March Madness! The Big Dance?
Duke?
Syracuse?
Kentucky?
Kansas?
That’s my Final Four.
Yeah – I know – it’s also most of America’s Final Four.
Can’t go wrong with Kansas winning the whole thing, either, by the way.
I covered one NCAA Men’s Tournament Game in Atlanta back in 1988 for the Peoria Journal Star. I followed Bradley University’s Top 20 team down to the Southeast Regional for a first-round game against Auburn.
It was an interesting cast of characters gathered in Atlanta that March 22 years ago.
Bradley was led by Hersey Hawkins, a gifted, gentle soul who shared the 1987-88 National Player of the Year honors with Kansas’ Danny Manning.
Bradley, an underachieving team under former NBA coach Stan Albeck, blew a 14-point lead and lost to a very ordinary Auburn squad led by its moody star Chris Morris.
Hawkins, the NCAA’s leading scorer, scored 44, but didn’t get a chance at a game-winner when Auburn’s Terrance Howard stole a passed intended for Hawkins in the games final seconds.
Looking back, it was clearly a game Bradley had no business losing. But this talented team’s inattentive personality allowed an inferior team to stay close, and ultimately, win.
That Laissez-faire attitude was clearly a direct reflection of its head basketball coach. Albeck, longtime NBA followers will remember, was actually a very effective NBA coach for the San Antonio Spurs and New Jersey Nets. But Albeck badly misread Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s views on how much Michael Jordan should play coming off a stress fracture late in the 1985-86 season. Instead, Albeck followed Jordan’s wishes to play and put on a spectacular display in an entertaining first-round playoff series loss against the Boston Celtics.
Albeck was subsequently fired, and replaced by Doug Collins, who was subsequently fired, and replaced by Phil Jackson. Six NBA titles in eight years followed for Jordan and Jackson. Albeck coached Bradley for three more indifferent seasons before being let go after his contract expired. He last worked in the NBA as a Lenny Wilkens assistant in Toronto.
Ironically, Collins was a 1972 Olympian and an All-American at Bradley’s arch-rival Illinois State. He later coached Jordan again with Washington. Collins remains the best NBA analyst in the business.
As for Hawkins (a Chicago native), he went on and became the 6th pick in the ’88 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers before being traded for Charles Smith. Hawkins joined a nice Philadelphia 76ers team featuring bruise brothers Charles Barkley and Rick Mahorn. Hawkins later started for the Seattle Supersonics, who lost to the Bulls in the 1996 NBA Finals. In between, Hawkins played two seasons for the Charlotte Hornets before retiring after one season with the Bulls.
Morris, a long, athletic player, went No. 4 in that ’88 draft to the New Jersey Nets and quickly disappeared into the NBA mediocrity abyss.
Manning was drafted No. 1 by the Clippers and enjoyed a successful, but injury-plagued NBA career. By the way, Manning’s Kansas team went on to beat Stacey King-led Oklahoma in the 1988 NCAA Championship game. Oklahoma, coached by folksy Billy Tubbs, would have played Bradley if Hawkins could have somehow got the game-winner against Auburn. King later went on to win rings with Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
Postscript:
Here’s the great Los Angeles Times Page 2 columnist T.J. Simers’ very different take (T.J. Simers: NCAA tournament is cause for a friendly wager) on the NCAA Tournament. A taste:
The daughter and Ann Meyers Drysdale have so much in common.
They are both women.
Ann is in something like eight Hall of Fames, a basketball superstar in high school and college, earning $50,000 and a three-day tryout with the NBA Indianapolis Pacers and a silver medal winner in the Olympics.
The first time the daughter played basketball, she tripped over the half-court line and fell. Later she would stumble over one of those recessed cracks in a sidewalk, and fall on her face, which explains the scar on her forehead. She loves watching the Olympics, though.
Ann has been analyst on TV for nearly three decades, and helped guide the Phoenix Mercury to a WNBA title as GM.
The daughter lost her job on radio and is presently unemployed.
Ann lived in Wheaton, Ill., home of John & Jim Belushi, Bob Woodward and
The daughter has no such interesting story to tell.
But both Ann and the daughter are dreamers.
And they are teaming to pick bracket winners in the annual father-daughter Page 2, for eight years, skating the same pond as Page 2, city administrators obviously waiting for just the right moment to unveil a placard marking the spot. Her brother, Mark, was in the same class as Page 2 at St. Michael’s. NCAA tournament jaunt to Mandalay Bay for the benefit of boys’ or girls’ clubs, depending on the winner, like the gals have any chance against Page 2 and Jay Rood, the guy who sets the betting lines for all the MGM Mirage sports books and monitors where all the smart money is going. Should the women be losers, $1,000 will be donated in their names to a boys’ club with the sincere hope this also doesn’t mean the daughter is moving back in with mom and dad.
Frankly, I found it surprising the daughter went to Drysdale for assistance, what with the next mayor of L.A., governor of California and maybe president of the United States available.
Happy Madness!
Priest Abuse Scandal Strikes At Vatican’s Main Resident
Back on October 6, 2007, I wrote a column in the Erie Times-News railing against the American Catholic Church’s appalling reaction to a nationwide priest sex scandal. Dioceses across the nation are still paying and feeling the financial, criminal and moral consequences.
My column’s thrust was the that Los Angeles Diocese’s idiotic plan to force some poor Santa Barbara nuns to sell their convent homes to help pay the diocese’s settlement payouts symbolized how the Catholic Church had so lost its way. By the way, those legal bills and settlements were built up by lawsuits spurred by the Catholic Church’s insane plan to transfer pedophile priests to unsuspecting parishes, where these abusive men sexually abused still more innocent victims.
The Erie Times-News was inundated with hundreds of letters to the editor after my column ran, trashing and calling me unprintable names. We ran a whole op-ed page full of these letters.
Now news breaking in Germany focuses on how Pope Benedict XVI handled the transfer of an abusive priest to yet another unsuspecting parish when the Pope (Joseph Ratziner) was a German bishop.
This is more horrific news for the Pope and the Catholic Church. Read about it in Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog How Is The Pope Different From Cardinal Law?.
Thanks to the Daily Dish for this excerpt:
A priest is discovered to have been actively molesting children. His superior is notified in 1980. One of the things he is told of is the priest’s forcing an 11 year old boy to perform oral sex on him. The superior does not contact the police. He approves a transfer of the priest to a different city, where the priest is required to undergo therapy but is also subsequently able to resume his work with access to children. Six years later, the priest is again found guilty of abusing children. This time, he serves a sentence, but he is subsequently allowed to resume work as a priest, with the church authorities hiding his past from future parishes, and is only removed from his position three days ago. Joseph Ratzinger was the superior, he reviewed the man’s files in 1980, and he was subsequently in charge of reviewing all sex abuse cases as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine Of The Faith in Rome. He was integral to the policy of hushing up as much of this as possible.
Here is a New York Times story on the firestorm Irish Catholic bishops are confronting (Irish Cardinal ‘Ashamed’ of Handling of ’75 Abuse).
Will Tiger Woods Be Tiger Woods At The Masters?
Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon asked this question after the World No. 1 announced he would return to golf after a four-month layoff (Right move for Tiger?).
A taste:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled he’s coming back. Once again, Tiger’s sex life is none of my business and really none of yours either, unless you’re sponsoring him. I’ve never once watched him swing a golf club because he could sell me a Buick (though I own an Enclave), or razor blades, or golf shoes (I’m basically a FootJoy guy). I watch because with a club in his hand he’s a sporting genius. In his absence, I’ve stopped watching golf. I didn’t say I watch less; I find that I don’t watch at all. And it’s not a conscious thing, like I’m boycotting the game because Tiger’s away. In fact, over the last 15 years I’ve watched golf pretty much every single week between late January and late September. Tiger only plays, what, 19 or 20 tournaments a year and I watch closer to 30 a year, which means he’s not there one-third of the time I’m tuned in. But I’m not watching now. The dramatic drop in television ratings suggest I’m not alone, either. Professional golf has been on life support all season. It’s in more trouble now than pro basketball was when Jordan retired from the NBA. Tiger, and this isn’t debatable, is bigger than the game. Or at least he was. Time will tell whether he can summon that again. But he’ll be bigger than the game when they tee it up at Augusta. Just look at the numbers. I’m not talking about the 20 million or whatever number it winds up being who will watch the Masters out of tabloid curiosity. I’m talking about the addicts like me, the week-in, week-out fanatics whom Tour ratings depend upon. Golf grew dangerously dependent on the talent, personality, marketing and, ultimately, the remarkably clutch championship performance of Tiger Woods – and now the game is stuck. How soon we’re going to see that Tiger Woods is the larger concern. And I find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine that we’ll see him at Augusta in a few weeks. The last time he came into a tournament with huge emotional baggage he missed the cut, at the U.S. Open following the death of his father. Now, after an arguably greater emotional disturbance (not to mention the disruption of professional routine), he’s supposed to just walk on the course and win? I can’t see it.
I can.
Good points from Wilbon. Here is a thought or two:
- Since winning the Australian Masters back in November, Woods has actually only missed four PGA Tour stops he normally plays: San Diego at Torrey Pines, the match play event at the Scottsdale TPC, Miami at Doral and Arnold Palmer Invitational at Orlando’s Bay Hill.
- Woods has won the Masters four times, most recently in 2005. As ESPN’s Andy North pointed out, the key for Woods will be the state of his marvelous short game.
You take the field. I’ll take Woods.
McEnroe (‘Mac’) Takes the Stage
McEnroe, a Golden Lab-Siberian Husky mix hereby known as Mac, joined the Oberle household on March 13. Mac, a stray Marguerite rescued from Erie’s A.N.N.A. shelter, was apparently abandoned by its previous owners, although there is a chance Mac could have ran away.
Mac’s former owners did a nice job with him, other than either abandoning or losing this pleasant pouch. He is well-trained and responds eagerly to sit, stay and come commands.
I wish there was better news to report on our soon-to-be 9-year-old Westie’s reaction to her new doggie roommate. Furious and confused, Asta quickly barred Mac from her bedroom, which also happens to be our bedroom.
This is complicated.
Mac is sharing sleeping quarters with 7-year-old daughter Nicole, whose successful campaign for a new dog intensified when we lost our first Westie Fala back in August (Remembering Our Old Gal’s Life And Death
The irony here is Asta encountered a similar reaction from Fala when we brought her home back in June 2001. Poor Asta endured a nearly 6-month intimidation campaign by Fala that only ceased when Asta became big enough to convince her Westie nemesis that it was time to give up.
Mac, who is roughly 10 times bigger than Asta, isn’t quite sure what to make of this persistent little white dog. Asta charges and nips at Mac whenever he tries to get back in the house. Asta turns into Mr. Wolf when Mac tries to enter the master bedroom.
But Mac, despite a nasty scratch or two, is holding his temper, declining to use his overwhelming size to show Asta there is a new sheriff in the house.
So far …
