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 It's Tourney Time! By Tom Danehy IT WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times.... This is it, the undisputed king of sports events, the highlight of every sporting year. The NCAA basketball tournament is what sports are all about--great athleticism, high drama, roller-coaster emotions and memories to last a lifetime. Oh yeah, and gambling.
Alas, once it's gone, it's gone. Then all we're left with is whatever it is that's passing for NBA basketball this year and (gulp) baseball. Makes you wish you could hibernate 'til September. Knowing that the long, hot summer of no real sports is right around the corner makes the NCAAs all the more vital and exciting. The UA-Penn State football game is soooo far away... IGNORANCE is bliss.... While more money is wagered in Las Vegas on the Super Bowl, the NCAA Tournament is the sports event that generates the most friendly wagering, intra-office pools, and unlikely winners. Tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars will flow from one hand to another during the next three weeks, with the winners and losers shaking their heads in almost perfect unison. There are upsets every year. One year, an upstart team of underclassmen will roll over three No. 1 seeds, escape two early-round upset bids, win two overtime games, and nab a most-unlikely national championship. Then, the next year, the same team enters the tournament as a clear favorite, rolls over three opponents, then has one bad shooting day and is gone. That's the nature of the beast, and a most beautiful and terrifying beast it is. How then to bet on it? Better to ask, why bother betting on it? This is a classic example of the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The more one knows about college basketball, the more likely they are to look stupid trying to handicap this tournament. There really is no great formula to picking this thing. It's anybody's guess. That's why the office pool will go to the quiet woman who swears she only entered the pool so people wouldn't think she was too cheap to throw in her two bucks. If only she hadn't asked which team Kareem Abdul-Jabbar plays for. This year, I'm going with whichever team's coach looks more like Gerald Ford. MARCH COMES IN like a lion and goes out like a lamb.... Just like UCLA. If any school has first-round upset victim written on it this year, it's the under-achieving Bruins. They squeaked past ASU and then just bent over for Arizona. If Baron Davis' broken toe hasn't healed considerably, the Bruins are meat for the under-rated Detroit Mercy. GATHER YE UNTO Me.... One big drag is that March Madness always falls during Lent, so it's salad and popcorn instead of chicken wings and fries. Why couldn't the guys who made the Gregorian calendar have foreseen this problem and put Lent in July? Nobody's got any appetite that time of year anyway. Heck, they were working for the Pope; they should've had some kind of divine guidance. My friends gather at Famous Sam's or Damon's on Tanque Verde. Then they come back and tell me how good the chicken or ribs were. My mom used to have a saying in Italian that translated to "I hope you choke on potato salad." I'm going to call her and ask her how to substitute "animal bones" for "potato salad." OPINIONS ARE LIKE (a proctologist's raison d'être)....
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There is no greater time of year for a sports fan. Fourple-headers
for the next four days. It towers over whatever ranks second,
which is probably the holiday season, with basketball in full
swing, overlapping the college bowl and NFL playoff season. Three
weeks of gut-wrenching, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, fill in your
own anatomical reference-add your own action verb. Heck, by the
time you've picked up The Weekly today, there have probably
already been two upsets and at least one miracle finish.