March Through Madness: An NCAA Tourney Blog : In Which Gerald Henderson Saves Our Author Three Thousand Bucks

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March Through Madness

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Mark Coatney

Devin Gordon

Mark Starr

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Though it's March Madness, We Know April is the Coolest Month

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March gets all the ink, and the fancy "Madness" nickname, but as a top-to-bottom sports fan, I'm finding myself much more partial to April. We get the Final Four and the national title game, then the Masters just a few days later. And wrapped all around...

The Ivies Muscle Up

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Teams to Root for--and Against

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In Which Gerald Henderson Saves Our Author Three Thousand Bucks

Devin Gordon

American Airlines flight #116 left JFK Airport for Hong Kong last night at 11:59 pm, and I was very nearly on it. It would've cost me nearly $3,000 to book a ticket so close to takeoff but it would've been worth every penny. I know all this about Flight #116 because I went on Orbitz and started looking for flights out of the country with about seven minutes left in the Duke-Belmont game. That's when I knew for sure that this game was going right down to the wire, that there would be no patented Duke run to quiet the crowd and disappoint, well, pretty much everyone. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I was pretty sure we were going to lose. After all, it's hard to win when your team captain and only senior starter, DeMarcus Nelson, has the same look on his face that little kids get when they really, really have to pee. A few days ago, our colleague at Slate, Josh Levin, who is a rabid LSU fan, teased me about Nelson's stinkbomb against his Tigers in LSU's Sweet 16 upset victory against us in 2006. Within minutes of the final buzzer tonight, we agreed that he had outdone himself tonight.

I like DeMarcus Nelson. Really. He's fought injuries his whole career as well as the disappointment of never quite living up to the expectations he arrived at Duke with. By all accounts, he works incredibly hard. I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him personally. He's strong. He's tough. He's a remarkable athlete. And he's the worst tournament player I've ever seen at Duke. In tourney games, something goes hollow inside him. He doesn't disappear. He actively dismantles our team. I wish I was exaggerating when I say that he looks at times like he has forgotten how the game is played. During a critical possession late, he bumped into Greg Paulus at the top of the arc and just kinda stood there, like he didn't know where else to go. He missed open shots, he made lousy passes, he dribbled into traffic and, with two seconds left, he belched up a free throw that hit the front of the rim like it was a gong. If I wasn't shaking with fury, still, hours later, I'd feel terrible for the poor kid.

But he's our captain. How can our captain keep playing like this in the only games that really matter?

Fortunately for me and my bank account, I was able to stop rummaging for my passport long enough to watch Gerald Henderson turn into Hercules before my very eyes. He was everything that Nelson wasn't. His coast-to-coast drive for the winner--shades of Tyus Edney--is an instant classic, especially if we rally and make a run in this tournament. (Riiiight...) And he even one-upped Edney with that scintillating finger-roll for the finish. Also, if you watch the replay 20 times as I did, you'll notice how his terrific rebound—back to the hoop, ripping the ball from two taller Belmont players—set the whole thing in motion.

But it wasn't just the game-winner. Down the stretch, Henderson did everything. In one key sequence late, he brought the ball up and had it poked away from behind, but somehow he lunged and tapped the ball ahead to a wide open teammate (forget who) and he laid it in for an easy bucket. He grabbed every big rebound. Hit his foul shots. Played rabid defense. All with a bum wrist. And the look on his face? Pure determination. He was locked in. He was far and away the best player on the floor, and he knew it, so he took over. Which is what superstars do.

(By the way, this wasn't all Nelson's fault. Stud freshman Kyle Singler pulled a disappearing act in his first career tourney game. Paulus made his obligatory bonehead errant passes in the last few minutes. And Coach K looked as constipated as Nelson, deciding that his strategy for winning the game's last eight minutes would be to stop substituting entirely and hope his kids played better once they were so tired they could barely stand up.)

I am under no illusions about Saturday's game against West Virginia. I fully expect to lose. Starr and Coatney, you guys have seen enough hoops to know that serious upset bids like these take on a suffocating momentum that's almost impossible to stop, and in that respect, there's something liberating about fighting back and getting the win. But that doesn't offset how pathetic and gutless we looked tonight. Still, if we do turn it around, if the team that beat Wisconsin by 24 and North Carolina in Chapel Hill shows up here on out, we could make some noise, if only because we got one critical thing out of this game: we finally found someone to depend on at the buzzer. O captain, my captain. Not you, DeMarcus.

Survive and advance, guys. Survive and advance.

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