Championship Monday

On basketball, Mr. Belt Buckle, and the championship games we play when nobody's keeping score

Hello friends,

It’s Championship Monday. That’s an expression that can be used twice a year now. Once on the Monday night of the NCAA football championship in January, and also tonight, which happens to be the night of the NCAA championship basketball game.

Championship Monday for basketball has been a long-standing tradition that goes back as far as I can remember. The football thing is a much different story. In fact, they’re never even used to be a football championship game: It was just something people who didn’t even play in the games voted on to decide who the best team was at the end of the year. How weird is that? Now that you think about it, it seems completely ridiculous, doesn’t it?

As usual, when I see something that’s interesting going on in my life, I decide that I need to write a story about it, but truth be told, this is not the thing that I thought I was going to write about and publish today.

The thing that I thought I was going to publish next was going to happen over the weekend and it was a piece about Easter - more specifically, a previous Easter 11 years ago that was worth revisiting. Despite my best efforts, I never really got to that piece about Easter and it doesn’t even matter, because I can write it next year and the memories will all be the same, even if it’s 12 years after the fact instead of 11.

The other piece that I thought might publish today is a piece that I wrote at the end of last week. It’s a really good piece. I think it might be one of my best ever. It’s got a kite eating tree, my recent therapy session and a friend of mine from Boston who happens to be visiting Buenos Aires, and somehow those things all fit together. But that’s not the piece that needs to be out there today. The one that needs to be out there today is this piece about championship Monday and the other stuff can wait, because this story isn’t just about sports or championships, it’s about life.

So tonight, my beloved Michigan Wolverines will play in the national championship game. This will be the sixth time that I’ve seen them play for a national championship game in basketball. They’ve actually played in the championship game eight times total but I wasn’t much of a basketball fan in 1974 and I was only one year old in 1965, so those games don’t really register with me. Many people remember Michigan’s back-to-back appearances in the titlr game back in 1992 in 1993 because of the iconic Fab Five, which to this day still goes down as one of the most significant recruiting classes in college basketball history. Five freshman who were national recruits came to Michigan at the same time and all five became starters right away.

There was a lot of controversy back then about whether or not some of those five young men got cars or money to come to Michigan. Apparently a guy named Ed Martin illegally funneled over $600,000 to members of the Fab Five over a two year period, which resulted in Michigan having to “vacate” those two final four appearances. I’m not vacating those moments from this story though, because pretty much everybody was doing the sane thing back then. They still are doing it, but now it’s been dressed up and sterilized under the three letters NIL - which in my mind stand for Nobody Isn’t Lying.

These days $600,000 won’t even buy you a back up point guard for a season, but that’s a different story for a different day. Today is Championship Monday and I’m not going to let a pesky little technicality like ethics or sportsmanship get in the way of my fun - tongue in cheek moment intended.

Interestingly, The iconic Fab Five never won the championship game though. They might have if not for Chris Webber traveling without the referees noticing it, before calling a timeout the team didn’t have. The resulting penalty for that miscue ultimately cost Michigan a chance to win the game. The only time the Michigan Wolverines have won the national basketball championship was back in 1989, and that finally takes to the heart of the story in 1989. It only took me 500 words to get here!

The national championship game was played on Monday, April 3, 1989. I was in the home stretch of finishing up a college degree that took me six and a half years instead of four, but what can I say, it was the pace that worked for me. One of my classes, in that final semester of college was a business development and marketing class - Business 407 - and the vast majority of the grade hinged on one project and one presentation. As unluck would have it, our presentation day was Tuesday, April 4, the day after the national championship game.

My teacher for that class was a man in his late 30s or early 40s. I don’t think I could pick him out of a lineup of two and I have no recollection of what his name was, but I do remember he always had a giant belt buckle. It wasn’t like a wrestler‘s championship belt buckle, or a Texas cowboy belt buckle. It was just unusually large for some college teacher at a midwestern college and if it’s the only thing I can remember about him, it obviously made a statement. For the sake of the story I’m just going to call him Mr. Belt Buckle.

I had three other partners on this marketing project. One was a guy named Bryan who had blonde hair and spelled his name with a Y instead of an IA. Another was a girl named Dahlia. I have no idea who the fourth person was, but I’m pretty sure it was another guy so we’ll just call him Dude #4.

The four of us were working on the final details of the project on the weekend before Championship Monday. We did a few dry runs on the presentation and we even made a last-minute video, which would be an example of a TV commercial for the business idea we were developing.

The backdrop for the commercial was a group fitness class, so Dahlia dressed up in her best step aerobics outfit including the headband and we filmed the commercial to the backdrop of Madonna’s Just Like a Prayer, which had just been released a month prior and became an instant #1 international hit. I can never hear that song without thinking of the tiny little workout room at the village Green apartment complex, Dahlia in a unitard, and me and my business development buddies crammed in there, trying to figure out how to make a commercial when none of us had any idea how to use a video camera or edit anything at all.

That Saturday, April 1, 1989 the Michigan Wolverines beat the Illinois Fighting Illini to advance to the championship game. I immediately knew I had a problem. While I was excited that Michigan had advanced to the national championship game, I also knew that me, Bryan, Dahlia and Dude #4 were probably going to have to pull an all nighter on the Monday before our presentation.

I decided that the best thing to do would be to reach out to Mr. Belt Buckle and see if we could get an alternate date for our presentation. Unfortunately, this was long before the onset of cell phones and emails so the only chance we had was to try to hunt down Mr. Belt Buckle on campus on Monday morning and make our appeal.

To my great good fortune, I actually found Mr. Belt Buckle on Monday morning and made my appeal. The motion was swiftly denied. I was told that business was more important than basketball and that if we wanted to get a good grade in his class, we would be ready on Tuesday morning.

Now mind you, this was not at any college campus anywhere in the United States of America. This was at THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN!

I realize that responsibilities are important, but to this day it is unfathomable to me that Mr. Belt Buckle couldn’t have all allowed us a one or a two day extension, because pretty much every other person I knew in the world was off partying that night while we were lockdown in Dude #4’s apartment drawing up poster boards and writing the final bits of our presentation.

We had the game on in the background. Despite the fact that the game has gone down as one of the greatest college basketball games of all time, including overtime and last second heroics, I don’t remember much of the game at all because we were working. I do know that we all stopped working as Rumeal Robinson stepped to the foul line with three seconds left in overtime and nailed two free throws to give Michigan one point lead. Seton hall would make a last ditch effort to sink a full court shot, but that would be unsuccessful and the Michigan Wolverines became basketball national champions for the first time in school history.

On Tuesday, April 4, we walked into our business development marketing class. I’d say they were probably about 60 students total in our class and maybe 20 of them were actually there. Mr. Belt Buckle was standing in his position on the window side of the room with his arms folded and that’s where he stayed for pretty much our entire presentation. I took the lead. Even back then I had an act for the stage. Despite the fact that we were tired and the classroom was less than half full, I think we did an excellent job. Later that week when we picked up our report and our final grade, we got a C minus.

At that point, I already knew I was graduating so I wasn’t super concerned about what grade I got in Business 407, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was really pissed off. We worked through the night to deliver a presentation when most of our fellow students were off partying or not paying attention to our presentation and we got a somewhat dismissive C minus for Mr. Belt Buckle.

We actually got high marks for our presentation, which made me happy, but the biggest downfall he said was the quality of our idea. In fact, I remember, he specifically said that the idea was “nonsensical and was on no way grounded in reality because there would never be a market for the scale of the business we wanted to create.”

And this is the part where I get to tell you about our idea. Actually, it was my idea. I’ve always like to find a way to take the things that I’m passionate about and put them into what I’m actually doing in the real world. I got into the wine business when I was in my early 20s because I loved wine. I opened up a yoga and martial arts studio i my thirties because I loved Eastern practices. I got involved in men’s community work and that led me to becoming managing director of MenLiving.

Back then, the thing I love the most was Sports. I love playing floor hockey. I loved swimming. I love hanging out with other people who enjoyed fitness and sports activities. So my idea was for a large warehouse sized sports related business. I named it Total Sports.

Total sports would be much larger than the classic Bally fitness center. There would be basketball courts and multiple oversized pools anf hot tubs. There would be restaurants and bars and places for people to hang out. There would be leagues for floor hockey and basketball and everything else under the sun. There would be office space and couches and comfortable lobby areas where people could spread out and hang out and spend the better part of their day. There would be tanning beds and massage therapists and steam room and saunas of all different temperatures. And there would be meditation spaces and quiet rooms for people who didn’t want to do the more high intensity workouts.

Overall, the approach of Total Sports would be much less about just workouts, and a lot more about lifestyle.

The idea that I came up with that Mr. belt buckle thought was nonsensical and in no way grounded in reality? Three years later in 1992, Bahram Akradi opened up the first Lifetime Fitness location and I think we all know how that turned out.

Now let me be clear about something. I’m not saying that Mr. Belt Buckle ruined my life. In someway, he actually gave me the opportunity to notice in my early adulthood that there needs to be a balance between recreation, even if it’s your passion, and things that happen in the real world matrix of life.

But here’s what Mr. Belt Buckle never knew about me and frankly how could he, because I didn’t even know it about myself until very recently. I am someone who has carried around a wound from early childhood for my entire life. That wound is multifaceted, but a big part of that wound is the wound of not being good enough. Nobody put that wound inside me, not even the older boys who hurt me. I picked that wound up all by myself because it kept me safe.

That wound lied to me and helped me tell a story inside my head that it was safer to play small. It was safer to quit the high school hockey team. It was safer to find a girlfriend and hang out with her all the time than do stuff with the guys. And it was safer to take your creative genius and you servant leader energy elsewhere. It was safer to work for somebody else than it was to try to do something on your own, where you could really reap the benefits from your creative genius.

I’m grateful for the hundreds, if not, thousands of great mentors who I’ve been blessed to have in my life. Some of them helped me see how to do things and some of them helped me see how not to do things. Like many of them, Mr. Belt Buckle did a little bit of both.

So tonight, I’ll watch the national championship game and root for my Michigan Wolverines. I probably won’t be able to follow the game entirely because there will be other stuff to at the same time. It won’t be a marketing project at Dude # 4’s apartment this time. Tonight it will be the important real world, in the matrix of life stuff like cooking chicken fingers and reading a bedtime story and making sure my daughter Emma, who’s back to school for the first day today after two weeks of spring break and influenza A, can be quiet, calm, and find a place of peace when she goes to sleep.

I’ll be happy if Michigan wins. It won’t be as big a deal to me as it would’ve been in the past if they lose. As far as I know, I won’t be anybody giving me a report or a letter grade later this week, but hopefully when the day is done, I can look at myself in the mirror and notice that I’m doing a pretty good job.

Something is shifting inside me. When I turned my interest in wine into my career, I wound up losing my interest in wine. When I made yoga and martial arts my business, I wound up managing a business that I didn’t enjoy anymore and temporarily losing a hobby. I still love helping other men and I’ll never stop wanting to do that, but let’s just say in this world there are a lot of men who are carrying around wounds inside them much like mine, and they’re just now figuring out how to take a look at them, so I don’t think the demand is ever going to decrease on what I’m doing in that matrix.

And then there’s this writing thing. This pure art of creation that has been burning inside me since I crafted my first story as a nine-year-old boy about the ant and the dinosaur. I’m not sure what’s gonna become of at all, but what I do know is that there’s no way I’m listening to the Mr. Belt Buckle inside my head who is trying to gaslight me and convince me that it’s nonsensical and that there will never be a market for it. The only person who gets a chance to give me a grade this time around is me, and based on what I’ve been writing lately - much of which nobody has even seen yet - I’m giving myself an A+.

I guess this is finally my Championship Monday.

Win or lose, at least I get to play in the game.

Rumeal Robison before the game winning free throw in 1989