An Ode to the Rollaway TV, the Original MVP of March Madness

The warm air of spring can sweep you into a time and place, one surrounded by the sound of squeaking shoes and the rollers on the bottom of a rusty old cart. March Madness arrives in Big Blue Nation on Wednesday when Kentucky opens SEC Tournament play at 12:30 p.m. ET. For folks of a certain generation, the early tip-off is immediately accompanied by reminders of the joyous sound that precluded an afternoon of skipping academic responsibilities to watch college basketball.

Many youths reading this are probably curious what exactly I’m referring to. Kids, information was hard to come by far people born in the 1900s.

Now you can open your phone to check scores, find highlights, and even stream all of the games. Until 2010, you couldn’t even watch every game of the NCAA Tournament. March Madness was exclusively broadcast on CBS. “Live Look-Ins” cut to the most dramatic games, but for the most part, college basketball fans were at the mercy of television executives.

(WATCH: A Live Look-In at Kevin Stallings’ Illinois State taking Down Tennessee in 1998)

Classrooms are now equipped with Smartboards and whiteboards. If the Smartboard can’t stream TV, surely there’s another monitor elsewhere that can. Chalkboards and overhead projectors were about as advanced technologically as it got in the 1900s, albeit for a few lucky classrooms that actually had a PC outside of the computer lab. But on some special occasions, a teacher was elevated to a demigod. When you heard those squeaking wheels, hoops were on the horizon.

Strapped down to the cart, the box television was an escape from the rudimentary grind of school and a gateway into March Madness. Once the power button was pressed, the box TV hummed, followed by static as the teacher tried to figure out how to get the settings right for it to work properly. Approximately 3-5 students shouted instructions, too impatient to wait another minute, and also much, much wiser than the teacher who was about to bless them with basketball. The static was abruptly interrupted by the voices of Tom Hammond and Larry Conley, eliciting an eruption of applause from the crowd.

In the 1900s, Hammond and Conley were the two brightest broadcasting stars for Jefferson-Pilot Sports productions of SEC basketball. The three Daves — Neal, Archer, and Baker — commanded the ship in a weekly football game, but it was a pair of Kentuckians holding down the fort on the hardwood. The regional broadcasts could be picked up on an antenna (the metal stick at the top of the box TV) for the first few games of the SEC Tournament, before the big wigs from CBS and ESPN swooped in for the final games.

All Teachers Should Embrace March Madness

Everyone who lived through March Madness in the 1900s went back to a specific time and place while combing through the previous few paragraphs. For me, it’s Dave Odom’s South Carolina Gamecocks on a fuzzy TV in the cafeteria while my mother worked a Fish Fry. There was also an NCAA Tournament in 2007, when Coach Reed let us take a break from freshman English class to watch his alma mater, Eastern Kentucky, fall to North Carolina in the First Round of the Big Dance.

Tomorrow after lunch, teachers around Big Blue Nation will be presented with a choice. Will they continue with their mid-week lesson, or reward their students with Kentucky basketball in the SEC Tournament?

The aforementioned Coach Reed did not win a Teacher of the Year award for giving me excellent grammar skills. But he did give me a memory that will never go away. Another memory I’ll never forget: sitting through a microeconomics class at Gatton Hall to prepare for a midterm, instead of attending Rupp Arena for the 2012 National Championship celebration. Was the C-grade worth it? Of course not.

You may not need to roll a box TV into the room on Wednesday, but if you’re a teacher, you do need to do the right thing. Give your kids the gift of Kentucky basketball during March Madness.