Dunks, Death, Damn-Age: The Corbin Smith Review Of Online March Madness Highlights

This feature is part of VICE Sports' March Madness coverage.

Last night I sat, cross-legged in the grass, staring up at the stars. As the universe grew to fill my whole frame of vision, my mind expanded as well, and I begin considering Vital, eternal questions. What is the true nature of life? What are the origins of space and time? Is there a divine, and can a human aspire to touch it, or is that an ambition only the greatest reservoirs of spiritual energy—the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Oceans—can hope to achieve?

But then, as my exhausted mind fled towards sleep, a consideration beyond all considerations grew, like a fern in my head birthed from the windblown spores of the universe. A question. "When does the Most Basketball exist?"

Is it Friday night, when the 37,100 high schools across this great nation face off, as well as a few Jon Barry-afflicted NBA teams? Is it during the NBA Playoffs, when the world's greatest players haul out the meatiest and tastiest cuts they have on hand for the nation's basketball aesthetes, their plummy pinkies reliably in the air?

I am not statistician, just a humble salesman of moral and aesthetic truths. But it is my sincere belief that even if it's not the BEST basketball, even if it doesn't involve THE MOST basketball players, that NCAA Tournament Time is probably, objectively, the most basketball that happens in a given year. The men's and women's NCAA Tournaments and NITs, tournaments in lower divisions, the angry NBA Prospects stewing in gyms, the lonely dads deciding it's time to get out there and hoist some jumpers after drinking two beers and watching Grayson Allen work. Also there are some NBA games happening as well, presumably.

Basketball never consumes more airspace, more bandwidth, more conversation, more column inches, or more of the nation's hearts and minds than it does during the first weekend of the tournament. It's our best-engineered delivery system of conventional sports thrills, heftily portioned for America's hungry-jack tastes.

Highlights, by their very nature, disassociate moments from the reality in which they happen. I think that, more than most of the game's manifestations, decontextualizing events from the MarchZone very dramatically separates the audience from the "natural" thrills that occurred either in the moment or through the cultural and societal osmosis around them. In sitting down to very briefly review highlights from the Tournament(s), I took special precaution to strip the context away, just observe things AS THEY HAPPENED, and make OBJECTIVE conclusions about the highlights.

The following is the result of my important work.

The spirit of ambitious, ill-prepared failure. The young man just couldn't jump high enough or reach far enough to make his dreams come true. He is like the writer who reaches into the skies to touch the divine starshine of genius, only to be scuttled and scrambled by the limits of his frail, weak, dummy-dummy mind and inability words that make the paperlookers eyeleak. I can relate.

I don't know why Reggie was about to say "Looked like from about the free throw line," because he wasn't that close, at all. But I accept Reggie for who he is, because he is a wealth of good spirit, lacking in cruelty. We all ought to make this change in our lives.

GRADE: B+

Here is the saddest 360 dunk I've ever seen. No dunk has ever been more like a basset hound humping a hole after its life partner dies. This dunk went to the bank to get a loan for its new sheet music store and was not only rejected, but hoisted up by its collar and pants, and thrown, face first, into a garbage bag full of old fruit. That's how sad this dunk is.

The pre-dunk bounce-forward-and-catch, the look of immense, high-serious determination in the dunker's eyes—these are not the kinds of joyous actions that are supposed to accompany a show-out dunk. It's not a proper triple axel if, upon approaching the pommel horse, you stop right before the spring pad, stare, mutter "You can do this, Domingo*" and start over. You already blew the approach! At least our friend with the failed Mozgov-ing felt something move inside of him. Here, we only see fear. The bearings of this work are sadness and malfeasance, even if we don't know why. I suspect we never will.

Prefacing this colossal disappointment with an announcer saying "Hold On" didn't help. This is a terrible highlight.

GRADE: F

Look I don't know who this guy is, but I do know two things about him:

ONE: He doesn't take kindly to having distracting shit on his TV Wall. I really respect that.

TWO: The way he says "Damn" could make literally any highlight seem average. If you were hanging out with this guy, watching this game, and then during a commercial, you looked outside and saw a neighborhood dog trot into your front yard and rattle off like six backflips while reciting a monologue from Measure for Measure, and this dude said "damn" as he does here, you wouldn't even mention it to your loved ones. That is how unimportant the situation would become, simply because of how he says the word.

Please excerpt this man's voice and use it to end conflicts in your household before they begin.

RATING: A-

Sometimes, it's nice to see a moving image that conveys only slightly more information than a still image. It reminds you that, by and large, very little happens in the world. Also, look at this ridiculous dude with a beard in the fifth row:

I had to blow it up a little bit for the web, but you can tell what a silly lookin' dude this is! Get outta here, beardo, people are trying to enjoy the game and they can't with your WeirdBeard swallowing the whole damn stadium!

RATING: C

The Cycle Inside is slowing. You can feel your heart giving out. This can't be it, you say. I had so much I wanted to do! Things to see, food to eat, love to make.

And then, you see a vision: 12 tall young women, cloaked in blue and white floor-length robes, their faces shadowed by the hoods resting neatly on their heads. They seem human, but radiate an energy that the most instinctual part of your brain reads, loud and clear: "Malevolent. Dangerous. A Threat to Us." You try to run, but there is no exit. No door. Just space, forever.

You collapse to your knees and beg. "PLEASE, Ladies, I… I have so much I need to do."

The one in the middle, a leader, you think, arms that span an ocean, speaks, cryptically:

"That's not how this works."

She pulls down a screen. The lights turn out. The clicking of a projector. An ominous soundtrack plays from speakers unseeable. A vision, on the screen, then:

The video fills your ghostly bones. The passing. Stewart playing inside and out, making pinpoint outlets as if willed by the mind alone—dribbling, shooting, outletting, post-up shit, the spirit of Utopian Basketball manifest in a human form.

You start to feel your body being slowly pick apart by a form of fundamental, team-oriented, basketball so extreme, question the fundamental truth of the essential goodness of human connection: if good teamwork can bring an end this painful, can it truly BE "good?" Is human cooperation the conduit of all suffering?

The score at the bottom grows more and more ominously lopsided:

You begin to feel, in your bones, that YOU are The Robert Morris University Varsity Women's Basketball team. Not as a metaphor—I see that death is taking the form of this implacable team, and ol' Corbin is showing me this video to really sell me on that idea, you got that already—but in that you sense the thoughts and feelings of Robert Morris's players and coaches, the looming inevitability of loss. And right then, right as you are feeling yourself out there, just trying to score some points, you send a lazy pass to another one of the yous out there, and Moriah Johnson picks it off and goes coast to coast and the score is 68-15.

Tears emerge. You realize you are beaten, but the game continues on in its cruel way. You feel every brick wall screen, every wizardly pass, every fundamental, efficient post up. You are trapped in a dungeon of planning, communication, and understanding. You start to think, "Ahh well, at least the starters aren't out here anymore, and some of these other players who are way better than me probably deserve the opportunity to score on me as well." Then, you get brick wall'd on a deeply grimy screen. You lie down on the wood, hopeless, beaten, sad. Death has won. You close your eyes and prepare to accept your fate.

But, then:

A…. hug? Oh my God! It's fine! Of course death has beaten me! It was inevitable! The only thing I can do is accept that, even in this loss, I am part of a broader world, and that the expiration of my body—and perhaps, my soul, for I cannot see over the blue ridge into eternity—is just me rejoining the great vastness of existence, returned to the Earth to enrich her soils and make new life. It is time for me to warily hug the Earth, having been thoroughly dominated. You feel at peace. And then you feel nothing.

RATING: A+

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