Tourney foils mapmakers, geographers
Solving a geography test isn’t necessary to win an office pool for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Just see if your place is having one, lest one breaks the law.
Then suspend disbelief and accept that the Midwest Region stretches from Albany, New York, to Sacramento, although California’s capital also is in the South Region. Then take my word that the Arkansas Activities Association — frustrated travel agents, as it were, whose geographic pairings in postseason play sometimes defy all logic – aren’t responsible this time.
(Congratulations to the AAA and the 12 teams that played in the recent Arkansas basketball state finals in Hot Springs and Bank OZK Arena for the 16th time in 17 years. Surely, there’s another trophy out there on which a Garland County team’s name will be inscribed as a champion. Repeating, Hot Springs is a suitable venue for this event, not big enough for Elton John perhaps but just right for small-college and prep basketball.
Arkansas is in Des Moines, Iowa, for West Region action today against Illinois. That winner returns Saturday against No. 1 seed Kansas or, after one of the all-time shockers, No. 16 Howard.
Take it from someone who watched an Iowa Derby there one weekend, Des Moines has some good fans. And with Iowa, Iowa State and hometown Drake represented in March Madness, it’s a basketball hotbed. The NCAA shipped Drake off to Albany against Miami, making one wonder what Saratoga, up the road on Interstate 87, looks like under snow?
This is a tournament without some coaches who made their reputations in March, and not just Coach K at Duke. Jim Boeheim joined their ranks last week although it’s not clear whether it was his choice or at Syracuse’s request. The Orangemen dropped a second-round game to defending champion Arkansas in 1995 when Lawrence Moten, like Michigan’s Chris Webber in the final only two years back, called one timeout too many.
I remember that game for a turf writer at Oaklawn expressing his loathing for Razorback athletics when Syracuse had the ball late with a chance to win. I don’t recall the sequence that unfolded but know that it followed the other man’s poignant plea of “One time, baby, one time.”
Money changed hands in the track’s press box before and after Arkansas’ U.S. Reed shot down Louisville from beyond half court in a 1982 second-round game. Orville Henry quoted Darrell Walker in the next day’s Arkansas Gazette, “I knew it was going all-net,” and I hope only that it wasn’t embellished. That Louisville team, with brothers Rodney and Scooter McCray, beat UCLA (coached by Larry Brown) in the previous year’s final.
Iowa and Purdue might play somewhere along the line, and I can never remember which Big Ten team center Joe Barry Carroll played for. Carroll, who played with an apparent sense of ennui that some people get watching movies with subtitles, was pegged in the press as “Joe Barely Cares.”
Missouri and UCLA are back in the tournament, which revives memories of the early-round game that blew up brackets in 1995. The Tigers let Tyus Edney immortalize himself with a court-length drive in the final seconds for a winning basket in a game that UCLA was ripe to lose.
Jim Harrick’s team, led by Ed O’Bannon, wound up in the finals and denied Arkansas, possibly the better team, a repeat championship. Of all Arkansas’ tournament losses, that one stings the most — right up there with LSU winning the 1966 Cot
ton Bowl in football. It was the college finale for Corliss Williamson, Scotty Thurman, Corey Beck and that magnificent array and the last Final Four game for coach Nolan Richardson.
Just say, that an Arkansas-Kansas game Saturday could test my home-state loyalty to the maximum, Eric Musselman’s team stumping me repeatedly.
Longtime readers of this column know my skepticism about Kansas basketball, though I have visited Lawrence and been inside Allen Fieldhouse. Whatever I feel about the Jayhawks, Wilt Chamberlain played there and wore an athletic jacket when returning to campus before his death — nothing else matters.
In that Arkansas lugs around “Whoo, Pig, Sooie,” it would be improper to comment negatively about “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” or the KU student body “waving the wheat” seconds before another win. Arkansas vs. Kansas is a game begging to happen.