I entered Mizzou Arena on Tuesday with the enthusiasm of a young teacher who had agreed in August to be the middle school cheerleading sponsor before fully comprehending that the toll of sitting through so many eighth-grade A and B team doubleheaders outweighed the need to pay off massive student loan debt.
Whatever they were paying me, it didn’t seem worth it now.
For good reason, Missourians are apathetic about their basketball team. Missouri’s passion was beaten out of it by years of basketball irrelevance, and the Tigers are currently running out the clock on a season with no stakes. They have almost no chance of winning their way into the NCAA Tournament and literally no chance of losing their way into a coaching change.
We’re just impassively watching guys miss 21-footers in two-hour events with no risk or consequences. Then we get on with our days.
This isn’t a universal sentiment, though. There were perhaps 6,000 fans who attended Missouri’s game against Georgia, including way more students than I expected. This is evidence there are still earnest people out there, people who go to church every week whether they need it or not, people who paid for those tickets and, by golly, were going to use them.
Tuesday was their night.
Even though the Tigers were losing by 12 points, these fans politely applauded the halftime act, the extreme pogo-stickers, in the way one compliments the cook after a solid B+ breakfast at Bob Evans. Sure, these pogo-sticking fellows were no Red Panda, nor that lady who shoots a bow-and-arrow with her toes while bending over backward, nor those adorable St. Louis Disc Dogs, but let’s see you do a flip on a pogo stick, buster!
Something I noticed, even before the Tigers erased their 20-point second-half deficit, was a guy in a nearby section who, as Missouri players released 3-pointers, kept standing up with his hands upraised. Imagine the optimism required to just assume a Missouri player was about to make a 3-pointer. Other fans began standing up as the Tigers grabbed the lead in the final minute and needed defensive stands to seal the game. It’s been awhile since I had to crane my neck to see the floor from the media section. There was a M-I-Z, Z-O-U chant that didn’t feel forced.
My boredom melted. This was exciting stuff.
