Get ready - in about three hours, you'll have a chance to hear an announcer utter the word "choke" for the first time over the next three weeks of college basketball, a k a March Madness.
"Choke" has become the convenient term to describe what a team, player and/or coach does when said team fritters away a lead or doesn't make the needed play. Some labeled New Orleans' loss to Mt. St. Mary's a "choke" on Tuesday night when coach Mark Slessinger inexplicably did not have his team foul late in the NCAA Tournament game when conventional coaching wisdom dictates that as the strategy.
In reality, the team or player or coach may be "choking up," but they're not choking. (Look it up.) And, this word has been used far too often as the convenient rationale for why a team gave up a lead and lost.
Did the Atlanta Falcons choke in the Super Bowl? Maybe. Or, maybe they just got beat by a super hero quarterback named Brady. Did Providence choke last night in the play-in NCAA Tournament game versus USC? Maybe. But, don't tell Bennie Boatwright as that would diminish his 24 point effort and big-shot making for the Trojans.
If you haven't guessed, I'm tired of the use of the word and as the easy path to explain away a loss by someone who was expected to win. To use it so cavalierly is to diminish the reality and the drama of sports - if everyone who was supposed to win always won, sports would be pretty boring and March Madness wouldn't be March Madness.
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