March is upon us, and that can only mean one thing. Actually, it can mean a lot of things – your heifers are calving; the corrals are a soupy quagmire; you really need to get started on your taxes – but for our purposes here, March means one thing: March Madness, baby.
That’s right, folks, it’s time to sharpen those pencils, pretend you’ve been paying attention to college basketball since October, put a few bucks in the pot and fill out those brackets. I love the NCAA basketball tournament. (Allow me now to preemptively apologize for going on so long waxing poetic and naïve about a zillion-dollar cash cow, but these next few weeks of TV watching are going to be awesome.) It’s the pageantry and passion and possibility that makes people love athletic competition, minus so much of the vitriol and cynicism that seems attached to most every other sporting endeavor these days. It’s a magical multiweek event where anything can happen, yet the ultimate result is all but indisputable. A colosseum where dragons slay and are slain – and where, most importantly, heroes are born.
They have names that could easily belong to 18th-century pirate captains (Khalid El-Amin, Orlando Mendez-Valdez) or Saturday morning cartoon characters (Fennis Dembo, Jimmer Fredette) to Wichita realtors (Thomas Walkup, Kyle Guy) or your high school buddy’s dad (Kevin Pittsnogle, Frank Kaminsky). Intellectually, we know they’re just a bunch of kids playing a silly game. But with a few minutes of miraculous shot-making, legend status can and often is attained.
The funny thing is, every sports fan’s March Madness memories are chock-full of heroes, but there’s a severe paucity of heels and villains (with the notable exceptions of a couple of coaches who could credibly moonlight as mob bosses). There are losers, yes. But historically speaking, the tournament is a boon to everybody involved.
It’s not so very different from the world we inhabit here in the cattle industry. Everyone suffers a loss here and there, but when the seedstock producer wins, so does the commercial cow-calf guy, whether he’s got a herd of 42 or 4,200. When the cow-calf operation wins, so do the backgrounder and feedlot operator. So does the auction yard. So does the hay broker. So do the pharmaceutical rep and rural vet and nutrition consultant. Even an occasional politician or bureaucrat will make an appearance on the friend-of-the-American-cowboy list. Our mental economy may tell us that every victor needs someone to vanquish. Yet we see time and again in this industry that a rising tide lifts just about every dadgum boat.
There are a lot of questions swirling around cattle country right now about immigration and international trade and endangered species – and when in the name of all that is holy we’re ever going to get consistent rainfall. And, just as they do when it comes to filling out your bracket, a lot of voices have a lot of opinions and projections they present as gospel. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that everyone in this game – from the blueblood cattleman whose family has been at this for eight generations to the clueless parents wondering how their fourth grader managed to talk them into raising a 4-H steer in the backyard – lifts up the industry. And every one of 'em deserves a crack at being a hero.
