A Canadian goes to South Florida to watch March Madness

The clarity that comes in loosening expectations, and the heady push-pull of the Sunshine State.

In South Florida, surrounded by swampland kept at tentative bay by freeways, inland hotel and housing developments, in the shade of a 450ft glass tower shaped like a guitar, we’re talking about bell hooks.

What are you reading? David asks, his thick Australian lilt more or less familiar to me by now.

I flip the cover up to show him and he tosses his hair from his eyes and squints, shakes his head. Who is it, he asks, then asks whether it’s a good novel.

Not a novel, I say first, thinking of a succinct way to describe hooks. How to condense history both finished and still in motion.

He’s editing a story he showed me, something he wrote off the last one of these trips because, as he scrolled through, I caught lowercase cities and mis-formatted versions of the property’s name.

You could do it, he feigns turning his laptop toward me so I can copy edit. I say I’d have to take a cut from what we won on the slots the night before, up til too late questioning strategy for a bank of NFL machines.

The palms rustle and bend, shifting clouds reflect on the blue glass of the hotel tower. Over the breeze and shriek of children scattered over the sprawling compound of the pool grounds, top 40 songs from the last three years flicker. Cowbirds cut around, flashing in their iridescent black, looking for leavings; pineapple rinds and french fries. It’s the fifth day we’re here and the first we’ve spent in the sun, at the pool. Everyone else in our little ragtag group of hosted media flew out as the sun broke over the Atlantic.

You can’t write about any of this, can you? David asks with a laugh in a moment of such startling clarity I feel like I’ve been thinking out loud.

It’s funny and heartbreaking in equal measure when the qualities of people you know and love better bring out flashes of warm familiarity in people you don’t. And in some of the people you don’t, the sense that they’re doing the same, drawing parallels to mannerisms, references of the body like time signatures that set you exactly into a place, another moment, tracing habits like something under delicate paper.

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Banking in from the Atlantic, a hex of highways and housing developments inlaid over swamp. Patches and pockets of water deep and dark, glass smooth with no reflection of the sky overhead. I know the land, made of porous limestone, breathes like a sponge, but it seems an awful lot of trust ceded to water in a state that’s sinking back into the ocean. Then again, maybe it’s the smarter position. Realizing you have no power to relinquish to nature in the first place, and certainly over a land’s pining to return to original form.

When I thought of the kind of story I could write about South Florida it was one of push-pulls. The relationship of betting to college basketball, of historic land theft and persecution of the Seminole and the Seminole’s subsequent reclamation and repurposing of undesirable land into profit centres and manicured paradises; the backdrop of always-encroaching swamp against sprawling development. The pressures, from afar anyway, seemed apparent. Up close, the strain shifted.

To draw a line between what’s undoubtably good and what’s neatly nefarious, the opposing points need to hold firm. There has to be tension. Here, points warp depending on skew of light, time of day, draw of a card, angle of perspective; changeable as South Florida’s weather. The tension, quite often, going slack.

The heady murk of it hits you the second you feel the air — deep, damp, green — get down in your lungs. Humidity softening the outline of everything. A state where permitless conceal carry means you’re free to shoot yourself in the foot in flip-flops and book bans have looped back to come for the Bible.

Where cars with watch for children and pro gun bumper stickers do 80mph on the freeway shoulder, passenger side wheels riding the drainage ditch. Where a guy in a red DeSantis cap eyeballs me and my piña colada warily from his deck chair, picking up on a whiff of pluralism but something decidedly outside of the state’s own make. Or touring a private gaming room on the 36th floor, where the table minimum is more than I can picture so I drift to the tall windows and see the turkey vultures I’ve watched lazily circling the pool for days, this time noting the sleek, brindled dark of their wings from above instead of squinting at the tawny wash of their underwings from below — their sole purpose in life, as predators, abiding from any perspective.

You don’t come to Florida for clarity.

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Saturday night, watching Oakland and Jack Gohlke lose in overtime and feeling kicked in the gut for Gohlke, who would have to to go back to class on Monday like nothing had happened. Not grasping how rapid my projection of a Cinderella story dashed onto him was until I saw clips and read quotes that embarrassed me back to context for his sensibility: “I'm not going to be an NBA lottery pick and I'm OK with that. That's just not how it works all the time,” Gohlke said.

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The Fort Lauderdale airport runway’s a sandy white, save for the landing strip which at first glance, bouncing along it with the breaks floored, looks like it’s paved with a different material, black as tar. Burn marks, I realize as we slow, from all the plane tires screeching to a stop.

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Wandering around the casino floor in my swimsuit, hanging at the edge of a cavernous sports book clutching a paperback from the library, trying to pick which of three concurrently broadcast March Madness games on which of three enormous screens to clamp my attention onto. Realizing the groans and cheers going up from all around are not for effort, or surprise in the action, but whatever is edging them closer or moving them farther away from the bets they have on any or all games. Tinged with the eagerness to watch brackets begin to pull apart, to bust.

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More than a few times, I forget I’m in Florida. Flood warnings and itinerary limit the first few days indoors. I get bits of news from the incredibly kind and patient people who are responsible for our PR trip’s small group and stay, mostly about the things they did after they left work, sometimes about the small dramas happening around the hotel. I start to feel like a kind of resort itinerant. Less a Quasimodo because he had a job, more like one of the small, sandy anoles skirting around, left to watch and wander. It isn’t an unpleasant sensation, intensified by being delivered to and from restaurants and clubs or by the noise and smoke when crossing or pulled into the orbit of the casino floor, a sense there like everyone is, for a while, transmorphing their statehoods. The times I’m alone I lose most of any idea what to do with myself.

One morning, after a massage has turned my muscles pliant as my brain, I sit in the spa’s crystal room and lose my focus on the tall wall of glowing dune bricks, wondering if the pulse I pick up when the light subtly waivers is my eyes shorting out or a natural gas station somewhere, chugging along. Somehow, 10 minutes pass.

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I never grew up with one shining moment, the song or the concept.

(The song got its inspiration from rejection, but not within college basketball. David Barrett wrote it after he played a bar show in East Lansing, Michigan, and tried to hit on a waitress finishing her shift. He was watching a Celtics game and, without looking at this woman, said something he thought was poetic about Larry Bird on a fastbreak. When he looked over to gauge her reaction, she was gone.)

Asked multiple times over the weekend whether I watched American college basketball, and its culmination of March Madness — going on everywhere, all around us, at all times, whether in direct line of sight or in sensory periphery, including at the Miami Open as Coco Gauff lunged and swung and bested Océane Dodin and I glanced away from the action for a second down to the phones beside me to find college basketball, muted and in miniature — I admitted my interest in it wasn’t low for its quality of play (I love frenetic basketball) but to guard against its quality of heartbreak. There are too many teams, too many people, who aren’t going to win. Who are in their last chances to win and will lose badly. Who might win big and then lose, not even badly, but lacklustrely, in the most regular way you could picture. Who might even win the whole thing and then be faced with the reality that they want more than the one moment, they want this as routine but aren’t going to get it.

Photo by Joe Sargent

I have to steel myself to watch college basketball in a way I don’t for the pros, especially the early games when the field is fresh, not riddled and pocked with upsets, expectations palpable and vibrating like individualized frequencies you can tune to. With the pros there’s something about knowing, barring injuries or a franchise imploding, there will likely be another shot. There’s a sense of a clean reset every season, a rhythm, of gathering stakes. With men’s college ball it comes down to one single configuration of a team per year. With 16 names on a roster, say, by the time the tournament gets to 64 teams that’s 1,024 people, all who spent 18 years in some mix of effort and focus getting there (taken cumulatively, that’s 18,432 years), and it could all be done in 40 minutes. It’s the programs that get to enjoy longevity, get to settle into their names and notoriety, get to entertain the concept of rebuilding years.

It’s why I find women’s college ball a bit of a relief and more compelling, too. Most athletes you’ll get four years to know, whether they stick with the same school or hit the transfer portal. The churn, that conveyor of bodies as it can sometimes feel, offered up to the Draft as if in sacrifice, slows down.

But they get that one shining moment, would inevitably be offered in response and I could try to start again at explaining myself or just repeat, There are too many teams.

There is one welcome, naive reprieve, though, that offset nearly every big loss or close win in the first round. David, who did not watch basketball before this, turning to report to me the score of any given match and earnestly ask, Can it be done?

Partially because there was a bet in play he wondered if he was about to lose, and then because it turned into a good bit.

For a team down by 20 with less than five minutes left I’d usually say, Not really. Then, he’d double down in urgency and shout with cinematic relief, So there’s hope!

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Under a giant, mirrored diamond suspended on a wire from the theatre’s ceiling, I asked Jonathan what it was he loved about playing football. He raises his eyebrows so high that he physically rolls back onto his heels. That’s a loaded question, he says in his Staten Island accent, the cadence of which tends to frame everything up like a question.

Is it? I ask. I might need a minute, he says. A man in a head to toe white suit and cowboy hat cuts between us and toward the theatre’s exits, transformed into diamond-shaped glittering chutes. I glance over to one of the huge projector screens that flank the small, temporary stage on either side, displaying the real-time countdown to Shakira’s album releasing here, tonight, her 12th, as the smiling MC has just finished telling us again. Paciente. Whoever set the display up and opened the music platform’s desktop app to appear on the screens left the arrow of their cursor hovering over the ticking down minutes and seconds, a detail I happily fixate on even as Shakira takes the stage with seconds to go and thanks us for coming.

Well, Jonathan says, both my brothers played in college so at first it was my way of following them. But he played a different position, he tells me. Can you guess what it was? He asks, then adds apologetically, I mean, it’s obvious.

The game isn’t ruined for me because, as I tell him, I’ll literally never guess. Tight end! He laughs. I’m not huge, but I’m fast. The DJ switches to reggaeton and the influencer in the all white suit goes by us again and tips his hat, pink LED lights glinting off his sunglasses. I ask whether he was sad to stop playing. Geeze, he chuckles, and pantomimes pulling at his collar in duress. I’m gonna need another drink or we have to change the subject, he says.

The MC is back and asking us whether we’ve ever had our hearts broken. Cheers erupt. The cursor hovers over the countdown, the numbers do not relent.

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Stone crabs sold still moving out of the backs of spray-painted trucks pulled into auto body shops, giant iguanas drowsy from cold and looking for heat from the pavement planted in parking lots so people have to watch where they walk at dawn and dusk.

On the Sprinter van’s radio en route to the Miami Open, the host can’t believe it’s already Palm Sunday.

Giant banyan and feathery tall Australian pines, silvery green buttonwood shrubs and leaning fan palms, crabwood and pigeon plum, all in great lustrous clumps along the highway.

My driver from the airport, once a diplomat, talking about the crisis in Haiti and the pull of being from a place you’re not sure you can ever go back to. My driver to the airport doing air drums to the saxophone solo in ‘Just The Way You Are’.

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Expectations can bear hard over something only forming. Stamp it out before anything can happen. It’s hard not to hold yourself to what you consider your compass, made up of experiences and understanding, tuned to the shape of your world. Brandished as a tool — a sieve, lenses to look through forward or back, a hammer — expectations limit.

In Hollywood, Florida, we were talking about Paris syndrome because of Japan. 

Specifically, the letdown some people who go to Paris experience because it doesn’t live up to how they pictured it. Bill is surprised, he loved Paris, really all of France, so much that he and his wife are going back for Christmas but not to the beaches of Normandy this time, he chuckles. He mentions it when I say how Japan was the only place I’ve been so far that bore out in everything people had ever said about it to me.

There are places that pull to the front of your mind, urgently, and others that serve as backdrops. There are places that shift easily between the two modes and let you make your own pace. I look around and think about all the cities we’ve come from around that night’s long table — almost all those cities via other cities — and how this place worked as the fourth thing, an accelerator, for our happy collision.

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Curling the toes of my red cowboy boots into the plush carpet of the Heat’s locker room, listening to Bam Adebayo and Patty Mills get changed behind me, trying to tune out their hushed conversation out of politeness. It’s so quiet that every time the door to the showers opens the squeak of the hinge rings in a soft call and response to itself.

During the game, when I first noticed the flag-sized jerseys hanging from the rafters, I was struck by how close they seemed. Same with the court, right there, barely a two person width of a walkway ringing the floor. The seating, shooting straight up from the floor so even without people in seats it felt compact, immediate.

Watching the Finals last season, or Chris Bosh’s retirement ceremony where I went back again and again to look over expressions on his face (for the book), the space seemed cavernous, giant. A wonder, how moments can warp — the big turning regular into resounding; the small and quiet, offhand details you notice inside a moment, shrinking the immediate way down.

Tucked into the lip of Adebayo’s locker, a laminated card:

I am alive so there’s hope
Whatever needs to be done CAN BE DONE