The NCAA men's basketball championship is tonight and, although I really don't have an emotional stake in the outcome, I always get a little pang around this time of year because it reminds me of the torrid 3-year affair I conducted with my first sports love.
My mom and dad both attended Ohio State, and there was never any question about where our sports loyalties resided. I was sort of a chubby, unathletic kid, though, and the sports gene pretty much lay dormant until the winter of 1959 - 60. That year, a once-in-a-lifetime recruiting class became sophomores and eligible to play at Ohio State, including Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, Mel Nowell and Bobby Knight. I must have contracted my dad's enthusiasm, and we started setting aside time on the evenings - Saturday and Tuesday, usually - when they played, and we'd strain our radio's capability to pull in the Columbus radio station carrying the games.
As this first wondrous season unfolded with victory after victory, we at some point got caught up in keeping score. My dad must have seen a bonding opportunity in this virtual sport that hadn't germinated in the freezing duck blinds and torpid bobber-watching forays he'd tried in vain to inure me to, and he made the most of it. He had printed (mimeographed - these were the old days) scoresheets made at his office with the hallowed starting five filled in, and blanks for subs, and we assiduously recorded field goals attempted and made, free throws attempted and made, and personal fouls. We'd compare notes at halftime and at the end of games, and compute the shooting percentages for individuals and the teams, and try to do it fast enough to compare ours with the post-game wrap-up.
We were aided greatly in this endeavor by undoubtedly the most egregious homer announcer I've ever heard, a guy named Joe Hill. It was amazing how close our radio-informed statistics would track the official numbers. And, an added bonus, Hill would really scourge the refs if he felt we were being jobbed, and, for the first time in my life, I tasted the seething vintages of the sports fan's hatreds.
The Buckeyes won the national championship that year that Lucas and Havlicek were sophomores, and went on to post a 73-6 record over the three years those guys played. They were beaten, however, in each of the next two national championship games by Cincinnati. I honestly think I lost my religion the Sunday morning after the second Cinci loss. I remember having to walk away from the TV in the second half, as I'd learned to discern defeat in a team's demeanor. Then in the morning, sitting in church with my eyes closed but seeing nothing but the Blade's "CINCI WINS!" headline emblazoned in Hiroshima-sized type on my retinas, I finally knew the universe for the cold and brutal place that it is.
Ohio State had a couple of good years after that with Gary Bradds, another all-American, at center, but, for me, bra sizes began to replace field-goal percentages as my stat-du-jour, my dad began to suffer stress from occupational angst and personal demons, and our period of Buckeye bonding dissipated.
Still, we had it, that period of delirious sports lust, and its corollary, the searing heartache of defeat and entitlement forfeited. Of course, my dad and I collaborated on projects and enjoyed each other's company until he died last fall, and I've had satisfying adult relationships with other sports teams, but I always feel a little nostalgia during March Madness for those nights by the radio, brow furrowed and pencil poised, urging Big Luke to sink another of his soft hooks.
(Pictures from The Golden Age of Ohio State Basketball by Lee Caryer)
Bonus shot - Basketball cognoscenti familiar with the scowling, silver-haired visage of Bobby Knight might get a kick out of the shot below, taken at the Cow Palace after the 1960 national championship game:
I think my laptop had a little stroke last weekend. At some point, the "8", "i", "k", "+" and a couple other keys quit working. Powering down didn't help. I found a spare keyboard in my closet and plugged it in, but found the space bar only worked intermittently, so I pitched it back into the closet and faked my way through various tasks. I did this by cutting and pasting the missing letters into a Word document, then whenever I needed one and couldn't think of reasonable synonyms, I'd 'Ctrl-C' the fugitive letter and 'Ctrl-V' it into my text. It felt both incredibly resourceful and incredibly stupid at the same time.
I went to eBay and found a replacement keyboard for sale pretty cheap, and I bought it, dreading the day it arrives and I'll have to undertake the disassembly of the laptop.
I had just finished scouring the internet for some schematics about how to take it apart when I noticed that the keys had started to work again, the industrious little electrons having found an alternative path around whatever thrombosis had caused the outage. It's stayed fixed for a full day now, and I'm crossing my fingers.
Still, in the past when I've found myself adding components to a computer, it's really time to look for a new one. Just one more task on my lengthy list, another learning curve I'll reluctantly mount. Not to mention the expense.
One of the fun things about being a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder (NYSE:BRK.A) is receiving the annual report, which I just received last week. Unlike other annual reports that are rich in smarm, platitudes and slick layout, and short on real information, the BRK annual report is written in large part by Warren Buffett himself, in first person. He recounts, with humor and apparent candor, the operating results and significant occurrences of Berkshire's far-flung empire, and often it's larded with pithy commentary like the following.
Investors should understand that in all types of financial institutions, rapid growth sometimes masks major underlying problems (and occasionally fraud). The real test of the earning power of a derivatives operation is what it achieves after operating for an extended period in a no-growth mode. You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out.
While this enjoyment doesn't completely ameliorate the $6,000 drop in share price over the last few weeks, it's still refreshing. The media has Warren on the griddle a bit lately. He's being called to testify in Eliot Spitzer's investigation of insurance giant AIG. A few years ago, a Berkshire subsidiary and AIG did a transaction that AIG then proceeded to record on its books in a misleading and perhaps fraudulent manner. Buffett is being called as a witness, not a target of the investigation, but there are questions about whether the Berkshire unit knew beforehand of AIG's fraudulent intent, and tailored the transaction to accommodate it. And, there is a question about how much Buffett knew about it at the time.
Part of the interest this case has generated occurs because, in his speaking and writing, Buffett has been an unwelcome scold regarding shoddy and deceptive accounting practices, advocating, for instance, that stock options be expensed by companies that grant them as compensation, long before the SEC reluctantly agreed last year. So, there's a little shadenfreude in seeing him be made to squirm a little.
Berkshire is a former textile company that Buffett has turned into a holding company, and it owns myriad businesses in diverse markets: GEICO Insurance, Shaw carpets, Dairy Queen, See's Candies, just to name a few. Being a shareholder is tantamount to investing in a mutual fund managed by Warren Buffett. So, my sentiment as well as my economic self-interest wants to believe that Buffett was oblivious to the minutae of the AIG business. Buffett's MO is to purchase a company that has strong fundamentals and competent managers and then let them run it. His "Owner's Manual" for Berkshire shareholders says:
Charlie (Munger) and I are the managing partners of Berkshire. But we subcontract all of the heavy lifting in this business to the managers of our subsidiaries. In fact, we delegate almost to the point of abdication...Charlie and I mainly attend to capital allocation and the care and feeding of our key managers. Most of these managers are happiest when they are left alone to run their businesses, and that is customarily just how we leave them.
However, since, in my view, Eliot Spitzer has basically been the country's justice department for the last five years, if I weren't a BRK shareholder, I'd probably be going, "Aha!" like a lot of other folks are, happy to see another corporate miscreant being brought to heel. In this instance, though, I'm hoping Warren Buffett's reputation and cachet remains intact.
I mean, the Pope can die and it only affects my life to the extent that I worry if the Final Four games will be pre-empted. When Warren Buffett dies, I'll be anxiously scanning the color of the smoke exhalations over Omaha.
Perils of Caffeine in the Evening
