PARIS—If this was America, Congress would be up in arms. No way you could get away with calling a nation-wide “day of action” on the third Thursday of March and giving millions of workers the day off. Too fishy. Obviously there’s a hidden motive there, beyond the earnest value of worker solidarity. Heck, enough people are skipping out of work today, regardless.
A union movement? Really, that’s your story? You must be joking.
But scheduling a strike in France on the first day of the NCAA basketball tournament – March Madness, or les Folies de Mars, the pet name I’ve just invented and am suddenly sort of sweet on – isn’t fishy at all, because the entire country isn’t huddled around a television watching Western Kentucky upset the University of Illinois. Nobody gives a merde.
A lot of people who care a lot about sports consider this the very best day on the year’s sporting calendar: the first day of the NCAA’s, with sixteen elimination games spread over the course of eleven hours, featuring colleges we know by name and reputation (those damn Dukies!), and a fresh crop of hopeful stars, some of whom we’ll get to know far better than we’d ever have expected over the course of the next three weeks.
But I had to ask the bartender at The Moose pub, a Canadian sports bar on the Left Bank, to put the first game of the afternoon on yesterday – the 12:20pm EST tilt between Louisiana State University and Butler. It was 5:20pm, local time (normally we’re six hours ahead of the Atlantic coast, but then you North Americans had to go fiddling with daylight savings time – we sensible Euro types don’t spring ahead for another week).
“Oh, the college basketball. I think that starts at midnight,” he said in perfect English. Mademoiselle Trotter and I were the only customers in the bar, other than a pair of French girls a couple tables over laughing at photos on a camera-phone. Three gorgeous flat-screen televisions in our section were showing golf, Irish rugby and South African cricket.
“Nope, it starts now.”
“Then I’ll see what I can do.”
The first trio of games featured two of those competitive-but-who-cares eight-versus-nine matchups, and a two-versus-fifteen tilt between Memphis and Cal State Northridge that stayed extremely tight throughout. But we were stuck watching the main CBS feed, of one of those meaningless contests to determine which one of two mediocre teams would win the rights to get blown out by a top-seed in the next round.
A couple other folks trickled in towards the end of these games, with CS Northridge looking frisky into the final minutes – and by “looking frisky” I mean “keeping the score tight in the little text box in the top corner of the screen, where they keep track of the games they’re not showing.” I had my laptop at the Moose, a reliable institution that serves up free wifi and Newcastle Brown Ale on tap. I adore both. At one point I figured out that you could stream NCAA games live, for free, on the NCAA website, so we caught the final fuzzy minutes of the Matadors’ failed upset bid, with Memphis pulling away in the final two minutes.
For the second set of games, beginning around 8pm, the crowd picked up. It sounded like a pretty even mix of English and French kids, and a couple friends of ours showed up, including Jen, who did her undergrad at North Carolina and shouted the occasional “Go Heels!” while her top seed demolished a sixteen-seed off-screen. We ordered wings and watched a truly mediocre set of four games, none of them close. There was no sound for the games, as the bar continued to play a classic Anglo-bar-music mix at louder and louder volumes, repeated several times (I’m pretty sure we heard the Police’s “Roxanne” at least four times in the seven hours we spend there).
I wanted to care more. I really did. I’d filled out a bracket on the New York Times website (reasoning that know-nothing secretaries always win March Madness pools, and clearly with the cost-cutting in print media the Times no longer employs any secretaries). Mine was much bolder than the one completed with great ceremony earlier this week, and captured on film for posterity by ESPN, by the President of the United States, an uncharacteristically boring parade of favourites to the Final Four that those in the betting world would call “chalk-heavy,” and I would call “prudent and unimaginative.” Hell, at least I had Gonzaga, my tragic bracket flaw for the umpteenth year now, winning the whole tournament, because I’m an idiot.
But it turns out I really didn’t care about tracking my picks and rooting for my predictions as my bracket was quickly and inevitably busted. I suppose my boundless passion for March Madness in past years had a lot to do with a broad and visceral sharing of that passion, a collective pact made by everyone around me to treat these basketball-laden afternoons in mid-March with great reverence and enthusiasm. It’s much harder to go it alone and stay excited.
The sporting event of the night, even in this predominantly Anglophone establishment, turned out to be the UEFA Cup football knockout match between Paris St-Germain and the Portuguese club Sporting Braga. It was 0-0 for eons, with groans and sighs of relief heard throughout the bar as both teams wasted scoring chances and rang shots off the posts and crossbars. And then the Parisians’ beanstalk-tall scoring machine, Guillaume Hoarau, came off the bench with fifteen minutes to play before the beginning of extra-time, and five minutes later deposited a clean header into the back of the net off a long free kick to give the Parisians a 1-0 lead with ten minutes to play.
As Hoarau’s header crossed the goal line, a shout went up, the sort normally reserved on a night like this with a small college, maybe a thirteen seed from an unknown Midwestern athletic conference, draining a late basket to beat a big school from the SEC or the Big Ten or the ACC – a thrilling last-minute exploit by Bucknell to shock Kansas in the first round, on the best sporting day of the North American calendar.
Thing is, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
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