Hoya Paranonia

Georgetown Essay

by Ted Bauer

My friends, who know me first and foremost probably as a sports fan, sometimes ask me, “Did you pick Georgetown because of the basketball?”

The truth is: I didn’t. Months after I had signed the admissions contract, I saw an article in The New York Post about some top-flight high school point guard in NYC (I honestly think it might have been Carl Krauser, who later went to Pitt – but I can’t remember for sure). It casually listed that Georgetown was among his “top five or six choices.” At that point, I started thinking myself as a corollary to Georgetown hoops history: the wrong end of Jordan’s shot, the right end of Seattle 1984, and the wrong end of the best game in college basketball history; as much a center factory as Penn State is a linebacker factory; and Big John pacing the sidelines.

It’s impossible, once you get to Georgetown, to not become a part of that history and culture. People here come from, as at most major universities, all over the world, so something has to unify that experience. At your first Midnight Madness, people are stark raving crazy, and the on-campus arena – a point of consternation, since we don’t actually play any meaningful games there – is decorated pillar to post with trophies, and jerseys of guys balling in the NBA, and pictures of Big East Championship teams. Basketball is passion at Georgetown; in terms of spectator sports, there really isn’t anything else. Our lacrosse program is excellent, as is track and field, and honestly, we’ve had a few good seasons in football, albeit not Big East football. All that, taken together, still can’t equal what we put on the line for hoops.

I remember my first Midnight Madness. I leaned over to my new friends and gasped with awe when Anthony Perry was introduced; years later I would see him stalking around my “Senior Week” and hear rumors he was a JV basketball coach in Maryland. See, that’s the whole point: I went to Georgetown during the “down years.” Across this period, Craig Esherick seemed to have one set play he called in, and we were treated to the likes of Courtland Freeman, Wesley Wilson, Lee Scruggs, and Victor Samnick. Sure, sure – there were good points, like Kevin Braswell (his greatest professional relevance to date has been hitting a preseason NBA buzzer beater) and Mike Swetney (seemingly now lost in the shuffle of the NBA). But by and large, the 1999-2003 period saw very little.

And yet, we still loved the program like nothing else. Every game, regardless of how miniscule a chance we truly had to win, the buses on campus would be full an hour before game time, ready to transport throngs of face-painted, frothing-at-the-mouth (occasionaly inebriated) fans to MCI Center. When we did well in those years – the 2001 run to the Sweet 16, the defeat of ‘Cuse during their eventual championship year – things were even more intense. I literally hugged people I had never seen before, because we were both Hoyas, and this was Hoya basetball, and that, frankly, was what you did.

I’m not going to compare Georgetown’s basketball atmosphere to Kentucky, or Indiana, or UCLA, or any of those programs. It’s also not on the same line as Notre Dame football, a Big 10 fall Saturday, or anything like that. We play at an off-campus arena and are just returning to national prominence now, at this very moment (and while it hurts to not be a student for all this madness, in a way it’s even sweeter to be the wise alum who suffered, looking back on the past as a hurdle en route to the present).

My friend once told me, though, that when he was studying abroad, he attended a rugby match in Great Britian. A few rows up from him, a guy was wearing a Georgetown basketball jacket, so my friend went up to converse; that, after all, is what any good Hoya would do. Turns out the guy didn’t go to Georgetown – he had been to America only once; but he still understood. “Ewing,” he said. “Mourning. Hoya Paranoia.” Georgetown basketball, in this respect, is seemingly a global force, or at least an element of global sports consciousness.

For me, and for all of us – those who actually know what a Hoya is, those who can ramble on about the on-campus/off-campus debate, those who can’t watch the HBO special about the Villanova upset – it’s intensely personal. It’s Saturday mornings with your friends before a Villanova game. It’s long bus rides to the MCI Center to watch us in a see-saw battle with a team we should handle, or be handled by. It’s “We… Are… Georgetown.” It’s the fight song at the most random time. It’s seeing your former star shooting guard drinking keg beer four years later and laughing. It’s Thompsons and Ewings and Greens and Hibberts and centers and everyone and everything, all rolled into one – yet the experience is so personal to us, so important to being a Georgetown student, that it almost can’t be explained or even quanitified.

We just know. That’s part of what it’s all about, anywhere – being part of a bigger secret that no one else can understand. Just like I couldn’t tell you what a game day at Notre Dame is like if you’re part of it, very few could speak of what it’s like to beat Arkansas first round on a buzzer beating floater (‘01), then have a 15 beat a 2 in the other game, setting up a match-up designed to get us to the Sweet 16, and as a result, seeing cars toppled right outside your window.

See, as the chant goes, we are Georgetown. And all this is the Georgetown experience. Without basketball, it just simply wouldn’t be possible.