On brackets

I made out a bracket on ESPN.com this year. A friend sent me an invitation so I filled a few out. I am reminded again why I don't fill out brackets.

I am an intensely competitive person. Games of all sorts require of me a rigid self-control. If I play a ball game I have to forget the score. If I play with the sort of person who repeats it after every play the ruthlessness emerges from its lair. It is a force of nature which I have fought for years to bury and to kill. Board games are a bit different. It's harder to forget who's winning. When I play a board game one of three things generally happens. Sometimes I give up and enjoy the game. This is a victory for me though I generally lose. More often I try to win. Either I do win, in which case the victory is hollow, leading only to the desire to win again; or I lose, in which case I get this terrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. This leads me to be unbearable around as you all well know. I become a surly wreck. Well everyone who is likely to read this blog has seen that so I won't explain further.

Which leads me to brackets. One of the joys of the tournament for me is rooting for the underdog. I would love nothing more than to see a 16 seed take out a 1 seed someday. But my competitive nature impels me to fill out a bracket as I think the tournament will actually turn out, not as I hope it will. I just can't fill out a bracket with four 16 seeds in the final four. I also want my bracket to win. Which means that when the games are going on I find myself actually rooting for the higher seeds. And so I can't root for the underdog, and the one thing that makes the tournament enjoyable for me.

So next year no brackets. Until next year by which time I will have inevitably forgoten the lesson I learned this year.