the Mark Pike

Thoughts while watching excessive amounts of college basketball this weekend:

• Why is the possession arrow not used more in real life? Having a dispute with somebody? “Jump ball!” That last french fry remains with Mark; Lucas gets to sit shotgun; Will gets to pick the movie; Melissa’s turn to buy drinks; amnesty for all illegal immigrants. (And with all jump balls and possession arrows, you’re guaranteed two thumbs way up, and probably some whistles of approval)
• The 20 second timeout should also be utilized more in daily life as well, but not the kind that Zach Morris uses. That simply disrupted the space-time continuum. I should be able to call timeout on the sidewalk and gatorade should appear instantly, and somebody in a suit and an ugly tie should definitely begin scribbling on a dry-erase board immediately.
• I wish I had a play by play broadcaster and a pep band following me around everywhere.

And yes, that’s me with announcers Mike Patrick and Dick Vitale. And no, that’s not my real hair. I was an extra in an ESPN commercial shoot about 6 years ago.

Recently, I’ve found myself to be faced with way too many choices. This isn’t good. I’m the type of guy who spends 45 minutes of his lunch hour trying to decide where to grab a sandwich. Basically, I overanalyze everything. If I didn’t, I’ve got no idea what the hell I’d write about on this blog.

First off, the NCAA tournament. It was hard enough with 64 teams, and they recently added a 65th to the mix. I watch college basketball all year just hoping that I have some sort of advantage at picking the winners correctly on my bracket when March Madness rolls around. Sadly, it doesn’t help me at all. I’m just flipping coins now, or determining which mascot would win in a street fight. Oh, and I do know what a Saluki is, so I’ve got that going for me (go Southern Illinois!?).

And if you think trying to makes choices out of a group of 65 is difficult, I’m trying to plan an itinerary for the SXSW music festival this weekend which features 1,300 bands. That’s a comma, not a decimal. Thirteen hundred! I didn’t know that many bands have existed in the history of music. I’m hoping to catch at least 10 shows, and if I get a chance to sing karaoke with Art Brut my life is complete.

Thoughts While Watching the 2006 Winter Olympics at 4:00am EST.

1) The French Bobsled team really messed up by not naming their squad “Moulin Luge.”

2) Ratings would be much higher if they found a way to incorporate more lava.

3) I really want to have a sports announcer follow me around the house one morning when I get ready for work and tell me how many fractions of a second I am off of my normal pace. (“He spilt the orange juice! That’s going to cost him.”)

4) I’d like to hear more cowbell in my daily life.

5) I’m tired.

6) I may or may not have just added “Cool Runnings” to my Netflix queue.

Blizzard Bricks
Originally uploaded by themarkpike.

An Imagined Speech As Delivered to My Fantasy League Basketball Team in Our Fictional Locker Room After Realizing We’re in 10th Place out of 12 Teams

“This is it, fellas. This is the moment in the season when we’ve got to either get busy winning or start losing on purpose to get a better draft positition for next year, but not too obviously so all the other teams don’t get suspicious.

Look, I know it’s been a rough year. We - okay - I drafted Amare Stoudemire, not completely understanding the severity of the microfracture in his knee. Can you blame me? I don’t think so. Any injury that has the word “micro” in it doesn’t really sound that intense, and so I took a risk and assumed he’d be playing by now. I’m a fantasy league manager, not an orthopedic surgeon.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, even if we can squeeze 2 months out of Amare it would be enough to double Zaza Pachulia’s output, no offense to you Zaza. Seriously, no offense. Great defense though. You’re averaging like 1 steal per game. It’s the little things, big man. The little things add up.

I know some of you were a little upset with the midseason personnel move I made, and you were sad to see Magloire and Finley pack up their bags after all they’ve contributed to this team. What you’ve got to remember is that this is a business. We’re not a family. You think the hot dog vendors in the stands get to keep their gigs if they’re only averaging a half-doz a night? They don’t. They get traded to Utah or something. They don’t even have Hebrew Nats in Utah.

The point is- we’ve got to start playing like a team, even though technically we only earn points for individual accomplishments.

Now get out there and show them what you’re made of. Team on 3.”

We were enjoying my friend’s dad’s sky box tickets for the Wizards vs. Celtics game this weekend. Neither team seemed to want to win, and nobody in the stadium seemed to care much about the contest. Everybody was glued to the TV to see the result of the Redskins game.

And then, the door opened. Where there is usually a silhoutte and a backlight, there was total darkness. A shadow crouched and emerged from the door frame, it was something much larger than the door. A smile illuminated the room like a new gibbous. It was a familiar face from the Transylvanian region of Romania.

Gheorghe Muresan!!!

I jumped out of my chair. Whenever Gheorghe used to appear on TV during the mid-90’s, I was transfixed. A man like this makes reality into a fantasy world. He makes mortals experience the life of Lilliputians. And he has always had a sense of humor about it all (think: ESPN commercials, Snickers, agreeing to appear with Billy Crystal in a bad movie).

I told him I’ve been scouring ebay for the past 6 years for one of his jerseys. I asked him to tell the Wizards management to start selling Muresan retro Bullets jerseys. He smiled and laughed and gave me high-five.

Spudd Webb, if you’re reading this, let’s hang out sometime soon.

My Giant
Originally uploaded by themarkpike.

Baseball and autographs have played an important role in my life.

We went to NYC to see the Yankees play in 1987. I finally got to see Don Mattingly, my hero, play the game. In fact, I learned to read by announcing the Yankees box score at the breakfast table.

For my bar mitzvah, my Dad arranged for a close family friend to get me a signed baseball by the best living Yankees. Mickey Mantle is on the sweet spot. Yogi Berra is on there. Hank Bauer. Whitey Ford. I used to sleep with it by my bed, in case there was a fire and I needed to leave in a hurry.

We went to Spring Training a few times to collect autographs too. Wade Boggs. Deion $anders (he actually signed my card with a dollar sign for the “S”). Ruben Sierra. The Don Mattingly signature was elusive. I sent him a picture of me with my monument to Mattingly, a collection of every piece of Mattingly memorobilia I owned with a handwritten request for an autograph. The picture was pretty creepy, in retrospect.

My Dad was in Hawaii with my Mom for a conference earlier this month. They were sitting at a table in the bar, when they noticed Yankee Captain Derek Jeter sitting at the table next to them. Jeter’s girlfriend had her feet up in his lap and they were having a great time. My Dad wanted to respect his privacy, but he also wanted that autograph for the collection. This is what he did…

He left a pre-postaged self-addressed postcard with a hotel employee and a note that said something along the lines of: “I’ve been a Yankees fan for over 50 years… I didn’t want to disrupt you in the bar… Thanks for the memories. Look forward to seeing you in the Series again next year.”

It arrived in the mail today.

DC’s Baseball team had not lost at home in nearly 34 years, since their 1971 forfeit to the Yankees. That is, of course, until I went and saw a game.

This is an index of every player’s “at-bat” music in the major leagues. It’s a little outdated (2004). Obviously, most the players don’t play 50 Cent’s “In the Club” anymore as they have replaced it with the more recent hit “This Is How We Do”.

While sitting up in the bleachers, my friends debated their own choices for the batter’s box. Emmy went with the opening guitar lick from Tom Petty’s “American Girl”. Classic, like pinstripe uniforms and cold beer in plastic cups.

I thought it would be cool to record a new song in the locker room each night after learning who the opposing pitcher would be. “Curt Schilling is goin’ to school and I’m his teacher / Gonna hit this ball out to the right field bleachers”. Everybody else thought it would be too complicated, and I’d probably get thrown a lot of high heat in retaliation for the diss tracks.

I learned how to read by looking for the Yankees box score every morning in the newspaper. I would announce Don Mattingly’s batting average at the breakfast table and the day had begun. “Yankees win, 7-4. Mattingly was two for four, with 3 RBIs and a HR.”

Since then, I have continued to use sports as an early morning exercise in mental faculties. Fantasy League Baseball allows everybody to be a George Steinbrenner.

Last night was our annual draft, which takes place via the web at a predetermined time, decided weeks in advance. This gives all fantasy owners plenty of time to come up with decent coverups when asked “what you’re up to on Monday night?” as well as ample time to read absurd amounts of ESPN analysis. If people put as much due diligence in to solving world problems as they did in to college basketball brackets and fantasy league sports, AIDS and Cancer would dissappear. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And as a sidenote, George Bush once traded away Sammy Sosa when he was an owner of the Texas Rangers.

Occasionally, fantasy mixes with reality.

Two weekends ago, I was watching the Duke vs. UNC game at a bar in Durham. In walks Grant Hill, by himself, and he just strolls though the crowded bar to a seat in the back. At the end of the game, I saw him outside and I said, “Hi Grant. Our trading deadline in my fantasy bball league is coming up this week, and I’m struggling. Be honest with me, should I trade for you?”

He laughed and said, “What you need help with?” And I say, “Everything. Could you give me some rebounds or points?” He says, “I’m a scorer baby. I can drop some points for you”. I thanked him and left.

Later that night, I proposed a trade for Grant Hill.

Let the games begin.

I stalked the perimeter of the MCI Center/Fortress, looking for weaknesses in the impregnable ACC tournament arena. I had given up on scalping a legitimate entry ticket nearly 15 minutes earlier when I witnessed one of the only available tickets get sold off in an impromptu dutch auction for $250 dollars.

I bumped into a kid wearing a DUKE sweatshirt holding up 2 fingers, a silent signal to scalpers that he was looking for 2 tickets. I asked the Dookie if he was having any luck. He reinforced my observations about the expensive scalping market. He saw one ticket get sold for $400 moments earlier.

We briefly schemed about buying a Wake Forest Pep Band shirt off the trumpet players and pretending like we left our instruments inside, but it didn’t seem like a sure thing and none of us wanted to end up with an ugly tie-dyed shirt souveneir to remind us of a dissappointing night in the DC cold. We parted ways, fanning out to increase our chances of netting a ticket.

After one complete lap of the arena, I bumped back in to the same Dookie, who was now ecstatic because some UNC fan exiting the arena sold him 2 tickets at face value ($30).

Two minutes later I saw the Dookie again, now dejected because the ticket scanners at the gate revealed that these tickets had already been used (arena policy refuses readmittance). The Tobacco Road rivalry lives on! You might have won this one, UNC, but you’ve got bad karma now!

Tip-off was minutes away and I could see a rush of people making their way to their seats inside the glass fortress.

Slightly discouraged but still determined, I walked around to another entrance and watched hundreds of ticketholders file out of the stadium still upset about their teams being eliminated in the earlier games. Their seats were obviously now empty, but stadium policy requires no reselling of tickets.

I tried my hardest to sweettalk a tickettaker and explain the absurdity of this policy. I told her how I tried to sneak in earlier, and that I could totally sneak in successfully if I tried harder. She laughed at me as the opening horn sounded.

I boarded a metro car and headed to a Sports Bar in Arlington.