Dec. 12, 2010
I'm holding David Lynch partially responsible for this roadtrip.
Since the end of last year's basketball season, I've been working alternating months on the night shift at my office. As my off days were actually off nights, I needed a steady stream of entertainment to fill the odd hours of the early morning. I decided on Twin Peaks, Lynch's groundbreaking and altogether strange psychological thriller/mystery/coffee commercial that followed Kyle MacLachlan's Agent Dale Cooper as he tried to solve the murder of local high school student Laura Palmer.
Well, 4am is still 4am, and thus I frequently dozed off in the middle of episodes, only to wake up and have the same reaction Homer Simpson did watching the show: "Brilliant! I have absolutely no idea what's going on." (Who am I kidding, that was most of the episodes I stayed awake for too.)
One time, I was awakened by the final image of a particularly dark episode-a close-up of a loudly screeching
owl imposed over a black screen. I haven't been that scared since I still believed monsters lived under my bed.
The owls were a recurring motif in the show-in fact, one of the significant clues in the murder case (delivered in a manner that totally makes sense-by a ghostly Giant) is the phrase "the owls are not what they seem".
Sure enough, I couldn't get that line out of my head the whole week before I travelled to Philadelphia this past Thursday to watch Georgetown play the Temple Owls at the Liacouras Center. I just knew something out of the ordinary might happen. The Owls weren't what they seemed when I saw them over Thanksgiving lose two out of three games at the Old Spice Classic. What was going to happen to the Hoyas when they met the Owls though? No such luck finding out ahead of time-I didn't see a Giant in my dreams this week (I assumed he'd look like Jay Bilas).
Naturally, something felt a little surreal, a little out of the ordinary when I got to northeast Philly.
Now, I wouldn't exactly call Broad Street a prototypical Lynchian setting-inasmuch as it appears to lack a thriving logging industry and a 1950s style diner. Instead, the characteristic rustling of the wind through tree branches is replaced with something more eerie to the visiting college basketball fan-the rumbling vibrations of Temple's Wild Cherry student section (of course it's cherry…hooray for extending the metaphor!).
For the third time in three seasons, my visitor's tickets found me adjacent to a student section. Of those, Temple had neither the largest (it filled the space it was given) nor the most dangerous (I'm in the front left of this video ignoring the turmoil) but made up for it with a unique special effect. The stands below me shook every time the students did a percussion-heavy cheer. One of the reasons I'm on record favoring mid-sized arenas over the NBA palaces and Domes of the world.
Every venue I visit lately, big or small, has become a kind of Black Lodge for Georgetown's season at that moment. Thursday night at Temple was my fifth consecutive road loss as a traveling Hoyas fan, nicely bookending an ignominious streak that began last January a few miles to the south at the [Whatever Bank It Was That Month] Center against Villanova. By this point, I'm watching games away from the Verizon Center in the same anxious, dazed stupor as Agent Cooper when he sees the Giant onstage at the Roadhouse.
It is happening again.
Or is it? What is it? More to the point, are we really meant to care?
I find one aspect of David Lynch's vision for Twin Peaks especially fascinating as it relates to how we view a television show generally and, perhaps, a college basketball season more specifically. The driving force of the show that became a surprising early hit was its murder mystery: "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" And yet Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost originally intended a rather audacious answer to the question-they weren't going to answer it. The water cooler question of the 1990 television season, if the creators had their way, was going to be a big old Macguffin. They saw the show not as a "Whodunnit?" but a window into the small town and the interactions of its quirky residents.
It was a high-concept idea, for sure, but one with a low likelihood of succeeding in the end. Television viewers want drama, but not always high-drama. They'll flock to water coolers to discuss characters, but not the finer points of character development. Ultimately, network execs and ratings intervened, and the Twin Peaks writers were forced to solve the mystery mid-way through the second season. Once the killer was revealed (SPOILER ALERT: it's complicated), the show began to more closely resemble the kind of trippy small-town soap the creators had in mind…and of course, was cancelled by the end of the season due to low ratings.
Internet message boards are often referred to as virtual water coolers, and I think the comparison holds some water (ugh…this is why I'm not a television writer). To be fair, college basketball fans in recent years have embraced high-concept fare on the internet-everything from tempo-free stats to the finer points of the Princeton offense. But if we're being honest, message boards like water coolers are a hub for discussing what just happened. During a season-of basketball or television-in most cases it's "Whodunnit?" rather than "Where is this going?".
But by obsessing over the latest shift in the storyline, have we lost the plot?
I once started a thread on the Hoytalk message board titled "So Your Team is Struggling". Walking through campus after a loss that dropped the Hoyas to 4-3, I overheard two students complaining about how poorly the team was playing, and how few students came to the previous home game. It seemed like a good water cooler topic at the time-the plot of the previous two weeks' "episodes" weren't very encouraging.
Less than three months later, a sold out Verizon Center watched the Hoyas win their 10th consecutive Big East game and take over first place in the conference. They finished that season (2006-07) in the Final Four.
This isn't to say one can't learn lessons from a single game-in fact, I'd say Coach Thompson is banking on his team doing exactly that this weekend. Nor do I necessarily disagree with any of the well-thought out critiques this weekend of how the Hoyas came up a basket short on Broad Street.
I do have to smile though that a well-commented thread titled "Who takes our last shot?" appeared on a popular message board even before the latest episode of Hoya Basketball ended.
Always with the "Whodunnit?"
It's just too easy to obsess over the latest plot twist. And why not? The last thing on my mind when Chris Wright nailed his game-tying three-pointer in Kansas City was distribution of minutes among Georgetown's guards or how playing an up-tempo Missouri team would prepare the Hoyas for the postseason. That was a crazy ending!
So on to the next episode we go…
Let's Rock!
Sunday's matchup with the Appalachian State Mountaineers (noon, ESPNU) will likely feature the introduction of a new character into this season's ensemble cast: the 6'9'' freshman Moses Ayegba, who joins the active roster after a nine-game hiatus. Moses has been quite the water cooler topic before even stepping onto the court, with Hoya fans growing in excitement over the prospect of adding another big body to the frontcourt rotation. If Moses' time off resulted in even 1/10 the physical transformation it did for Nadine Hurley, we're in for a real treat.
Another day, another game, another new episode to debate around the water cooler. The world spins, and the ball still bounces our way most of the time…except, apparently, when I go on road trips.
Will it happen again? Well, I don't have any trips planned until January. Until then…
…I've got good news. That offense you like is going to come back in style.
John Hawkes (SFS '04)
Proud Member of Generation Burton
