Just A Game?

If it had been a movie, Butler's Gordon Hayward's last shot would have gone in.

But it wasn't a movie, it was real life.

It was the NCAA Championship game and real life spoiled things for an amazing Butler team, for about 60,000 (out of the 70,000) people in the arena, and for millions of people the country who were rooting for the little school that almost could.

The score was close the whole game, and Duke’s winning 61-59 probably made the defeat all the more painful for Butler.

It was an excitingly emotional game. Up and down, tied, up and down some more. It was the kind of game you didn't want to end. Butler University, a school only a few miles from the arena, a school with about 4,000 students, was considered the underdog this season no matter whom they played and no matter how high their ranking soared in the national polls. People love an underdog. In sports and in life. We get much more excited to hear a success story about someone who started with nothing rather than one about a kid who was born rich and then succeeded.

The non-sports fans always seem to ask why people who are seemingly mature in other ways will get so involved in a game. They don't understand that getting so involved in sports, getting so wrapped up in watching a game, is a great break from the realities of life. In those last few minutes of the Championship game, I guarantee you nobody there was thinking about the economy, foreign policy, or whether their kid had married the right person. They were either rooting for a team they had cheered on for years or for a team they felt symbolized the optimistic mantra of "Anything's possible." And maybe then they felt that anything's possible for them. Maybe they can solve those problems in the "real world," maybe they can get a job or a promotion, maybe they can get that person at work to smile at them.

It was fitting that Butler's Hayward took that final half-court shot. Butler has often been compared to the school in the movie "Hoosiers." If so, then Gordon Hayward was "Jimmy," the kid who could do almost anything with the basketball, a kid who looked so very Middle American in this sport that had its origin in Middle America.

After the game, I felt a little depressed as reality was slowly creeping into my mind. "I have to pack, would I make my plane connections tomorrow? (I didn't), I have a lot of work to do when I get home," etc.

Reality can be an annoying thing. It disturbs our dreams. It often spoils our good times. But for reality to join fantasy -- like during an "unreal" basketball game -- is a wonderful gift for those who are lucky enough to be present for it.

I was at that championship game in Indianapolis, and sitting behind me was a very tall man who looked like he had definitely played basketball. He turned out to be the Olathe, Kansas girls high school basketball coach (and science teacher) Joel Branstrom. A couple of months before this game, he had been in the news because of something that happened at a pep rally at his school. Some kids blindfolded him, then told him that if he could make a half-court shot, he'd win tickets to the Final Four. Branstrom, a former basketball walk-on for the University of Kansas, made the half-court shot blindfolded. The kids were shocked, and then admitted that they didn't have any tickets for him. It was just a prank. There was that annoying reality again.

But somehow, the NCAA got wind of this whole thing and sent Branstrom tickets for the championship weekend. So there he was, sitting behind me with his family, a big smile on his face, watching one of the most exciting games in history. For him, reality had joined fantasy.

If it worked for him, if one of his dreams could come true, maybe it can work for the rest of us, too. Let's face it: making a half-court shot blindfolded sounds impossible. It is impossible in the world of reality, but not in the world of sports.

By the way, when Gordon Hayward missed that long shot at the buzzer, I wonder if Branstrom was thinking, "How could he have missed that? He wasn't even blindfolded.

Couldn't Give It Away

Suppose you're driving along and you happen to be behind an armored car. Suddenly, the back door of that armored car flies open, a bag of money hits the street, splits open, and cash starts flying all over the place. Would you slam on your brakes, get out of your car in the midst of traffic, run over to the bag, stuff as much money in your pockets as possible, run back to your car, get out of there as fast as you can, and think they're was nothing wrong with what you just did? I didn’t think you’d do something like that. Neither would I, but that's exactly what several people did recently when this actually happened in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

The first thing I thought about when I heard the story was how could the back door of an armored car fly open allowing a bag of money to fall to the street? I've been driving for a long time, and I've never had any money fly out of my car, and I don't even drive a special vehicle whose sole purpose is to safely drive money around.

The other thing, of course, was the behavior of the people who grabbed the money. $100,000 is still missing. ($100,000? I guess that was a pretty big bag). Maybe they rationalized that they were taking the money from a big, unfeeling, faceless bank or corporation, not from “regular people.” But that money that was bouncing around in the armored car probably belong to "regular people." It could have been your money going to or from a bank.

Maybe another rationalization was that obviously, the money was insured, so "nobody got hurt." Your house is probably insured. If you were robbed, would you think that "nobody got hurt?"

Call me a Pollyanna, but I generally feel that people are good, honest, and responsible. That's why I was so disappointed to learn the way so many people acted. I worried that maybe I’d been wrong all these years about my positive views of my fellow men and women. It shook up my entire perception of the world. If people are willing to run out of their cars in the middle of traffic to grab money that’s not theirs, who knows what else they’re capable of doing? Maybe some people actually do things like cheat on their income taxes, take drugs so they can play sports better, or take their neighbor’s newspaper early in the morning to check last night’s sports scores.

So I decided to conduct an experiment. I would walk up to people with money in my hand, and ask them if it was theirs. I started with quarters and I would usually be near a store's cash register to make my scenario believable. "I think you might have dropped this," was my line. But every person I approached that way said to me, "No, that's not mine."

I even went to a video arcade where quarters are like gold. There were two kids in there who were either doing research for a paper on video games or were ditching school. The one whose jeans were around his knees actually dropped a quarter as I walked in. After he picked that up, I presented him with one of my quarters and said, "I think you dropped this one, too." The kid declined the quarter, saying it wasn't his. (He actually said, “Not mine, dude).”

I decided to up the ante. I was walking in a crowded shopping mall with my hands in my pockets and purposely "dropped" a $20 bill to the floor and continued to walk. I was practically tackled by two people, coming from opposite directions, telling me that I dropped the twenty. They also admonished me, saying I should be more careful with my money.

As I put the $20 bill back in my pockets, I smiled. People really are good. Then how do I explain the actions of those who stuffed their pockets and fled? There are plenty of plausible explanations. For example, maybe that's the one street in America where people don't act properly. Maybe they plan to give the money to charity. Maybe they thought it was play money. The important thing is that I proved that people really are trustworthy.

By the way, if you see me walking around, don't bother following me, hoping that I'll purposely be dropping money on the ground. My experiment's over. It was a one-time thing. I have faith in people, but I'm not going to push my luck.