I was stunned when Binghamton University qualified for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament last year. My alma mater, a basketball powerhouse?
I attended Binghamton in the 1970s when it was called SUNY Binghamton and still referred to as Harpur College (if you mumbled when you said you went to Harpur, people thought you said Harvard).
In many ways, Binghamton was the anti-Penn State: small, for a state school, no Greek system and no football team. We had Division III teams in other sports – back then they were called the Colonials, not the Bearcats – but no one I knew went to any games. We were hippie kids from NYC, most of us, and way too cool for the cornier aspects of the collegiate experience.
One year, though, word got around that we had this kick-ass men’s soccer team. When our guys crept into the national Top Ten, we had to see it to believe it. At first we pretended to be detached observers. When we cheered we tried to pretend we weren’t really that into it; we were just “goofing” on the whole rah-rah scene.
(We mocked a lot of traditional behaviors that way. When called upon to shake hands in the conventional open-palmed manner, we would pump heartily and say “How are ya?” in deep, booming voices to make clear we thought shaking hands was this totally unhip ritual performed by polyester car salesmen. It was a strange time.)
An observer might not have noticed the difference between our semi-ironic cheering and the real deal because, in fact, there wasn’t any difference. We may not have wanted to admit it, but we had rediscovered what’s long been obvious to Penn Staters: It’s fun to watch a good team win.
My interest was extremely short-lived, however. I maybe attended two soccer games in four years. I don’t recall going to any basketball games whatsoever, to say nothing of the other sports, which weren’t even on my radar screen. Mostly I remember jamming in the stairwells of the dorms (killer acoustics), attending folk, blues and bluegrass concerts (Doc Watson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, the Balfa Brothers and the Boys of the Lough come to mind), and hiking or tobogganing in the nature preserve behind campus.
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[Whoa, flashback: The main trail in the nature preserve was pretty steep. After tobogganing from halfway up for a while, we decided we needed more speed or a longer ride or a bigger thrill or something. We went to the top.
The five of us arranged ourselves on the toboggan, each person’s legs wrapped around the waist of the person in front. We pushed off – and went airborne. Legs disentangled. Bodies flew every which way.
There was silence and then a moan. Someone called out, “Everybody OK?” From disparate locations on the mountain came four affirmatives and one weak negative. Steve, I think his name was. Tall, skinny kid. Leg injury.
We found the toboggan, loaded Steve onto it and carried him down to the infirmary. Later, back in my dorm room, I looked in the mirror and saw that my face, having been raked by tree branches, was covered with a network of scratches, like a pane of glass that had cracked but not shattered.
I healed, Steve healed. Several years later I ran into him while backpacking in Europe – not once, but twice, weeks apart, in France and in Italy. “Done any tobogganing lately?” I asked him.]
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Down the hall from me during freshman year was a suite full of guys who preferred the more sedentary pleasures of tiddlywinks. In fact, had there had been a tiddlywinks national championship, our school might have competed for it. But basketball?
A decade ago, the school’s top brass apparently decided that it wasn’t enough to be consistently ranked among the best values in higher education or the best public universities. They wanted big-time athletic success, made the jump from Division III to Division I and started bringing in players who did not exactly fit the mold of the scholar-athlete.
The result, as has become well known: The school made it to “The Big Dance” for the first time last March, but as often happens at big dances, some of the attendees began getting in trouble for smoking in the boys’ room. Actually, they’ve been getting in far bigger trouble than that. One player was busted for selling coke, another for using a stolen debit card, a third for swiping condoms. Not to mention all the ways the coaches found to help players circumvent certain inconvenient aspects of student life like actually having to study and attend classes.
In short, the coach and horses that took my alma mater to the Big Dance have turned into a pumpkin and a pack of mice. And we can’t count on Prince Charming fitting the glass slipper onto her dainty little foot – not with all those corns and bunions.
This Cinderella should have stuck with tiddlywinks and toboggans.
