COLUMN: The culture of intramural basketball

From Jason Brenner's, "My 20 inches," Fall '97 From Jason Brenner's, "My 20 inches," Fall '97It involves months, sometimes even years, of intense preparation during which the athlete wholly commits himself to the task at hand and rids himself of any vices which may harm the good of the team (except beer drinking). It consists of a hard-fought gladiatorial combat between two groups of finely-tuned and fully-focused warriors. "What the hell are you talking about, fool?" you may say. I'll give you two guesses. No, I'm not discussing some perilous battle to conquer the unending riches of an exotic foreign land, all in the name of bestowing glory upon his royal highness. I'll give you one more guess. No, I'm not babbling about some female mud wrestling match I happened to see while frequenting a sleazy establishment in Mt. Ephraim, N.J. (I'll have you know I partake of no such immoral pleasures and anyone who says he owns pictures of me at some trashy place clearly had the photographs doctored to blackmail me.) This glorious battle whose virtues I'm so lavishly describing happens to be none other than?drum roll please?Penn intramural basketball. Laugh if you will, but intramural basketball represents one of the most important methods of achieving popularity and of finding that special someone to "go steady" with. I'll explain this notion using an analogy that even the most uncultured layman could understand: the mating habits of the unspotted North African wildebeest. The unspotted North African male wildebeest proves his sexual attractiveness by challenging other unspotted North African male wildebeests to violent conflict. The unspotted North African male wildebeest who survives the brutal session of biting, scratching and clawing wins the undying love and affection of all the unspotted North African female wildebeests. (Columnist's note: for any reader actually trying to learn something important from this little analogy, I would just like to say that I completely fabricated this whole story about the unspotted North African wildebeest. I don't even know if such a species actually exists. Sorry to get your hopes up.) As I was saying, the male intramural basketball player -- or as scientists refer to this curious species, excessivus testosteronus -- competes in this pugilistic melee in order to bring himself glory and power among his peers and to increase his chances of mating with a female. You see, the female (also referred to by her scientific name, personalitus vacuous) seeks a male who can prove his worth by making a whopping two out of every ten shots. The female does not necessarily seek a male who belongs to the championship team because, after all, intramural basketball isn't about winning and losing?it's about looking good. The successful intramural player wears a cut-off T-shirt thus exposing his rippling, bulging, behemoth, mammoth, enormous, colossal (Can't you tell I went a bit overboard with the thesaurus?) biceps. He hopes that any onlookers will observe his well-endowed arm muscles and will assume that he is similarly well-endowed in his other -- ahem -- muscles. (I'm talking about his leg muscles, pervert. What did you think I was referring to?) The intramural basketball player must also succeed in one other important aspect of the game: trash- talking. Whether a good or bad basketball player -- usually the latter -- the intramural participant must prove his worth by shouting obscenities at competing players and by insulting their matrilineal ancestry. During one of my own intramural games, I was the victim of an opponent's taunting. He tormented me with high-brow intellectual insults, such as "Come on, bring it" and "Yeah, you think you can stop me." He strutted and pointed at people and generally behaved like a quality intramural basketball player. When it came time to back up his words, however, he missed a wide-open lay-up. That didn't matter though because he proved his worth as a successful trash-talker. (It also didn't matter because his team beat ours by about 30 points.) Now, I hear the voices of my loyal readers asking, "Hey Jason, why would you ever participate in such debauchery? What possible benefits could you get from associating with people so clearly you're intellectual inferior?" Well, I'm glad you asked me that question. It's not because I'm such an incredible basketball player and feel the need to impress others with my crowd-pleasing slam dunks and my awe-inspiring jump shot. It's the animal instinct in me. We all have vestiges from the days when our gorilla ancestors roamed the earth dragging their knuckles on the ground. I satisfy my sheer brutish desires by missing wide-open shots, throwing the ball out of bounds and having the ball bounce off my face. Playing intramural basketball is something I have to do, though. How else am I going to find a nice, Jewish unspotted North African female wildebeest to take home to Mom and Dad?