New Version of March Madness?

I couldn't care less about the college basketball tournament. To hear the TV and radio talk show hosts tell it, the whole country has brackets filled out for office pools. They say that office productivity will screech to a halt while either watching breathlessly on keeping up with scores on the internet. Maybe it's because pastors generally don't have office pools, but I don't know anyone who really cares about all the "Road To San Antonio."

My fraternity had a bracket pool. You paid two bucks for the right to draw a team out of the hopper (each of the 64 team's 2-inch bio/season recap was cut out of the Monday USA Today after the teams were selected and taped to an index card) and if your team won the tournament you got the money. I won in once, and I cared about winning the $128 bucks, but not about the tournament.

However, growing up in the Deep South, March Madness had a different meaning.

First, this is the weekend my fraternity had the annual Luau. It was 4 weeks of covering the house with bamboo stolen from some field in east Alabama, paper mached volcanoes and tikis, complete with a couple of man-made pools and streams and even a swinging bridge (the engineering majors had a blast with this practical application of knowledge)...followed by 4 days of debauchery and chaos. My favorite part was the guys that would literally drive to the Gulf Coast in a pickup truck and buy 150 pounds of fresh shrimp and drive it back for us to have for dinner on the Friday night portion of the party. Another great memory was one year some band offered to play for free after the seafood dinner (apparently they were trying to break into the college market at Auburn) in our front yard and they were incredible...playing all sorts of songs that would eventually wind up on CD's with titles like "Classic Fraternity Party Anthem Rock." It was like the pied piper as they just cranked it up and people kept coming to hear where the great music was coming from...and about 2,000 people wound up around our fraternity house. We had a blast and they played until the cops shut 'em down.

Second, this party coincided with what is called A-Day. It's a ritualistic celebration in which 30,000 people (referred to as "members of the Auburn family") will drive about two hours and pay $5 bucks to watch the football team play a game against itself. It's a glorified practice with referees and a scoreboard. In Alabama, the "game" is showed on regional television and the Sunday papers will dissect each play and player and make predictions about the upcoming football season.

These days, my March Madness involves lawn care, a nap, and shuttling kids to art and softball. Maybe today I should build a tiki in the back yard, crank up a classic rock anthem like "Long Cool Woman In A Red Dress" and stroll over to the park to watch a meaningless soccer practice.