Between The Madness Seth Allen

“Boy, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad we don’t have practice this week or next week.” 
I’ve never seen a coach so openly defeated after a loss. There’s no stoicism here, no talk about being proud of his players, no looking forward to next year. There’s no energy left for that. Here is the great Jerry Tarkanian, a coach I’m used to seeing emanate such intensity that he has to bite on a towel during games, and boy, he’s just glad it’s over.
It’s one of the final scenes from Between The Madness, the 1998 documentary following the Fresno State men’s basketball team over the entirety of their disastrous season that year. A baby faced Andy Katz is standing with Tarkanian, looking in this moment more like a friend lending an ear than a sports reporter for the Fresno Bee. The two are in the bowels of Madison Square Garden after Tarkanian’s team lost a heartbreaker in the NIT. It feels like a private moment between the two, but there’s an unseen third party holding the camera, peering at Tark’s exhausted looking face from around Katz’s shoulder. Whoever holds that camera spent the better part of their year watching from close distance as the team broke apart in headline grabbing fashion. As I watch this scene I wonder if that person is glad it’s over, too.
Fresno State entered that season with a loaded roster predicted to make the Elite 8 by Sports Illustrated. Tarkanian assembled an unprecedented amount of talent for a Western Athletic Conference team with four players that would go on to play in the NBA, and more that had the potential to. Despite their talent the team never found consistency due to player suspensions for violations as trivial as smoking weed, as serious as domestic assault, and as unbelievable as threatening with a samurai sword. So much s**t hit the fan in Fresno that Mike Wallace brought his 60 Minutes crew to campus to file an expose on the program. I have to link to Wallace’s GOTCHYA segment on the program here, not because it’s good, but because it’s a chance to hear Mike Wallace muster up all his 60 Minutes gravitas to say the phrase “White (blanking) honkey b***h.”
Between The Madness first aired on Fox Sports One on Thanksgiving, 1998. The film’s producers agreed not to show NCAA violations (Fresno State would later vacate wins for the following season and the two after that), but otherwise had creative control and unprecedented access to the team for the duration of their season. The resulting raw behind the scenes feel was jarring to me as a modern viewer accustomed to careful brand curation that has a firm grasp on modern sports media. Before watching this film I didn’t realize how thoroughly conditioned my expectations have become by our era of Players’ Tribune, sportswriters guaranteeing brand-friendly coverage in exchange for access, broadcasters employed by the team, and player produced documentaries.
There are some similarities to The Last Dance, the docuseries that drew millions of viewers when it aired on ESPN earlier this year and now lives as a binge friendly hit on Netflix. Both make use of beyond the norm access to tell the inside story of a season, and incidentally both had cameras rolling in the same time of the same year. The differences are more interesting. While Dance uses interviews taking place in our time to look back, in Madness the viewer is trapped in the moment with no faces from the future guaranteeing a happy ending. Dance, being a product of our time, also required sign-off from it’s billionaire star subject so predictably avoids venturing far from corporate interests. Dance may make you feel like you’re finally getting the real story, but ultimately it’s the same story you’ve gotten all along, the tried and true one that has been told in two minute commercials for decades. The crew behind Madness had license to tell whatever story they felt was most worth telling, and the result feels a lot more human and interesti