger
point of approval from a Tech player during warm-ups.
It was a
heartening gesture, a moment of connection between players and fans, one that
for this tournament is sure to be diminished, if it exists at all.
.jpg)
.jpg)
