Georgia In My Heart

I have been under a rock for the last week. Licking my wounds after VCU fell off the bubble and into the scrap heap that is the NIT. I went to Fairfax to collect my thoughts, get in touch with what was real, and to party like a rock star. Fairfax, Virginia is a suburb of Washington, DC. It is it's own city to itself. It is the definition of sprawl. A concrete and glass jungle being fueled by migrant workers, over the top waitresses, gang members, and coffee addicts. You can get anything you want in Fairfax, and none of it is free. I stayed at a hotel which overlooked the parking lot of the local mall. This meant I could get my suburban white boy groove on across the parking lot at a restaurant located in the mall. In the mall restaurant with the back drop of big screen televisions and mojitos I contemplated my life and decided that I wanted to go home. I watched the disconnected and disenfranchised of suburban life drink themselves into a coma. I remembered that when I was in Charlotte, NC that I was one of them. I am now older and more predictable. In the end, I just wanted to go home after night #3.

So last night I headed home and found that everything was still intact. The house had not been destroyed by a giant beetle. My daughter had not called Columbia asking for more Pop Tarts. My wife was as tired as ever. All good. After everyone went to bed I checked the scores from the various conference tournaments. I checked the SEC tournament being held in Atlanta. It was about 9:30. That's when a series of improbable events occurred. The first event occurred outside the Georgia Dome. Almost out of nowhere a devastating tornado strikes the center of downtown Atlanta. Mississippi State and Alabama were locked up in a close battle in the Georgia Dome when the building started to literally shake. The scaffolding started to sway. Debris started to fall onto the floor. Pieces of the roof were broken off. People in the arena not knowing whether it was a tornado or terrorists became scared and sought cover. The game stopped. I watched pieces of this occur safely in my kitchen. I turned to CNN and found out that the CNN Center had been hit as well as a swath of the downtown area from the Georgia Dome towards the Phillips Arena, CNN Center, and the Olympic Park. Roofs were blown off, homes destroyed, glass all over the street. CNN was off the air as CNN International (likely being beamed from a bunker somewhere in Columbia) was on the air reporting with a rookie reporter who probably never had as much luck as he did last night when he was thrown into a major story of a tornado hitting the downtown of an urban large city.

After about an hour, apparently they decided at the Georgia Dome that George Bush had not decided to burn Atlanta down again and they re-started the last minutes of the game between Mississippi State and Alabama. The Bulldogs finished the job against the Tide and moved on to Saturday's semi-finals. Thirty minutes after the game was over I cranked up the laptop to watch on-line the last semi-final of the night between Georgia and Kentucky. As a Georgia fan I was looking forward to watching the last place team in the league get mauled by a surging Kentucky team thus ending another season of bitter disappointments and inconsistent play that has been the calling card of Georgia basketball since Jarvis Hayes was getting A's in classes he never attended. It was then that the folks at the Georgia Dome decided they were not safe after all from George Bush or the elements outside. They made a fateful decision. To postpone the Georgia-Kentucky game to the next day. I had never heard of a basketball tournament being postponed in March due to weather. So this set the stage of the winner of Georgia-Kentucky playing twice in the same game. Another improbable event. The delay gave Georgia the "call from the Governor" to stay their execution and an additional day of rest as they had upset Ole Miss in overtime. At 2 a.m, we learned that Georgia would play Kentucky at noon and will have to play the game on Georgia Tech's home court two miles away.

In order to be "fair" the SEC made another improbable decision. They decided since the Alexander Coliseum did not fit even half the crowd of the Georgia Dome that they would only allow the bands, cheerleaders, the press, and the families of the teams into the arena for the game. Everyone who bought a ticket for the tournament would not be allowed entry. So the tournament of one of the top conferences would play the remainder of their tournament in a near empty arena. Classic.

What was Georgia's record against Kentucky in tournament play prior to today's game? 0-8.
In another improbable event in front of an empty arena and TV camera, freshman Zak Swansey scored five points in OT and a crazy three point shot with 1.3 seconds left to help Georgia beat Kentucky 60-56. Georgia got the benefit of an incredible no-call on what obviously was a charging foul on Georgia as Kentucky called a set play on the inbound pass at the last second of the OT. Two games. Two upsets by the worst team in the league. And the gift of playing an improbable 2nd game on the same day roughly six hours later against Mississippi State which was a higher seed than Kentucky.

How many SEC games had Georgia won all year before the tournament? 4. By the second game in eight hours they had won two since Thursday. Now they played highly favored Mississippi State on their bitter rival's home floor in front of only the mascots. Led by Sundiata Gaines who pumped in 20 before fouling out with 7:18 left, Georgia provided one of the most gutsy performances in my memory by hanging in the game and eventually winning the game 64-60. Georgia played with heart, courage, and super human energy in an incredibly difficult situation. I was about ready to pack the game in when Gaines fouled out and hurt his hip with 7:18 left. I thought that Mississippi State would take the momentum and begin to distance themselves from the exhausted Georgia squad. Astonishingly, Georgia out hustled their opponents down the stretch. They flipped a switch and went into another gear that nobody believed they had all year in the last five minutes. They refused to quit. They banged for tough rebounds. They used their quickness to get good shots in the paint. They stayed on their feet. And they pulled it out in the end. It is unknown whether they were playing for their beleaguered coach (it's not his fault that Georgia is where they are as a program) or for better grades in their weight lifting classes, but it is clear that they had the heart and guts of a team refusing to quit under crazy circumstances.

One of the most critical measures of an individual or a team is how they handle crisis. I am not interested in how people do when things are going well. That's too easy. It's when people go through a crisis is where I can see what they are truly made of. Georgia met the crisis they found themselves in at the door, said hello, and kicked it in the knees. They met the challenge. Their reward? A chance at making the Big Dance with four straight improbable wins. A chance at 16-16 to make it to the Big Dance. A chance to win the SEC tournament championship by knocking off Arkansas (on their bitter rival's home court in front of only the cheerleaders and camera crew). Arkansas stunned a recklessly fun #4 ranked Tennessee squad today 92-91 to earn a bid to the Dance as well. Whatever happens no one will forget Georgia's unlikely run. I hope that the story ends with then punching a ticket to the dance and raising a trophy that no one on Earth felt that they would even see outside of a glass case let alone touch. If it doesn't end in story book format, then I will always have the knowledge that they became more than a basketball team. They became something bigger than themselves that each player will take with them in any walk of life for the rest of their lives. Isn't that what college athletics is supposed to be anyways?