March Madness and Democracy

March is the cruelest month. The confluence of myriad midterms, sundry applications and neglected theses is bad enough. But for those whose basketball jones prevents sustained concentration on anything but March Madness, March can be, well, maddening.

It's tough to justify spending hours in front of the television watching the NCAA championships when the world beckons. Nevertheless, it's a good thing so many students--especially Harvard students--do so. Nothing less than the preservation of American civilization depends on it.

What makes the NCAA tournament so great--and makes this year's tournament better than most--is cheering for underdogs, a distinctly American pastime. When the Statue of Liberty says "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," she asks for underdogs. Horatio Alger, Class of 1852, spent his life writing about underdogs. And then there's "The Underdog Show," a cartoon that first appeared in the late 1960s, in which the lowest of the low (Shoeshine Boy) transforms into an unlikely superhero--a small, cute, furry dog who spends his time, as the memorable theme song goes, "fighting those who rob and plunder" with "speed of lightning, roar of thunder."

And no sporting event is better suited to this intense national sympathy with the disadvantaged and unfavored than the NCAA tournament. In no other sport's championship does one find such a clear system of ranks. In each game there is always an underdog--the five-seed is supposed to be better than the four-seed. And because several of the 64 spots in the tournament are filled by the winners of small and athletically unendowed conferences (the Ivy League, for instance), the presence of uncompetitive teams against which all odds are stacked is guaranteed. All of which makes the NCAA tournament a uniquely American event.

And not just uniquely American, but uniquely democratic as well. In the ancien regime, one guesses, men cheered for the favorites--a noble lord with a time machine would be a Duke fan. We moderns, however, are different. Even the old money types among us--our closest approximation of the landed gentry--root for the probable loser. These days, even the least democratic have democratic souls.

If, as Aristotle says, democracy is the rule of the poor, we might just as well say it's the rule of underdogs. Perhaps democracy is a sustained rebellion against those who, by virtue of their virtue, have a just claim to rule. Zeal for the underdog, then, is a leveling, equalizing, smashing impulse--in short, rebelliousness.

In his 1838 address to the young men's lyceum, Lincoln worried that this impulse was responsible for increasing disregard of law, which he thought important because "if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." This, in turn, threatened to break down the people's attachment to their political institutions.

Lincoln went on to worry that great and ambitious men, living after the great deeds of the Founding, might achieve fame through destruction rather than preservation of political institutions. An ambitious man of the loftiest genius, he wrote, "would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire [distinction] by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down." To overcome such a threat, Lincoln argued, a people must be united together and to their government.

Although what Lincoln had in mind when he spoke of "towering genius" is extremely rare--he gives Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon as examples--one still finds similar passions in the geniuses who grow regularly within a democracy, such as the kind of geniuses who fill the elite schools, Harvard not least among them. For these students, who might otherwise "boldly take to the task of pulling down," cheering for underdogs in the NCAA tournament is cathartic. The tournament allows their revolutionary energies to be safely spent.

Students at schools like Harvard--where the reigning hobgoblin of the sports program is a consistent mediocrity--are especially well-suited to sympathy with unfavored teams. Unless a squash enthusiast, a Harvard fan will, by graduation, become thoroughly acclimated to the role of underdog fan.

For the most towering geniuses such acclimation is necessary. When the best and brightest lack underdogs to root for, their destructive ambitions seek other outlets. A combination of academic excellence and athletic prowess, then, is not only rare--it's dangerous. Is it mere coincidence that the 1969 occupation of University Hall came just one year after the Harvard football team went undefeated?

Some wise soul in the wing of Harvard's sprawling bureaucracy responsible for scheduling vacations seems to have learned this lesson--this year's spring break corresponds almost perfectly with the climax of the NCAA tournament. Please, watch college basketball over the break--the continued welfare of our nation may well depend on it.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.