Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Masks and Madness
Thursday
March 15, 2007
"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."
-Oscar Wilde
As I type this, I have one NCAA men's basketball tournament game broadcasting via my TV and another via the internet. Two more are also taking place right now; the first Thursday/Friday of the tournament is an annual overdrive of hardwood drama for college basketball fans everywhere.
I could only imagine what it's like in Las Vegas right now. The sports books must be packed to the rafters.
|  | Tyler Hansbrough in his mask (above) reminds me of Karl from Lost (below) in his brainwashing goggles.
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Duke lost earlier tonight to Virginia Commonwealth, and the look on Coach K's face after the game was amazing. He wore a livid, tightened up expression that was part anger and part humiliation. I don't hate Duke and Coach K like some people do (Duke is an outstanding school), but there was something very funny about the whole scene.
It's humorous to me to see North Carolina forward Tyler Hansbrough wearing the giant protective mask that was necessitated by a flagrant foul suffered in the regular season finale against Duke. The foul (by Duke's Gerald Henderson) broke Hansbrough's nose, and the mask is being used to protect Hansbrough from further damage. But, unlike other masked athletes like Richard Hamilton and Rey Mysterio, Jr., the mask looks very strange on Hansbrough.
The producing of the tournament by CBS is an amazing balancing act of serving up the most competitive games while at the same time minimizing the alienation of fan bases across the country. In this era of DirecTV HD (not to be confused with "High Def", my brother Matt's most-hated phrase) and streaming of games (for free!) online, it's not quite the frustration for viewers that it was a decade ago.
But it still has to be a mammoth challenge to decide when to jump from one game to another, trying to prep the studio crew to handle four different feed situations on the fly, etc. Not to get bogged down in technical talk ("But that's technical talk, that doesn't concern you," said Buck Swope) but it seems to me that the job would be perhaps the most challenging logistical and timing experience that exists in network TV. I'd think that television coverage of a NASCAR race would be the most difficult thing to produce from a single-event standpoint, but the multi-game mayhem of the NCAA tournament I would imagine trumps even that.
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