"Finally, payback for what Christian Laettner did to us."
(Referring to the legendary 1990 east regional final during the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and Laettner's buzzer-beater that sent Duke past University of Connecticut by one point in overtime.)
Congrats UConn. This was a legendary game too, and you played amazing. I was rooting for Duke but I wanted to see a good game more than anything, no matter who was competing. You deserve this win.
Best of wishes going on into the Final Four.
I'm watching the NCAA basketball tournament. Maybe it's just me but it's DISGUSTING watching so many young men, at the height of their sports careers, who are festooned with TOO MANY tattoos. I've seen some of these guys who have both arms completely inked. Some have tats on their necks.
WHY?!?? What is the purpose of all those tattoos??
These are healthy young specimens, in the prime of their lives, and they are completely destroying the symmetrical beauty of their bodies by marking them up. It absolutely takes away from appreciation of their presence on the court.
Why would anyone do this to themselves? Have they considered that there is something to life other than basketball? I mean, they ARE in college to study matters that will presumably give them fuller and richer lives after graduation, yes? What are those tattoos going to bring about when these young men are having job interviews? Some employers would fast think that these aren't the people they are looking for.
It just looks nasty. It makes the team look cheap. I can't imagine Dean Smith approving of his team sporting tattoos. He would probably have instigated a policy barring anyone tatted from playing for UNC. As bad as things have gotten I think Mike Krzyewski would have eventually done the same at Duke. The reasoning would be sound: "If you don't care for how you look you probably won't care for how you make the team look."
Come on lads, stop doing this. Bring some dignity to the game but more important than that, bring some dignity to yourselves. Covering almost every spare square inch of your bodies with health-destroying ink is not glamorous or cool or really impressive at all. The young people of America are looking at you, more than you know. And they want to be the kind of people that you pose to be.
Don't give those kids reason to "follow the crowd" into self destruction.
It really shouldn't have been any surprise, that the Bad Bunny performance would be so ridden with vile content (in whatever language it was "sung" in). Or there was one person who is now a bit more educated on matters than I had been before this morning. I understand now, and I see that "entertainment" like what happened at the Super Bowl is just going to continue and grow increasingly worse.
It turns out that ever since 2020 or so the Super Bowl halftime shows have been produced by Jay-Z. The guy who made an unconscionable amount of money rapping about gangs, drugs, sex, violence... you get the picture. I will never understand why it is that some of the most negative aspects of the human condition are so commonly deemed to be high art to be praised by all. But we are far from the glorious years of the Renaissance.
So of course the halftime shows are going to be vulgar. They ultimately derive from vulgar minds. Minds motivated by lots and lots of money, something the NFL as an entertainment powerhouse amply provides.
Yes, the Bad Bunny performance had audience numbers. "Largest ever for a halftime show", it's being raved. It was fifteen minutes that cost tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of man hours to construct and choreograph. It was money well spent indeed, if the goal was to arrest the attention of moral misanthropes from sea to shining sea.
The Turning Point halftime program had much less lead time, involved far fewer people, did not have the bankrolling of a multimedia corporate monster, and still pulled in a sizable audience. Yet this somehow "lost" to Bad Bunny.
It doesn't impress me at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am in my fellow man, that he has sold out his principles in defending an "entertainer" and system that denigrates human life instead of lifting it up.
But those are things for "mass men" to celebrate. I am not a mass man. For all my occasional dalliances with pop culture, my mind is still poised toward something higher. It's why I wrote my book the way that I did. It could have been something else, more "marketable". But I knew who I intended my readers to be and so I wrote for them. I feel like I'm going to be the least successful writer in human history sometimes. For all of my talk of being a writer, I have never achieved anything remarkable. But I can take pride in knowing what I have to offer is authentic. Something that I didn't have to sell my soul to produce. And that I will never attempt to insult the intelligence of my readers with.
Perhaps someday the National Football League will come to its senses, and again produce Super Bowl halftime entertainment that reflects the better of human nature. But that is not going to be anytime soon. Not while men of vulgarity are calling the shots and presenting THEIR perverse vision of American identity and culture.
It didn't happen on this occasion. But give it time. If the league continues catering to the least common denominator, eventually there will be a halftime special competing with the "official" one of the Super Bowl. And it will be so wildly successful that there will be board members of the NFL turning in their resignations come Monday morning.
Until then, if I need entertainment while waiting for the second half of the game, I will do as I did this past weekend: watch the In Living Color halftime show from 1992. A product of a much better and more innocent time, when we weren't expected to hate others without sound reason.
I refused to watch the official Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny. Seeing a grown man in a dress who has burned the American flag on a number of occasions isn't anything I was interested in.
I did not watch the Turning Point halftime alternative either. I was told that my doing so would be "supporting hate". Even though those making such accusations are responsible for more hate than anyone else in America right now. But I digress.
So what did I see instead?
I opened YouTube and started up the legendary In Living Color halftime special from 1992!
From a time when it wasn't demanded of us that we be angry enough to hate others without reason. It was a better age. More joyful and innocent. In Living Color's halftime spectacular was a stroke of genius on the part of Fox Network and 34 years later it's still very entertaining and hilarious.
Watching this was my own little act of defiance against the bitterness suffusing our culture. It may not have had the viewing numbers tonight, but it was all mine.
For the past six days we've been watching it like a hurricane, churning ever closer and gaining strength along the way. It has become the perfect storm: nothing like this has happened before and nothing like it will ever happen again. We are bracing for a collision of gargantuan proportions and no matter who wins it will be a battle for the ages.
Tonight, Duke plays North Carolina in the NCAA Basketball Tournament semifinal.
The two teams have never played each other in an NCAA tourney. The last time Duke played Carolina was on their home court in Durham. Coach Mike Krzyzewski's final home game and Carolina beat them by double digits.
Tonight could be Krzyzewski's final game ever.
I hope not.
I want to see him in the final on Monday night, playing against either Kansas or Villanova.
I want to see the Duke team giving their coach one last thrill.
Is there any other way to put it?
GO DUKE!!! :-)
They are the team I now want to see take it all:
Go Peacocks!!
(And dude with Seventies mustache for the win!)
Amazing game Saint Peters played last night against Perdue. Now hoping they'll send North Carolina home tomorrow. Either Saint Peters wins the tourney, or I want to see it come down to Duke and UNC... with Coach K leaving triumphant.
I probably wouldn't be so fired-up ANGRY about this if I hadn't been a swimmer in high school...
Above you see a photo of Emma Weyant. She's been a swimmer on University of Virginia's team. She also earned silver as an individual during the Olympics. And in a sane world she SHOULD be recognized as the top women's swimmer in America.
Instead that recognition goes to someone who was ranked 500-something last year in men's swimming. And then "Lia Thomas" (real name William Thomas) decided that he was a woman. Even more so, that he was eligible to compete in women's swimming. And the University of Pennsylvania decided to indulge him that fantasy.
"Lia" proceeded to blast all competition out of the water (almost literally speaking). With the musculature and endurance of a male biology, no woman has been able to compete with Thomas. It has been as lopsided a competition as there has ever been. He has become the number one ranked women's swimmer in the country.
"Lia Thomas" has made a complete joke out of the sport of swimming. I'm not saying that Thomas shouldn't be swimming at all but he is a MAN and he should be swimming against OTHER MEN.
Thankfully, it seems that more people than not are supporting Emma Weyant and recognizing her as the one true women's swimming champion.
Mash down here for more about this travesty of college athletics.
It's been awhile since I really followed college basketball. It's still the sport dearest to my heart, mostly because I remember cheering on the '83 "Cardiac Pack" team at North Carolina State as they won the national championship under coach Jim Valvano. And on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that game, I paid a visit to Valvano's grave to leave flowers. In high school I thrilled to watching Duke win back to back national titles after so many tries by Mike Krzyzewski (hey, I finally spelled his name right!!). One of these days maybe I'll get to see my alma mater Elon University go to "the Big Dance". And then everyone will be asking "Elon? Where's THAT?" just like we did with Gonzaga.
One person who knows basketball... and I mean REALLY knows it... is my lifelong best friend Chad Austin. He's been finding some good stuff lately and sharing it on Facebook and I thought it was worth passing along to all two of this blog's regular readers. The first is an article from the News & Observer about this being Krzyzewski's final season as Duke's coach, and his relationship with legendary UNC coach Dean Smith. Some may want to have a tissue handy.
Then today Chad posted this article about Griff Aldrich, the head coach at Longwood University. Aldrich is 47 and made a drastic career change mid-stream, from a job paying $800,000 a year to being the coach of a small school's men's basketball program. The Longwood Lancers tip off against Tennessee during tomorrow's opening round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Aldrich's story is nothing short of inspirational. It certainly is to me.
And finally, Chad turned in an article of his very own for the North Carolina Baptists website: about "Bones" McKinney, the legendary coach at Wake Forest University. McKinney had a dual career as basketball coach and also Baptist minister. Chad interviewed a lot of people, including basketball broadcasting giant Billy Packer, to get the story about McKinney and the impact he made on the court and in the pulpit. It's a terrific piece and this one also, is quite inspiring.
Thanks for finding this stuff Chad. Thanks to you I now have a school to root for this tourney: GO LONGWOOD!!
I've written for several years that I wouldn't be surprised to see Nascar fold by 2020-2025. Or at the very least, there would be races that weren't televised live any more, if at all. Regrettably, there are enough sheep out there to keep the sport alive but I see no reason to change my prediction about Nascar on television because any sport depends on its traditional fanbase to support it in hard times. Nascar's attendance and ratings have been down for years and it can be traced right back to the unholy trinity's concentrated efforts to run off the traditional fans. MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, Soccer, Tennis, Golf, other auto racing bodies such as Indy and F1, and nearly every other sport I can think of tries at least to innovate but still remaining loyal to their core fanbase. In the case of MLB, I think they try too hard sometimes to do this since it hinders progress that could actually make the game better, but they are at least trying to keep their core fans.Crash here for more of Doug's thoughts. It's well worth reading and pondering, whether you are a fan of NASCAR or are a student of corporate decision-making (if there really is such a thing...)
Nascar on the other hand doesn't subscribe to this theory. They think that the fairweather fans are the group they need to go after. I'm not saying they shouldn't try to lure in new fans but I am saying that perhaps if they didn't mess with things that worked to draw in fans for over 50 years previously, perhaps they might actually draw in some new fans without running off millions of fans that Bill France Sr and Jr worked for a combined 55 years to draw in.
I'm not much up to speed on sports of late. But watching the agony from brackets getting busted in full gory on my Facebook front page has been pure comedy gold!
Even though I don't have a dog in this hunt (I would have rooted for my alma mater Elon if it had gotten into the Big Dance for the first time) I have to say: from the getgo this has been a weird weird tourney. Probably the most topsy-turvy one in recent memory.
This is one such person...
The Knight Shift says "Happy Birthday" and wishes all the best to Michael Jordan - perhaps the greatest player that the game of basketball has ever known - on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday today!
I was wondering late last night why my Facebook and Twitter pages were going crazy. Now I know.
Can't say it any better than how one friend put it: "The NFL has become the WWE."
If you're still trying to figure out this mess, Mash here for ESPN's report.
Well anyway, no matter who who're rooting for tomorrow or even if you're not a sports fan at all, here's something we can all enjoy: Andy Griffith's classic comedy monologue "What It Was, Was Football", accompanied by George Woodbridge's illustrations from MAD Magazine!
An 85-year-old Australian woman said she "didn't feel 85" when she reeled in a 849-pound marlin off the north coast of Queensland.You go Grandma!! Gotta love reading about stuff like this :-)Connie Laurie, a grandmother who said she has been fishing all her life, said she was on a fishing charter trip during the weekend off the coast of Cooktown when she caught, and then released, the hefty marlin, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported Monday.
"I certainly didn't feel 85 when I was bringing it in, I was too busy concentrating on keeping it on and getting it into the boat," she said.
Former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, better known to his many fans as "Smokin' Joe" Frazier, has passed away at the age of 67. His death comes just days after publicly disclosing that he was fighting liver cancer.
Frazier will always be remembered as one of the greatest - some say the greatest - boxers in the sport. His 1971 bout with Mohammed Ali that saw Frazier keeping his belt would still be considered one of the most legendary matches of all time. But even that was eclipsed by the "Thrilla in Manilla" a few years later: the third and final fight between the two and the end of Frazier's attempt to win back the heavyweight title.
But y'know, it doesn't matter that he didn't, not really. Joe Frazier was one of the greatest in the ring and he was a true gentleman out of it. A guy with as much heart and love for God and others as he had for his sport. He will always be a man remembered for those qualities.
Thoughts and prayers going out to his family tonight.
