The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

20
Eye of the Storm
BRETT BIEBEL
This is unverified. You should know that going in. There’s some fragmentary evidence, of course, mostly
archived web pages and bootleg videos and such, but the rest is basically hearsay and whole cloth
invention, and it all involves this Grinnell grad from the 1990s, a guy by the name of Goins. He had an
obsession with D3 basketball. Used to drive all across the Midwest with a handheld camera, and one night
he’s up in the middle of nowhere Minnesota, and St. John’s beats St. Thomas at the buzzer, and half a
dozen monks and a few hundred students storm the court. The monks look dignified. The students look
drunk. And nobody’s seen the footage, but apparently this becomes like a formative event or something
because all of a sudden the only thing Goins cares about is court-storming. Empty bleachers. Crowds
sucked into midcourt and sweat and popcorn and boiler heat all fucking mixed together in a nothing town,
and there’s something different about non-scholarship celebrations, something more abandoned.
Meaner. Urgent and unpredictable and frenzied, and it’s like a certain kind of pornography, and now it’s
Goins on a quest. Goins on the road. Goins in Moorhead and Mt. Vernon and Kenosha and praying he can
capture something spasmodic and violent and exhilarating, and he surfs rivalry games. Massey ratings.
Sagarin, etc. He understands that hatred and improbability are the drivers of cataclysmic celebration, and
there are moments when he doesn’t know if he’s after the ecstasy or the catharsis or maybe the potential
for a Hillsborough-type tragedy, and obviously most of the time he doesn’t get any of that (or even a
particularly good game), but he always lucks into at least one or two storms and then finds a few more in
late February and early March, and as the years go by he develops a kind of system. A feel. He thinks
about matchup history and bad blood and conference standings (as well as local and national events,
about socioeconomics and town-and-gown dynamics), and eventually it all gets pretty sophisticated.
Algorithms are involved. He can tell you within a few percentage points either way the chance that any
particular game ends in a court storm, and he starts a blog about it. Solicits donations. Doesn’t get many.
But there’s a following. The nichiest of athletic niches, and there’s some micro targeted ad revenue, but
THE UNDER REVIEW