Which one of us is the Ogre?
I had a lede in mind for this column, something about how I regret nothing and everything about the George Mason Obsession circa 2006-2011. And while that is still true, I have to start this by noting I went to KenPom.com late last night to figure out exactly how many days and games have elapsed since Hofstra faced George Mason in men’s basketball.
It’s been 3,568 days and 301 games. And the Dutchmen’s most lopsided loss in that span was…3,568 days and 301 games ago, when George Mason rolled to a 79-50 win at the Arena. Because OF COURSE I established my #TwitterBrand for ranting after a loss that was nowhere near as lopsided as the third-most lopsided conference defeat the Dutchmen have suffered since joining the CAA.
(I should really be madder at Blaine Taylor and Ron Hunter for the beatdowns Old Dominion and Georgia State delivered in March 2003 and March 2012, respectively, but who can ever get mad at Blaine Taylor and Ron Hunter?)
And as it turns out, no one, except George Mason fans, could get mad at Paul Hewitt, who, if anything, displayed gentleness towards Hofstra during and following that rout on Feb. 20, 2013. The Patriots, taking on a Dutchmen team depleted by injuries and arrests during the worst season in school history, were up by as many as 32 points in the second half and probably could have won by 52 if they felt like it.
Instead, they eased off the gas pedal, and afterward, Hewitt shared a warm handshake and appeared to offer some comforting words to Mo Cassara. Which sure beat the second half haranguing about being outside of the coach’s box and the dead fish handshake Cassara got from Jim Larranaga — heretofore identified as C. Montgomery Larranaga — during and after the Dutchmen’s 87-74 win at the Arena on Jan. 5, 2011.
It always comes back to C. Montgomery Larranaga. Even now, far enough removed from the nightmare that was the 2006 NCAA Tournament — when George Mason, whose athletic director was on the selection committee, made the Final Four after getting an at-large bid over Hofstra, which beat George Mason twice in a 10-day span, including in a CAA semifinal game in which Tony Skinn delivered an abdominal injury to Loren Stokes by punching him in the nuts, oh God, I’m getting mad all over again — and old enough to recognize I wouldn’t react to that and everything thereafter now like I did then, the guy and his Final Four team still provide a visceral reaction. It’s sort of like my late great Casey Cat hissing and scratching whenever he saw the veterinarian.
(Hey idiot, you are trying to convince people you regret some of your past actions, should probably stop comparing yourself to a cat trying to attack a vet)
Aaaanyway, Hofstra facing George Mason — in its 10th season since moving to the Atlantic 10 — is a reminder I surely have Tweeted at least a couple multiples of 3,568 times about my contempt for George Mason in the aftermath of the Selection Sunday Screw Job. And the number of words I’ve written about said topic is DEFINITELY a number many, many multiples of 3,568. I mean, for goodness sakes, I wrote 2,227 words over two separate blog posts ALONE about the Patriots’ 90-72 win over the Dutchmen on Jan. 19, 2010.
That was an interesting month. I drove to Fairfax for the first Hofstra-Mason game of the year on Jan. 4 and had a pretty good time with former Mason student Ryan Sonner — who didn't end up graduating from there but is still the first Mason-connected person I’d ever befriended! — and some of his former classmates, even though the Dutchmen lost 67-63. Then I got into a frightening car accident on the way home when a drunk driver slammed into the side of my car on 495 outside of Baltimore, sending me careening across four lanes of traffic before I found myself going backwards in drive in a non-breakdown lane.
Somehow, no one was injured. A few minutes later, before she failed a field sobriety test and got arrested, the driver who hit me asked where I’d been before the crash. I told her a college basketball game in Fairfax.
“Oh, George Mason?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I went there.”
No shit. Now they were actually trying to kill me.
And things got even weirder the next day, when we were both retrieving items from our cars at the same junkyard, buried so deep in the woods and manned by such a strange-looking mechanic that I was sure this random reunion with the driver who crashed into me was part of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
I would like to declare that series of events excused my behavior following George Mason’s decisive victory in the rematch at Hofstra. But the truth was I was madder over Ryan Pearson sinking a 3-pointer in the final minute of that win than I was over getting sideswiped by a Mason alum with a buzz and a vendetta (I assume, anyway). Even by the standards of sports fanaticism, that’s pretty messed up.
I was convinced Pearson and C. Montgomery Larranaga were running up the score on Hofstra (they were) and unloaded almost four years worth of frustration during the aforementioned Tweets and blog posts. It wasn’t the first time I’d ranted about George Mason, but it was the first time my words found an audience outside of Mike Litos and a handful of other readers of Defiantly Dutch.
Tweets with the #CAAHoops hashtag used to automatically collate on the CAAZone message board. Mason fans took great delight in telling me what a loser I was (past tense!) in posts about and Tweets replying to me. Someone even started a fake Twitter called Defiantly Bitch. I also got a bunch of emails making fun of me and my then-employment status.
Was it a lot of fun in the moment? Not especially, though my wife was amazed at the reaction my Tweets and blog posts got. I believe her first words to me the next morning were “You’ve got to see what they’re saying about you at the CAAZone.” Now that’s love.
But it also ended up being, pretty quickly, a reminder of what is now looked back upon as a somewhat simpler time. I say somewhat simpler because it’s cliched to think that the past was always simpler. I had a lot going on in early 2010, nothing of which was more impactful than trying to come to terms with the death of my Mom in March 2009. There was nothing simple or nostalgic about that time.
But in terms of a community on social media, early 2010 was definitely the good ol’ days. The #CAAHoops community was budding and filled with like-minded people who found one another on this still-nascent thing called Twitter. Whether we were approaching middle age or in college, most of us were schooled in traditional media and conditioned to believe that we were the outliers in focusing our passions on mid-major hoops afforded only slivers of coverage in newspapers and on TV.
The blogs focused on #CAAHoops (thanks again, Litos) and Twitter proved we weren’t alone. There were other people who felt like we felt, and Twitter, in particular, provided an organic and euphoric way to find each other.
Sight unseen, we’d trade tales of fandom, establish inside jokes (The Wolf converts eight-point plays and solves problems for Hofstra), put the CAA into pop culture terms only we’d understand (there was one email thread about St. Elmo’s Fire as the CAA) and create friendships.
One longtime friend from this community says his wife calls mid-major hoops soap operas for men. I think that’s a great way to describe it, even if I scheduled my college classes around “Guiding Light.” (You didn’t think I’d write this long without mentioning something that would make me the target of jokes again, did you?)
And in 2010, with Twitter still in its innocent phase, it was easy enough for the relationship with Mason fans to unfold like an ‘80s movie in which the instant mortal enemies eventually united, a la Ogre and the Nerds. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which party here is Ogre and which one is the Nerds!
We could argue and call each other names, but there was a common ground to rooting for another CAA school. Simply seeing someone else Tweet about the CAA, even if his or her comments made us mad, was enough to mash the follow button.
In these more innocent times, being on opposite sides of an issue didn't entrench us to the point where the block or mute button was almost immediately deployed. Nor did we have to scroll through his or her feed first to figure out if he or she, say, seemed to support the idea of a violent overthrow of the United States government.
By March 2010 -- barely a month after Ryan Pearson ran up the score -- I was meeting and shaking hands with Mason fans at the CAA Tournament. Over the subsequent dozen-plus years, the friendship has evolved to discussing shared interests, from baseball — I’ve met up multiple times at sporting events with Mason fans I met via Twitter — to parenthood. There have been messages and gestures of support through health scares and health battles involving one another or family members.
In much more mundane matters, some of the nicest comments I got in those blissful 18 or so hours in which it appeared Hofstra was going to the 2020 NCAA Tournament were from Mason fans. Despite March Madness being canceled, my friend Ryan paid up on a long-ago bet in which we’d agreed that whenever one of our alma maters finally made the NCAA Tournament again, the other one would have to buy a shirt of the advancing school and be photographed wearing it. A few months later, he bought a Cameo message from Jim Larranaga wishing me a Happy Birthday. Now THAT was funny.
This is both hilarious and triggering.
You know what would be even funnier? Buying him a Cameo message from Speedy Claxton if (pardon me, when) Hofstra wins tonight in the first game between the schools in almost 10 years. Despite our harmonious relationship, a Hofstra-Mason game is still a big deal. My phone blew up with messages and Tweets from Mason fan friends when the game was announced.
A Hofstra fan friend asked me this week which rivalry game was bigger: The United States-Iran soccer game or Hofstra-Mason. What a dumb thing to ask. Of course the answer is Hofstra-Mason.
As a, uhh, man in his late 40s here in late 2022, I have matured (snort) enough to both believe I overreacted in January 2010. Yet I still desire to see the Dutchmen to get revenge for March 2006 and Ryan Pearson running up the score and everything that happened in between.
But I will not be driving to the game in Fairfax because, well, you know, someone might try crashing into my car on the way back. Instead, Mason Nation and everyone else in the #CAAHoops family past and present interested in this game, I’ll see you where we all met — on Twitter.
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