NCAA National Championship 2014: One Non-Gambling Moment

The Final Four is one of my favorite sporting events of the year.  That may have a lot to do with it coinciding closely with the opening of the baseball season and the Masters tagging in not far behind, but there is just something about amateur athletes playing for pride that puts me in a good mood.  Even if this situation with Northwestern gains more traction, a vast majority of NCAA players will still be amateurs that do not play for millions of dollars.  They may play for better benefits and access to the college career tracks that all students have, (this is their right, especially with the $$$ they bring in), but the malice of professional sports will most likely be kept out of the NCAA.  Let's hope so at least.

The late great Hunter S. Thompson is a hero of mine and it always seemed like he had more fun writing about sports when he had money on one of the teams or competitors in whatever contest was taking place.  I have no money invested this evening in either UConn or Kentucky, but it is still a fun game to watch and write about.  (This is my one non-gambling moment of the tournament this year.)

The great Dr. Thompson would probably come at me with a sharp object of some sort if I badmouthed UK in his presence since that was his home state, but I cannot help but bring up how much I really dislike Kentucky, especially with John Calipari in tow.

I just wrote a column for Saintlouissports.com earlier about how we as St. Louis Cardinals fans did not want to slip down the slope of becoming pain-in-the-ass fans of a team just because they are good on a regular basis.  This is exactly the reason why I don't like Kentucky and why I enjoy every down year they have.  It may be mean, but it's how I feel.  Plus John Calipari is as crooked as any politician that has every been outed for malfeasance of any kind.  He even has the look.  Why he has the support of the NCAA after the things he has pulled is beyond me, but I guess we are talking about the NCAA here and not Shriner's Hospital.  I digress.

1:55 into the second half and UConn is leading the Wildcats 37-35 after coughing up a 13 point lead in the first half.  Shabazz Napier is/was a force to be reckoned with in the first half.  Watching that first half I had already planned on writing about how he was running circles around the physically superior Wildcat team, but alas the fucking Wildcats have lived up to their modus operandi and come back with a flurry of capitalizations of Huskie mistakes.  It makes me sick to my stomach, but that could also be the smooth Busch beer I've been drinking since watching the Cards' home opener earlier.

{POST INTERRUPTED SO AUTHOR COULD  WATCH THE REST OF GAME}

A bit of an anticlimactic ending but a good one still.  I won't say that John Calipari is not a good coach.  I will just say that he is a cheater and a scoundrel.  I will also say that Kevin Olie is a hell of a coach and that Jim Calhoun probably feels pretty good right now.

UConn started out with a head of steam, characteristic of a team coached by a pragmatic guy like Olie.  (He seems so in his press conferences anyway.)  UK came out at first looking like they had prepared to be run on and were overcompensating for this fact with silly fouls and overzealous goaltending calls in the first half.

Then they made a game of it and made everyone that has seen them fall behind and come back in this tournament squirm.  Coach Cal is very skilled at bringing together the big egos of teenage phenoms from around the country to play together as a team.  This however does not make him any less of a crooked fucker, in my humble opinion anyway.  I may be judging a book by its cover, but any avid reader knows just as well as I that when you are window shopping for books you put an awful lot of stock in the cover.  And I am willing to bet if we read the back flap of John Calipari it still would not pass many morality tests.

I will be the first to tell you that I am biased because of my disliking of John Calipari and Kentucky basketball.  That does not make what UConn has accomplished any less impressive.  Hell, I picked them to lose in the second round.  Actually, I picked both teams to lose in the second round now that I think of it, and I still stand to win $50 on the lone bracket that I filled out this year.  Figure that one out.

I guess Hunter Thompson was right about it really being more fun to write about sports when you stand to win some cash.  Long live college hoops.

-Luke
4/7/14