The National Chris Clark Holiday

Today Avery and I are enjoying the National Chris Clark Holiday with Daddy.

What? Your boss didn’t give you the days off in honor of this sacred basketball holiday?

For the past 11 years, Chris has taken off the Thursday and Friday of the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament. This tradition started the year following Bryce Drew’s fabulous shot in Valpo’s improbable victory over Ole Miss. Chris missed that fantastic ending because he was at work. After that, he vowed never to miss another spectacular ending again. Thus began the National Chris Clark Holiday.

In honor of the holiday, Chris watches 48 games over four days (men’s NCAA only, not including NIT, women’s NCAA, Pacer and high school games) while eating the official foods of the holiday: pizza and wings…and Pepcid. Last year, he watched all or part of 65 games in four days.

Crazy, I know. But it’s something he looks forward to each year.

He also creates about five different brackets in free online pools. Being the statistician he is, Chris has kept track of all of his results in both paper form and an Excel spreadsheet. He has his results from 1991 forward, minus one year that got lost along the way, in the paper format. (Unfortunately, all of his brackets were victims of the Great Flood of 2008. But he’ll never consider throwing them away.) The Excel spreadsheet includes his winning percentages from 1991 forward.

All of this might seem a little neurotic or just plain strange. But I love his passion for basketball. But it’s a good thing I’ve got a busy weekend planned. While I like basketball, I can’t take four straight days of nonstop games!