Bellying Up to the Bracket

For the first time in at least 25 years, I missed my favorite day of the year. Each year I go home to "do my taxes" on the first day of the NCAA tourney. It is a basketball orgy in my basement every year during the tournament's first weekend. I have the projector and two televisions tuned to different NCAA games and I haul the one from the bar over to view the state tournament concurrently. I am like a pig in slop as I sit through 32 games over a 78-hour period.

This year, because I was on a wonderful, Roman excursion with my bride, I missed it. Not only was the tournament not televised there, there was NO coverage. And I truly did miss it.

Steve Rushin has captured the magic of that first weekend here with his "Air & Space" column in this week's SI. It reminds me of the "Razzle Dazzle Club" in Council Bluffs in 1982 or Salt Lake City in 2003.

It isn't easy spending the first day of the NCAA tournament in an Irish pub watching 13 consecutive hours of basketball, from noon tip-off to 1 a.m. sign-off, jump ball to last call. For starters, you need an artful explanation for your absence from the office. I told my bosses I'd be "looking into the NBA draft," by which I meant my Newcastle Brown Ale, drawn from a tap.

Next, you have to find a joint in which it's socially acceptable to hold down a bar stool for 13 consecutive hours. That bar is Vaughan's Public House, half a block from the Hartford Civic Center, home arena of the UConn Huskies, whose fans evidently put the AA in NCAA. "They're boozers," says Johnny Vaughan, Dublin-born proprietor of the pub that bears his name. "Our door swings open at five o'clock on game nights and doesn't swing shut again for 15 minutes."

On Thursday, five o'clock arrived at noon, as it always does on the first day of the tournament, the best day of the year for a sports fan to play hooky. TGIT.

As Greg Gumbel settled in at his anchor desk, I settled in at mine, a 25-foot mahogany bar imported from Ireland. Three overhead TVs lit the beer taps, which in turn lit the lunch patrons. At the bar, as on the bracket sheet, one round leads to another.

As the games ebbed and flowed, office workers alternately crowded and abandoned the bar all day, so that it seemed to swell and contract like the bellows of a bagpipe. Tom Steed fled his office at Prudential around 2:30 when he read on the Internet that Pacific had taken Boston College into overtime. The 42-year-old systems analyst ducked into Vaughan's with two coworkers. That's where I found him systematically analyzing a pint of Harp. "Two years ago," said Steed, "we went to get a quick beer and catch up on the scores. When we walked out, we ran into our boss on the street. She asked where we'd been, and one of my buddies said, 'We just gave blood at the Red Cross.'"

At Vaughan's, businessmen came for lunch and stayed for dinner. "If they're on the fence, we encourage them to stay," Vaughan explained. "If it's cold and rainy outside, that's a win for us." Thursday was frigid, so when Jody Poduje blew in at two for the second half of the BC game, he was persuaded to stay for Marquette vs. Alabama, Tennessee vs. Winthrop and UCLA vs. Belmont. He finally abandoned his post just before George Washington vs. UNC-Wilmington went into OT, ending an impressive lunchtime-to-crunchtime run on the stool next to mine.

A 39-year-old regional manager for a business-services company, Poduje arrived as a stranger, left as a friend. In parting he said, "This has been one of the most enjoyable afternoons of my life."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was now 9:15 in the "afternoon," but then a pub is as timeless as a church, which it resembles, with its stained glass and wooden pews and priestly pints of Guinness ringed by clerical collars of foam.

On the Saturday of the Big East tournament Vaughan's sold 10 pints of Guinness every minute for six straight hours even though -- or possibly because -- UConn had been eliminated the day before.

Over my shoulder stood Justin Tripp, a Lego executive who was born in South Africa, raised in England and moved to the U.S. 18 months ago. "This is the best day for drinking and watching sport in America?" he asked. There followed a litany of rugby anecdotes illustrating a central theme: American sports fans are, on the whole, a lily-livered lot.

Likewise, the Hoops that Vaughan really cares about are his beloved Celtic F.C., referred to as the hoops by Scottish headline writers. Vaughan came to the U.S. 15 years ago, at age 19, to play soccer at Central Connecticut State. "Recruiters told me if I came to America, I'd be picked up in a limousine, I'd be on the radio all the time," he said, roaring at his youthful credulity. As he spoke, America's real college glamour event played out overhead.

In the bar is a lovely mural painted by the Michelangelo of pub artists, Paul Joyce, whose great-grandfather, James Joyce, wrote, "Our national epic has yet to be written." Our unwritten national epic is an empty bracket, pregnant with possibility. Late Thursday night a woman seated at the bar stole a glance at the TV and said, "I haven't paid attention to this all day. I feel so un-American."

Soon after, I was climbing the stairs from the basement gents' room as two men carried a keg down. One of them looked at me and said, "You're still here?"

"I'm staying till the basketball's over," I replied.

The guy squeezed past me and said, "You mean you're staying till April?"

Now there's an idea.

No tears for me though. I still plan to be in Indy to see the national champion crowned for the 25th consecutive year. While I'm there, I intend to belly up to the bracket and throw down a cold one. I think I'll drink to a quarter century of champions!