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March Gladness
I love the end of March. One reason I love it is that, for those of us in Northern climes, March is without a doubt the ugliest, dullest, grayest and longest month of the year. Saying goodbye to it is cause for celebration. "Comes in like a Lion, Goes out like a Lamb", indeed! How about "Comes in like a gray, ugly, cold, snowy thing, Goes out likes a gray, ugly, cold, rainy thing". But as we get to the last week in March, we begin to feel the first gentle (if cold and ugly) stirrings of spring. Just a hint of warm sun here and there, a faint sniff on the cool breeze that tells us that the earth is preparing to come alive again. People begin to smile just a bit more. You notice a spring (pardon the pun) in your step. We know that within a couple of weeks Spring will bust out all over. We have almost survived another Minnesota Winter!
For this modern suburban American, it is the indoor rituals of spring rather than the outdoor ones which begin to grab the mind and tease the soul. After a month and a half of essential sportlessness, those dark depths of winter with nothing to watch but figure skating and the travesty that pro Basketball has become, things begin to unfold. First the NCAA basketball tournament begins. The transition in life from the start of the tournament 'til its end is remarkable. It starts in the dreariest fag-end of winter, and always seems to end in the glorious opening crescendo of Spring. The intensity and excitement of College Basketball puts the pro game to shame. Young men, in their prime, doing their best for their schools and a fat Pro Contract. Despite the increasing "attitude" present in the College game (why should it be spared?) it is probably the single most exciting sporting event in America. The natural excitement brought on by lengthening days and disappearing snow feeds into, and is compounded by, the contrived excitement of the Tournament. Week by week we watch as the stakes rise, as both the glory of victory and the doom of defeat grow more intense.
In obscenely sunny Florida, spring training is well underway in baseball. Although it seems less intense than when I was a lad, the pop of a fastball meeting the catcher's mitt and the crisp crack of bat striking ball still gets the heart racing just a little bit, proof absolute that winter is getting behind us and Opening Day, that incomparable milestone on the road to spring, will soon be here.
But there is even more! If one turns from CBS to NBC one sees that the professional golfers are beginning to move away from the foreign and exotic courses of California, Hawaii and Arizona, and into the Southeast. Starting in Florida they begin to inch their way North, bound slowly but inevitably for Augusta National and the Masters. The goofy charity/pro-am/celebrity events disappear, names like Price and Montgomerie and Els begin to appear on leader boards. Week after week the tournaments improve, the golfers think a little harder and swing a little more firmly. I first watched the Masters in a serious way in 1986. I was instantly transfixed. That was the year that Jack Nicklaus pulled his tremendous comeback to cinch his last Major Championship. I was transfixed not just by the amazingly counter-intuitive excitement, not by the great shots, but by the magnificent portrait of spring being painted on my TV set. Flowers in a thousand shapes and colors framed by placid water and deep green grass and just the right shade of light filtered through the trees. Birds chirping like mad in the background while the announcers deferentially hushed voices contrast with the periodic cheer of appreciative galleries. The Masters has become the one sporting event I will not allow myself to miss.
As we enter the last week of March, these forces all gather speed together, propelling us faster and faster, pulling us away from the grim, gray cold of March and toward an enticing April spring that yet seems light years away. But it will get here. And I will be ready when it does.
As I walked to the mailbox this morning through the gray, sleety, snowy, windy weather, I noticed that the first of my tulips were just beginning to force their tips through the surface of the brown, seemingly dead, earth. I sat and looked at them for a minute. They know, too. Wow. How could they possibly know? They don't even have TV.