Holiday fail

I never liked holiday basketball tournaments.

I never liked the idea of giving high school kids Christmas Day off and then, on the day after, hauling them back into the gym to play a two-or-three-day tournament because why not.  I mean, who would want schoolkids to actually get a break on their Christmas break?

Now, I confess, this was not my only reasoning. Mostly my reasoning involved self-interest, as it usually does for sportswriters. Truth is, I wanted a break at Christmas, too. And holiday high school basketball tournaments righteously fenged that shui.

(I wasn't alone, either. I know of at least one area high school coach back in the day who hated the local holiday tournament. And for the same reason I did, though he framed it as a break for the kids. Didn't fool me, though.)

In any event, watching Big Ten basketball on Christmas Day yesterday brought all that back to me.

It's not that I didn't enjoy watching Michigan State and Wisconsin slug it out or Purdue beat Maryland or Minnesota get the lordly Iowa Hawkeyes up there in its icy lair and knock 'em off. And I got the argument for it: The players were all bubbled-up away from their families anyway, so why not play?

But something about it just felt wrong. And that something, of course, is what's wrong with corporate college athletics in general.

It's that the basketball players at Michigan State or Wisconsin or Iowa are a workforce that generates billions for its universities, yet their universities persist with the fiction that they're not a workforce. They're "student-athletes", silly, playing for the glory of Dear Old Whatsammatta U.

For that they get a break on their books and tuition. What could be more fair?

Well. Yesterday once again exposed the cynicism behind all that.

Yesterday the workforce was treated like any other workforce, because sometimes workers are compelled to work on holidays. And so the workforce worked, and the Big Ten made some more dough, grasping business entity that it is.

And the Big Ten, of course, is more grasping than most. It's why a Big 12 school (Nebraska) and an ACC school (Maryland) and a Big East school (Rutgers) are now part of the "Big Ten." More schools, more moolah.

Of course, the Big Ten's TV partners made all this sound like the coolest deal ever -- Christmas Day basketball! What could be better? -- and the "student-athletes" played along. They thought it was pretty cool, too, working on the holiday. Or at least they pretty convincingly said they did.

Me, I wondered what would happen to the kid who went on Zoom and said it kinda sucked having to play a game on Christmas Day. I'm guessing a few gassers might have been in his immediate future, and maybe a scooch down the bench.

On the other hand ...

Well, maybe I'm just cynical, too. Like the Bastard Plague, it tends to be contagious.