Wait, what?

 The first round of the 2024 NFL Draft is behind us now, and ... wait, what?

You mean the Bears might not have done something stupid for once?

You mean they went ahead and chose the QB everyone wanted at No. 1, and then they scooped one of the top three wide receivers in the draft with the No. 9 pick?

You mean now they've got Caleb Williams and Rome Odunze, who joins a wide receiver room that already has Pro Bowl wideouts D.J. Moore and Keenan Allen? You mean that's in addition to a tight end room that includes Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett? You mean the Bears not only didn't go off the rails and use the No. 1 pick on an offensive lineman from Directional Hyphen Tech State, they also didn't use the No. 9 pick on an edge rusher who's a sack machine but who also has had surgery on his neck?

No, they by-God didn't. That was actually the Indianapolis Colts who took Neck Surgery Guy.

His name is Laiatu Latu, and four years ago he suffered a neck injury so severe it required fusion surgery, and he was told at the time his football career was over. His coach at the University of Washington even announced he'd retired.

But Latu sat out 2021, transferred to UCLA, and in 2022 recorded 10 1/2 sacks for the Bruins as a backup. Last season, as a starter, he had 13 more sacks, 21 1/2 tackles for loss and was the Pac-12 defensive player of the year.

Last night the Colts, with the 15th pick, made him the first defensive player taken in the draft. Some people thought this was a curious choice not only because Latu is Neck Surgery Guy, but also because the pass rush was a Colts strength last season; their 51 sacks as a team were the most since they became the Indianapolis Colts in 1984.

"Wait, what?" you're saying now. "This sounds like something the Bears would do! What gives, Mr. Blob?"

Hey, don't ask me. The world's a strange old place. I mean, right now we've a got a Supreme Court justice (Samuel Alito) who thinks former presidents should be immune from prosecution because if they weren't, they'd have to sit in court like any other Joe Schmo defendant and wouldn't even get to go anywhere decent for lunch.

(I'm not making that up. Go check out what Alito said.)

Anyway, you put that together with the Bears actually coming out looking like draft winners, and that is one Twilight Zone of a day. They weren't the Colts. They also weren't the Atlanta Falcons, who made Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. the surprise pick at No. 8 even though they just handed Kirk Cousins $180 million across four years to be their quarterback.

"Wait, what?" Cousins might have said, and probably did.

Others were willing to give the Falcons the benefit of the doubt, in keeping with the tradition of not  just blurting "Jesus, what a stupid pick!" on draft night.

"Maybe this could be one of those Aaron Rodgers/Jordan Love sort of deals," someone suggested., in so many words.

"Sure! Penix sits four or five years behind Cousins and then steps into the job!" someone else agreed, in so many words.

All of this, of course, ignores that Penix has the best arm in the draft (in the Blob's opinion ,anyway), and will be ready to light up opposing defenses long before that four-or-five-year window closes. So it seems all the Falcons have done here is buy themselves a nice juicy quarterback controversy.

"Not us, by God!" the Bears are probably saying right now, with a gleeful chuckle.

And there's one more Twilight Zone moment: The Bears laughing at someone else for once. Strange days.

Gettin' a bit drafty

 Tonight is the first round of the NFL Draft, and, boy, I can hardly wait for the three hours or so it will take because every team gets 10 minutes per pick to make decisions it made weeks ago.

This is one of the many hilarious/annoying aspects of the Draft, which the Blob hardly ever watches because you can follow it online and you don't have to watch highlight clips you've seen a million times. Also -- and this is a big "also" -- you don't have to listen to Mel and Todd and the other draftniks engage in boring geek speak for three hours. 

Mel: "Caleb Williams is the most NFL-ready quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck --and by 'NFL-ready',  I mean he's already been in a bunch of Subway ads, and his dad is already a pain in the ass, and consequently he already has the requisite sense of entitlement."

Todd: "Marvin Harrison Jr. from Ohio State is the most NFL-ready wide receiver prospect since, I don't know, his dad, maybe -- and by 'NFL-ready', I mean he skipped the combine and skipped the private workouts, and already people like me are saying he might not even be the best wideout in this draft. I mean, have you seen Malik Nabers from LSU and Rome Odunze from Washington?"

I don't know about you, but I can do without  all that. Also if I don't watch I don't have to see Roger Goodell every 10 minutes, so there's that.

Suffice it to say I'm definitely not the guy to ask if you want to find out who the Colts are going to select with -- what is it again? -- the 15th pick. Apparently they need wideouts, but the three marquee guys (Harrison, Nabers and Odunze) likely will be gone by then. So they'll be left with, I don't know, some guy from Oregon or USC, or some other guy from Ohio State or LSU or Washington not named Harrison Jr., Nabers or Odunze.

I'd put in a plug for Raymond Berry, but he's 91 years old now and already played for the Colts, and he's in the Hall of Fame and stuff.  So I doubt he'd be interested.

They could use another tight end, and Brock Bowers from Georgia is a really good one. So maybe the Horsies pluck him if he's still on the vine at 15.

Other than that ...

Well. I got nothin'. 

Oh, I've heard about all the quality quarterbacks in this draft, but I've been around long enough to know most of them will turn out to be Zach Wilson or Mitch Trubisky. I've also heard this draft is deep in offensive linemen and (as already noted) wide receivers. 

I also have it on good authority there's a couple late first-round steals from Bemidji State and Whatsamatta U. lurking in the weeds. 

OK. So I don't.

Your hockey news for today

 ... and, no, it doesn't involve the Florida Panthers, Colorado Avalanche, Nashville Predators and New York Rangers, all of whom won last night in Stanley Cup playoff games.

No, today's news comes from the U18 world hockey tournament, where Kuwait, which might or might not actually have a U18 hockey team, lost a tight one to Thailand the other day. The final score in this nailbiter?

57-0.

No, I'm not making that up.  

Not making up that Thailand outshot the Kuwaitis 121-1, either.

One-hundred twenty-one shots! Man, I can just hear the conversation between the Kuwaiti coach and his goalie before the next game.

Coach: Marc-Andre (probably not his real name), you're starting in goal again today.

Probably Not Marc-Andre: Nuh-uh!

This assumes, of course, that there actually is a Probably Not Marc-Andre, which the Blob regards as highly unlikely. I'm guessing the Kuwaiti goalie is actually a live-size cutout modeled on the goalies from your old table-hockey game. You remember, right?

As to the rest of the Kuwaiti players ... 

Well, I'm stumped. 

I have no idea where the Kuwaitis found players so bad they lost 57-0 to Thailand, which isn't exactly crawling with Connor McDavids and Auston Mathewses, either. Did the national hockey program begin, like, a month ago? Did they pick the team by lining everyone up at one blue line and saying "OK, everyone who can skate to the other blue line without falling down makes the team"? And who's the lucky kid who got Kuwait's only shot on goal, and was he treated like a national hero back home?

Other questions: At some point, out of simple human decency if nothing else, was a running clock deployed? When the game was over, did the Kuwaiti coach channel Herb Brooks and make 'em skate Herbies until they dropped? Did he try to fire them up with an inspirational Herb Brooks-style pregame speech?

Kuwaiti Coach: Tonight, you ... are the best hockey team in the world.

Kuwaiti Players (convulsing with laughter): As if!

Through all of this, I keep coming back to poor Probably Not Marc-Andre, and what a wreck he must have been after facing 121 shots. Or maybe the Kuwaitis tried three or four Probably Marc-Andres in the course of the game. In which case the Kuwaiti coach may have looked up after the game and seen three or four sets of goalie pads lying on the locker room floor, as if the Probably Marc-Andres had all been raptured up or something.

Imagine Probably Not Coach Brooks' astonishment.

Probably Not Coach Brooks: Hey, what happened to Probably Not Marc-Andre, and the other Probably Not Marc-Andre, and the other Probably Not Marc-Andre?

Kuwaiti Players (pointing toward the showers): They're all in there, sitting in the corners, twitching and mumbling to themselves. It's kinda creepy, actually. Also they refuse to come out.

No doubt.

Caleb Williams vs. history

 The NFL Draft in Detroit is two days away, and you know what that means, Blobophile(s). 

"More lame jokes about Mel Kiper's bulletproof hair?" you're saying.

Nah, that's such a tired schtick it laid down in the middle of the road during rush hour and fell sound asleep.

"More ridiculing NFL general managers for the way they over-analyze everything?"

Nah, there's only so many way you can make fun of draft analysts obsessing over "tight skin", "burst" and "waist-benders."

"How the Bears will manage to screw up Caleb Williams, since it's almost certain they'll take him with the No. 1 pick?" 

Ah. Now you're getting warmer.

Now you're coming right down the street of a guy who grew up watching Jack Concannon throw the football into Lake Michigan and Bobby Douglass decapitate receivers with 110-mph swing passes, and learned early on how to tell  the difference between Peter Tom Willis and Slo-Mo Bob Avellini. (Hint: There was no difference).

So let me voice a healthy amount of skepticism that Caleb Williams, who has been pronounced to be All That by the people who look for tight skin in a player, will actually be All That.

I think he's got skills. I think he throws a good ball from a variety of stances and even non-stances. But is he that much better than Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye or Michael Penix or anyone else who won't be getting drafted by the Bears?

I don't think so. And not because of arm strength or eye-hand coordination or the hypotenuse of the cerebral cortex divided by the patellar tendon times the Heimlich maneuver squared or some such business.

It's because it's almost the Bears will take him with the No. 1 pick.

Every team has its own identity, and the Bears' identity, for as far back as most of us can remember, is that they never have a Dan Marino calling signals for them. Or a Johnny Unitas or Joe Montana or Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, for that matter.

Chicago is where quarterbacks go to die, in other words, or at least where they go to contract raging cases of Interception-itis. It's where Concannon and Douglass and Slo-Mo Bob and Peter Tom Willis go to hear "Dis guy sucks!" from the perpetually suffering Bears fan base. It's where Jim McMahon won a Super Bowl handing off to Walter Payton, throwing the occasional bomb to Willie Gault and watching the Bears defense vacuum-pack opponents.

Chicago is where McMahon  could complete a titch over half  his passes and throw almost as many picks as touchdowns and still win a ring.

It's where the only other time the Bears made the playoffs, Rex Grossman (or as he is colloquially known in  the greater Chicagoland area, "F****** Rex Grossman") was their quarterback.

That's some heavy history Caleb Williams will be swimming against, in other words. So if he indeed does become Patrick Mahomes 2.0, it will be a greater miracle than an open lane on the Dan Ryan at rush hour.

The Bears, to their credit, have done what they could to give the kid some weapons. They got De'Andre Swift from the Lions to beef up their running game, and Keenan Allen from the Chargers to pair with D.J. Moore. And they got Gerald Everett from the Chargers to deepen a tight room led by the dependable Cole Kmet.

And yet ... they're the Bears.

Who will almost certainly take Caleb Williams just three years after taking Justin Fields, figuring he was their quarterback of the future. And who Bears-ed that one up, right on cue.

Fields, see, turned out not to be the Man but just one more quintessential Bears Quarterback, although the Blob remains unconvinced he wouldn't eventually have become more than good enough to take them where they want to go. Now it's Williams' turn to try to break a particularly stubborn mold.

Natural-born pessimist and longtime Bears observer that I am, I wish him luck. Because God knows he'll need it.

The Iceman still cometh

 You might have missed it with the Stanley Cup playoffs getting started and the NBA playoffs, too, but over the weekend one of the more enduring eras in sports continued to, well, endure.

Out in Long Beach, Calif., in one of IndyCar's most venerable street-course races, the most venerable man of them all showed 'em the fast way around. Call him Dixie or the Iceman or just the Best Racer Of His Generation -- he's all of those, and no arguments to the contrary will be entertained on the last one -- but call Scott Dixon your Long Beach winner.

And in perhaps the most remarkable drive of the season so far.

Scott Dixon started eighth, worked his way to the front and then kept a host of eager throttle mashers in his mirrors by somehow stretching his fuel beyond the boundaries of convention. He made one load last 50 of the 85 laps, led 42 of them, and balanced speed and endurance on just enough of a knife's edge to hold off Colton Herta and Alex Palou and Josef Newgarden, who were once again amazed by IndyCar's old man.

"Once he took (the lead), I was like 'He's going to make it work'," said Palou, Dixon's teammate.

"Seems like Dixon is the only one that goes for these things sometimes, and they always work out," Herta concurred.

If that was another way of saying no one's better at the speed/fuel conservation thing than Dixon ... well, maybe that's because he's been doing it awhile. Long Beach was the 57th win of an IndyCar career that goes back more than two decades; only A.J. Foyt, with 67, has won more. 

The only anomaly in all of that, of course, is an echo of another golden era driver, Mario Andretti. Like Mario, he's won the Indianapolis 500 just once, in 21 starts.  That was 16 years ago, in 2008. Dixon was 27 years old, and no one doubted more milk-dousings were to come. But despite finishing in the top five six times since, it hasn't happened. 

And yet ...

And yet, he won his first major open-wheel race in just his third start back in the CART days, then won his first IndyCar championship the next year, when he was 23. He's won five more titles since -- and with his win in Long Beach, he's now won at least one IndyCar race for 20 straight years.

Twenty straight years with at least one win. Twenty straight years, as times changed and fortunes changed and the series got more and more competitive. And now he's 43 closing fast on 44, and there are more gifted young chargers in the series than it's seen in perhaps 30 years, and still the old man shows them all his tailpipes at least once every season.

The Iceman still cometh, in other words. And everyone else traileth.

The White Sox are terrible

 And now, time for another Cruds Break, but not the Cruds Break you think it is, even if my Cruds (the Pittsburgh Pirates), after a brief flirtation with competence, are inexorably making their way back to their ancestral home at the bottom of the NL Central.

"Wow, that's some impressive run-on sentencin', mister!' you're saying now.

And also: "But you ruined it because it was mostly about your bleep-bleeping Pirates. Honus Wagner is dead, dude. Get over it."

Fine, then. I won't write another word about the Pirates. At least in this post.

That's on account of the fact this post is about baseball's real Cruds, currently defiling the game in myriad disgusting ways on the south side of Chicago.

They're the Chicago White Sox, of course, and, man, do they stink. As of this morning, April 21, they're 3-17 and already 11 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central. Think about that for a second: They've only played 20 games, and they're already 11 1/2 games out of first.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a White Sox fan right now. Or a White Sox player. Or my friend and former colleague LaMond Pope, who's the Chicago Tribune's White Sox beat writer and one of the best people you'll ever meet.

Five more months of this poop show lies ahead of him. I can think of some people who might deserve such a fate, but LaMond not only isn't one of them, he's the least deserving of such a fate. The baseball gods are cruel.

Anyway, again, I can't imagine. Although I got an inkling last night at dinner, when my wife Julie and I sat next to an acquaintance who grew up in Chicago and started going to Comiskey when he was a kid, and has been a White Sox fan all his life.

I can easily imagine what he'd like to do to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf right now.  But he's far too jovial a guy to say anything  about that, other than Reinsdorf is the worst, the absolute worst.

So we talked about Bill Melton and Wilbur Wood and the Go-Go Sox of the early 1970s instead. And Bill Veeck and Harry Caray. And the Sox of '59, who had Nellie Fox and Jungle Jim Rivera and the ageless Minnie Minoso, and who lost the World Series to the Dodgers because (as my acquaintance recalled) an L.A. reliever named Norm Sherry kept trotting in from the bullpen to shut them down.

We didn't say much of anything about this Sox team, other than the fact they're the worst team in baseball and how could Reinsdorf put a team on the field that isn't even a major-league team? And still charge major-league prices?

And play not in old Comiskey, but in something called Guaranteed Rate Field?

The baseball gods are cruel. I know I said that already, but it bears repeating.

It's namin' time!

 The Phoenix Coyotes are officially toast on a stick, or maybe predator on a stick, and now the fun begins. Their new home will be Salt Lake City, and the team will go under the simple moniker "Utah" for its first season, but already the first submissions for a new nickname have been filed with the NHL office.

Here are your choices so far, America:

Utah Blizzard.

Utah Venom.

Utah Fury.

Utah HC.

Utah Hockey Club.

"Those all suck!" you're undoubtedly saying now.

Well, yes. Yes, they do.

Blizzard, to start with, is just another way of saying "Avalanche", and Colorado already has that one locked up. So it would violate the Territorial Rights To Winter-Weather Nicknames Rule, which I just made up. Although it's probably why the ECHL Utah Grizzlies are named the Grizzlies and not, say, the Utah Wintry Mix.

Utah HC, meanwhile, is a soccer name. The team won't be playing West Ham or Aston Villa any time soon, so that's out.

Venom? Meh. Fury? Meh. Utah Hockey Club?

"We already did that!" say the Washington Commanders, formerly the Washington Football Club.

So what should the team be called?

Well, let's start by thinking about some things for which Utah is known.

(Long pause while we all try to think of some things for which Utah is known)

(Longer pause)

(Reaaaallly long pause)

"I know!" you say at last. "Mormons!"

Well, yes. And someone's already suggested the Stormin' Mormons. But the Mormons might object to such trivialization of their religious beliefs, and they'd be right. It's why you don't see many Perturbed Presbyterians, Moody Methodists or  Battlin' Baptists in professional sports.

So what else is Utah known for?

Well, it's got some stunning national parks, to start with: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches. It's got the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's got mountains and valleys and the Great Salt Lake, and ... mountains and valleys and the Great Salt Lake.

Also the Bonneville Salt Flats, where so many lands-speed records have been set. So I guess you could call the team the Utah Speed, but what would the logo look like?

(Then again, what do a lot of team logos look like these days? Like Picasso crashed head-on into Dali and then dropped acid with Jackson Pollock, that's what.)

Now, lots of suggestions have been thrown out there on the Magic Twitter Machine, some of them really bad and some of them actually quite clever. One of the more notable is the Utah Crawfish, which its author noted would play into the New Orleans appropriation theme begun when the NBA's Utah Jazz moved from New Orleans and no one cared enough to change the name.

Me?

Well, right now I'm thinking of the Salt Lake Buzz, the original name of the Salt Lake Bees, Utah's Triple-A baseball team. Both play off the fact Utah is the Beehive State, which of course opens up a bunch of possibilities.

I'm thinking the B's would work.

The Utah B's! (Or the Fightin' B's, because it's a Blob article of faith that every nickname is improved by adding "Fightin'" to it). The logo could be a fierce-looking capital B with glaring red eyes and a hockey stick. The mascot could be Alpha(bet) Andy, a fierce-looking cursive B.  And the team motto could be something like "The Utah B's: We Always Bring Our 'A' Game".

Questions?

"I've got one," you're saying now. "How do you manage to feed yourself?"

Very funny. And a cursive be upon you.

Writer's block

They say you learn something every day, and this week I've learned  a lot. I mean, a lot.

I've learned what was in Indianapolis Star  sports columnist Gregg Doyel's head the other day, for starters.

I've learned how a sports columnist should and shouldn't go about columnizing, and what his or her role should be, and some of it I've learned from people you'd never imagine had so much knowledge on the subject.

I've learned,  mostly, that Gregg Doyel should be fired immediately for what was in his head the other day, and for what it led to him doing. Which was gross and ridiculous and conduct unbecoming a professional sports columnist, and did we mention gross and ridiculous?

What he did was make the heart shape with his hands when it was his turn to ask Caitlin Clark a question. Same heart shape Clark makes toward her family after every game.

Then he said, "I'm glad you're here."

And then Clark said ,"Hey, I do that toward my family after every game."

And then Doyel said ,"Do it to me and we'll get along fine," or words to that effect.

And, yeah, again, just so you don't misunderstand (though you probably will), it was gross and skeevy and "ewww", and disrespectful  to Ms. Clark, and unprofessional in a "What the hell were you thinking?" sort of way.

There's no defending it. There's no defending him, at least in this instance. And I'm not doing that here no matter how you choose to interpret it.

What I am going to do is say it sure is amazing how much everyone seems to know about things they don't really know about.

For instance: I don't know Doyel well, but I have interacted with him several times in various pressboxes, and he seems like a decent guy. I also enjoy his work, generally -- though if I may presume to say so as not nearly so accomplished  a columnist, I think he leads too much with his emotions sometimes, and thus occasionally strays into the dreaded Maudlin Zone.

That said, having actually met the guy, I don't think he was trying to hit on Caitlin Clark the other day. I think it's absurd even to suggest such a thing, though that's never stopped people before.

I  think what he was doing was looking for an angle in his signature (and often inadvisable) personal way, and it backfired on him big time. Instead of an angle, he came off looking like some lovesick middle-aged man making a play for a woman young enough to be his daughter.

And, yeah, that's as "ewww" as "ewww" gets for sure.

But you know what?

I think Doyel probably knew it almost immediately, which he is why he came back with a damage-control column the next day that some people interpreted as insincere and self-serving but didn't strike me that way.  I also don't think, as some people did, it was another example of his GIANT EGO (as if everyone in the biz doesn't have an ego) trying to make it all about him -- for the excellent reason that this time it was about him, even if he made it so to begin with.

I don't think the guy's a pervert, as Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports labeled him. (Which is hilarious considering Portnoy is pretty skeevy himself, and his website is a notoriously toxic den of misogyny).  I also don't think what he did was some sweeping indictment of  the lack of respect the predominantly male sportswriting biz has for women athletes, because Doyel has the clips to prove he's a poor example of that.

And, no, I don't think he should be fired, as some of my former colleagues have demanded. I think his editor should call him into the office, close the door and say "What the hell were you thinking?", and then give him a two-week sitdown to come up with an answer.

(He might also suggest Doyel contact Clark and personally apologize to her, not just in print. Although he may have already reached out to her. I'm guessing he has.)

Look. I get it. In the flying circus that is America these days, the nuclear option is the only option for a lot of folks.  Overreaction and over-extrapolation are its meat and drink. There may certainly be times when overreaction is not overreaction and over-extrapolation not over-extrapolation, but not, you know, all the damn time.

I think this is one of those All The Damn Time times. Sorry not sorry.

Woody on the rebound

 Hey, look at this, will ya. Perhaps Mike Woodson isn't soiling Indiana University's grand basketball tradition, assuming anyone out there is old enough to remember Indiana's grand basketball tradition.

Yes, the Hoosiers failed to make the NCAA Tournament this year, and couldn't hit water if they fell off a cruise ship sometimes, and tracked mud all over hallowed Assembly Hall on more than a few occasions. Even got grated like parmesan by Purdue twice, losing by 21 in the Hall and 20 in Mackey Arena. 

All of this made the less rational  precincts of Candy Stripe Nation somewhat disgruntled. OK, so they thought Woody was the WORST COACH EVER and wanted to TAKE HIM TO CAPE CANAVERAL AND LAUNCH HIM INTO SPACE.

(Sorry for the all-caps. Just trying to convey the general mood of the Less Rational Precincts.)

Anyway, Woodson's Hoosiers were a deeply flawed team, and they missed Da Tournament, and hardly anyone remembered that Woodson's first two teams made the Da Tournament, which is something his predecessor (Archie Miller) never did. His one prize recruit de-committed, and some folks were saying this was because Mike Woodson was lazy, with the unfortunate racial subtext that goes with that.

That was March in Bloomington.

And now that April is past halftime?

Well, let's take stock, shall we?

Trey Galloway and Anthony Leal have decided to stick around for another season when they didn't have to.

Ditto Malik Reneau and Co-Big Ten Freshman of the Year Mackenzie Mgbako.

Woodson landed another five-star recruit (Bryson Tucker) to replace the five-star recruit who bailed (Liam McNeeley).

Via the transfer portal, he's also locked up the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year (Washington State point guard Myles Rice) and the nation's No. 1 portal target, 7-foot Arizona center Oumar Ballo -- a two-time all-Pac-12 selection and a player who averaged a double-double this season for the Wildcats.

I don't know about you. But it sounds to me like Woodson hasn't exactly been sitting around eating bonbons since the season ended.

Sounds to me like he's winning the offseason, and, yeah, he's done that before. But he's got a lot of nice pieces, and the portal and recruiting season has barely started, and maybe by this fall he'll have a roster even he can't screw up. 

Or so the Less Rational Precincts no doubt would put it.

Me?

I say he's already proved the usual doom-criers half wrong.  Whether or not he'll prove them all the way wrong is yet to be seen.

A Boy for all seasons

(My longtime former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, ran this today in its Thursday editions. You can subscribe to the print or online versions here. Please do so. Do it because local journalism is important, and it's being gutted these days by hedge-fund jackals. So do your bit in telling them to bleep off.)

Outside our bedroom window the lilacs are blooming again, a splash of lavender and  whiff of perfume. The forsythia is going from yellow to green and the flowering trees from white to green. Their shedding petals dance on the April breeze like benevolent snowflakes.

Spring is at flood tide, in other words. And that means summer waits just offstage.

Which is why it was the right time, maybe, for Carl Erskine to take his leave of us.

He laid down his burden yesterday in the full measure of 97 years, and rarely has a man lived 97 years with more grace and distinction. If he was one of the Boys of Summer made famous by Roger Kahn in his book about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, he was also the living embodiment of a Hoosier gentleman, a man who went off to find fame in the big city and then came back to his hometown of Anderson to find something more enduring.

He grew to a giant's status there not because he had a curveball that made baseball's best hitters fan air when it was right, but because of his lifelong dedication to his son Jimmy, who was born with Down's syndrome. Jimmy got involved in Special Olympics -- the son of an athlete following the family legacy -- and that got Carl involved in Special Olympics, his compulsion to serve influencing both that cause and, of course, baseball.

The man was cursed, and we were blessed, by an almost pathological inability to say no. His phone would ring and off he would go to work some baseball camp or speak at some baseball function, or talk to some reporter about some aspect of his game.

Every so often -- more times than I recall, actually -- that reporter was me. I got to know Carl during my own Anderson days, and I've always counted it one of the more fortunate occurrences of my fortunate life.

You can start with the fact that Carl was one of the finer human beings who ever breathed air, which is why I never hesitated to lean on him for his unmatched perspective on some baseball current event . It wasn't just that the man pitched a dozen years for the Dodgers, or threw two no-hitters, or once struck out 14 Yankees in a World Series game, including Mickey Mantle four times.  It was that he was a ground-floor witness to a seismic period of American history, and remembered it with such clarity.

One example: Erskine was Jackie Robinson's teammate in the early, sometimes ugly, days of baseball's integration, and years later he could remember the room-service carts sitting in the hallway of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. This was in 1954, and the carts were sitting outside the rooms of Erskine's six black teammates, who were barred from going places Erskine and Duke Snider and the rest of the white Dodgers could simply because of their pigmentation.

They were the days of Whites Only restrooms and drinking fountains and dining establishments and schools; the days of bus boycotts and Emmett Till and President Ike calling out the National Guard to protect the right of a handful of black kids to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.  And of course they were so much more.

Television forever altered both baseball and America while Erskine was confounding batters in musty old Ebbetts Field. He witnessed the expansion of the game first-hand when Walter O'Malley uprooted the Dodgers and took them west to L.A. And he served as the Dodgers player rep years before Curt Flood and free agency and baseball strikes.

Shoot. Even mass transit underwent a transformation during Erskine's time; he began his career riding the trains, and ended it flying the friendly skies. 

"I played in a specific era in the  game," is how Carl put it once. "There were a lot of historic changes that happened in that era -- and baseball always reflects those changes in society."

This was during a time when his phone would ring and it would be a reporter calling or his alma mater Anderson University (nee Anderson College) or another fantasy camp. Or the Dodgers wanting him to come down to Vero Beach for spring training. Or a local high school wanting him to attend the dedication of their new baseball facility. Or ...

Or Dale McMillen inviting him to Mr. Mac Day in the early 1960s, when Wildcat baseball was just getting off the ground in Fort Wayne.

There's a photo from that day hanging in the suite area of Parkview Field now. Mr. Mac is in it. So are Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller -- and Carl Erskine.

"I'm cheap and I'm available," Erskine once joked about all the requests he got.

No, Carl. No, that's not it at all.

It's because you were more than just a Boy of Summer. You were, and will always remain, a Boy for all seasons.

Caitlin mania

 She didn't ask for any of this. Let's understand that straightaway.

Caitlin Clark is a basketball player with impeccable skills and a shooting range that invites comparison to Steph Curry, but she didn't ask for what came with that.

She didn't ask for the Iowa women to become the hottest ticket in town everywhere they went this season because of her. She didn't ask for the TV numbers for the women's March Madness to zoom past the men's numbers largely because of her, or for more viewers to tune into the women's championship game that tuned in for any game of the World Series last fall or of the NBA Finals last June.

And now it really gets crazy.

Now the Indiana Fever has done what was expected of it and made her the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, and already the teevees have slotted in 36 Fever games for the coming season. Tickets for Fever games in other WNBA cities are going for 10 times face value. In some WNBA markets, games involving the Fever are even being moved to larger venues.

And the company marketing WNBA jerseys (Fanatics)?

In an hour last night, it sold out of every size but small in Clark's No. 22 Fever jersey.

Caitlin Clark didn't ask for any of that. And she didn't ask for what some people are inferring from it, which is that she's some sort of savior for the WNBA.

She herself has never said that, and never would presume to. But some of the women who built the WNBA brand, and who continue to build it, are rightly torqued about it.  

Diana Taurasi, for one, all but warned Clark she's a marked woman now. And you just know, given the competitiveness and skill level of the current WNBA stars, that they're lining up to welcome the rook to the league in the most unwelcome way possible.

Everyone's gonna take her shot, in other words. Everyone wants to be the first one to swat one of her logo threes to Saturn, or to knock her into next week when she slaloms to the iron, or to turn the "savior" into just an ordinary underpaid WNBA grunt.

With heightened expectation comes heightened motivation for the opposition. And if it's true Clark herself created those expectations by turning herself into something of a basketball savant,  she didn't ask for them to reach the absurd levels they have reached.

But they have, and now Clark faces the impossible task of living up to it all. If she doesn't do superhuman things -- if she doesn't dunk over Brittney Griner or splash every three-ball or  dish 20 dimes a game to Fever teammate and 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston  -- she'll get the dreaded All Hype tag. It's virtually inevitable.

Best example of this off the top of my head would be Pete Maravich, who surfed into the NBA on a Caitlin Clark level of  hype. The Pistol was a dazzling NBA player with a skill set years ahead of its time, but he never averaged 44 points per game the way he did in college, never jumped over the moon, never, I don't know, made himself disappear and then reappear in the middle of a fastbreak. And he'd have had to do all of that live up to the ridiculous expectations with which he was burdened.

Undoubtedly, Clark already knows this. She's weathered that particular storm pretty much flawlessly so far, and even had some fun with it. It's going to get harder to do that now, but she's a savvy young woman in more ways than one. A single-minded focus on basketball is what got her here;  that same focus, the Blob suspects, will keep her from trying to be Wonder Woman instead of just Caitlin Clark.

Which will be more than enough, it says here. And ought to be.

Drama killer

 Tiger Woods was only around for a couple of rounds at Augusta this week, before returning to what he is now, which is an old man with an old man's infirmities. Shooting 14 over par across the last 36 holes of the Masters will do that to a guy.

He blew to a 10-over 82 on Saturday, then added a 4-over 76 yesterday to render his signature Sunday Red little more than a nostalgic echo of days gone by.  He shot 16-over for the tournament, his worst score ever in  professional event and one that placed him last among the 60 golfers who made the 36-hole cut. Among those he finished behind: 61-year-old Vijay Singh and 58-year-old Jose Maria Olazabal.

Tiger's right there with them now, someone for whom the galleries still cheer not because of what he might yet do, but because of what he once did.

But you know something?

In a bodily-transference sort of way, somehow he still won the green jacket.

Long after Woods departed the premises, see, Scottie Scheffler did a thing, and if it wasn't Tiger breaking everyone's will on Masters Sunday, it was something very like it. Squeezed all the juice out of the last round, is what he did. Unplugged the dramatic oil pan and let the drama run right out of it, to use a particularly tortured metaphor.

He started the day with a one-stroke lead over Collin Morikawa, and there were half-a-dozen others within striking distance. It shaped up to be yet another encore of glorious Masters chaos, with Amen Corner miracles sharing the stage with car crashes and dumpster fires and wheels coming off and someone finally dropping a road-map putt to stagger off with the win.

Instead ... we get Scottie Scheffler pulling a Tiger.

Which is to say, he crushed the life out of everyone, shot by shot and without pity. Made seven birdies on the day, the most in a final round by a Masters winner since Nick Faldo did it 35 years ago. Made two of those birds back-to-back on the back nine, when the leader's knees are traditionally supposed to turn to jelly.

Not Scheffler. He never got rattled, never presented an opening, simply left the field choking on his dust with a final-round 68 and a four-stroke win over Ludvig Aberg, a Swede playing in his first Masters.

Aberg and Tommy Fleetwood carded 69s. Just about everyone else came down with the final-round flu;  only Tom Kim, deep in the field, shot a lower round on the day with a 66.

This is not to say Scheffler is the next Tiger, because there isn't one and likely will never be. But his grip on the game right now at least approaches the psychological dominance Tiger once held. If there was a Tiger cringe mode back in the day, there was a Scottie Scheffler cringe mode this weekend, with virtually everyone expecting him to win and Scheffler obliging.

Sunday's green jacket was his second in three years, and he's now won eight times on the PGA Tour in the last 26 months. The first man ever to win back-to-back Players Championships, he has, at 27,  played in five Masters and won two of them.

The only player to do better -- two wins in three starts -- was named Horton Smith. And he did it 88 years ago.

 This is historic ground Scheffler is trampling, in other words. His win Sunday, for instance, made him the fourth-youngest player to win at least two green jackets.

The only ones who were younger?

Their names are Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Seve Ballesteros. Perhaps you've heard of them.

Still Masterful

 They played the second round of the Masters in a wind tunnel yesterday, and it was something to see. Clothing rippled. The Cathedral of Pines waved to and fro. Water features practically grew whitecaps, and there were reported sightings of Dorothy and Toto aloft in some of the drunker precincts. 

The predictable result of all this was that some of the world's best golfers sprayed Titleists around like your average Weekend Walter. 

Bryson DeChambeau, who opened Thursday with a 65 , staggered home with a one-over 73 on Friday. Scottie Scheffler's first-roud 66 became a second-round 72. Of the top 14 players on the leaderboard, only five made it through their rounds under par. And the lowest score among those five was Ludvig Aberg's 69.

"Enough about Ludvig Aberg," you're saying now. "What did Tiger do? I bet Dorothy and Toto strapped an 85 on him, right?"

Um, no.

Tiger shot 72, even par. This despite the fact he played 23 holes yesterday, because he was still five holes light of the required 18 when play was suspended in the first round. At 1-over for the tournament, he made the Masters cut for a record 24th straight time -- and by five strokes.

I don't know if, after all this time, you can classify anything the greatest golfer of his generation does as remarkable. But this was remarkable.

He is, after all, damn near 50 years old now, and his body is probably 75 or so. For 23 holes Friday, he was out there swinging the club and stumping around Augusta National on the ruined leg he gave himself in a foolish episode of reckless driving a few years back.  And Augusta is not exactly the Bonneville salt flats; it's much more hilly than it looks on TV, with a lot of up-hill-and-down-dale hiking between shots.

And yet, wind and all, he followed a 73 with a 72. He's still Tiger Woods, if only sporadically these days. And he's only eight strokes back at the tournament's turn.

"Surely you're not saying ..." you're saying now.

No. No, he's not going to win the thing, barring divine intervention. The Blob makes it 50-50 he even finishes, given the leg and the Augusta hillocks and what would be 59 holes of golf in 72 hours. 

But with the weekend still ahead of him, he's already astonished us. He's already done  Tiger Woods things . At 48, with a body that's a walking surgical procedure, he made the Masters cut while younger, fitter men did not.

He made the cut, and Jordan Spieth did not.

He made the cut, and Dustin Johnson did not.

He made the cut ... and Bubba Watson did not, Justin Thomas did not, Viktor Hovland did not, Justin Rose and Charl Schwartzel did not.

Give the man a hand. Again.

All in the family

 Jay Wright didn't want the job. Billy Donovan said "Nah, I'm good." Dan Hurley wondered why he'd leave UConn after winning back-to-back titles there; Baylor's Scott Drew said thanks, but no thanks; and Nate Oats said on the whole, he'd rather be at Alabama.

It was starting to look like no one wanted the Kentucky job, which must have left the Big Blue faithful slack-jawed in disbelief.  Baylor over Kentucky? Alabama over the Wildcats? What, did Bear Bryant coach basketball? And if he had, would he have beaten that crusty old racist Adolph Rupp?

I don't think so, BUD!

It was the ultimate snub, the basketball coach at a football school turning down one of the nation's legendary basketball schools.  And so UK did what a lot of folks do when they've been done wrong by strangers.

They turned to family.

In this case, "family" is Mark Pope, a captain on the 1996 Kentucky juggernaut and now the coach at BYU. Everyone thinks the world of the guy, apparently. And he's pure bluegrass from his head to his toes, unlike all those other dirtbags who clearly didn't appreciate the opportunity they were being offered.

Hey, come to Kentucky! Look at those banners! Have yourself a nice soak in all our history! And if you win us a national title every other year, we promise not to run you out like we did that Calipari fella!

Now, I don't know if that's what Oats and Drew and all the others heard when Kentucky came calling. But job security is no small thing in these uncertain times. And that's especially true now that college buckets are the Wild West and kids are changing schools every year the way they change their socks.

Which is to say, it ain't easy being dynastic these days, and dynastic is what the UK fan base expects. So you can halfway understand why marquee names who've built solid programs elsewhere would be reluctant to leave the solid ground those programs provide.

Enter Mark Pope, who at least knows what UK expects and (presumably) thus knows better how to cope with those expectations. Even if his resume isn't the sort of resume a Kentucky coach generally brings to the table.

In five seasons at BYU he's gone 110-52 and taken the Cougars to two NCAA Tournaments, and his season put up 23 wins in BYU's first season in the Big 12. But he's a less-than-overwhelming 187-108 in eight years as a head coach at Utah Valley and BYU, and he's never won a game in the Madness. In 2021 6-seed BYU was knocked out by 11-seed UCLA in the first round, and this year was deja vu all over again: The Cougars were once more a 6-seed, and once more an 11-seed -- Duquesne this time -- upset them.

Calipari's last Kentucky team, meanwhile, lost to 14-seed Oakland in the first round this year. So at least UK fans are used to getting taken down by a lower seed.

Which is most assuredly not why the school is hiring Mark Pope, as Calipari could attest. But you know what?

At least the hometown guy knows that.

Dark legacy

 O.J. Simpson died yesterday at 76, and again I see that blood-red USC headgear gliding through shoals of golden UCLA headgear back in '67, and see the red buffalo on his Bills headgear as he went over 2,000 yards on a snow-flecked afternoon in '73, an-

I'm sorry, what?

I'm leaving something out, you say?

Well, yes, I suppose I am.

I suppose here is where we relegate all of that football glory to the bottom of the piece in the approved inverted-pyramid style (important stuff up top; less important stuff at the bottom) , and start right off with the white Bronco and the slaughter of his ex-wife and a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if-the-glove-don't-fit-you-must-acquit.

O.J. Simpson was just a Hall of Fame running back before all that, one of the best ever to play the position.

After, he was a sociopath whose celebrity furnished him cover for years, and which allowed him to get away with a gruesome double murder.  And a darkness descended that would forever define him in the public mind.

In that sense justice was served, for if he never went to prison for butchering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the madness of that night would lock him away in a purgatory of his own making for the next 30 years. He could say, and those deluded souls who believed him could say, that he was acquitted by a jury of his peers. But the hard-eyed jury of public opinion knew better, and sentenced him to contempt without possibility of parole for the remainder of his days.

He became a symbol of racial division -- some black Americans actually cheered the not-guilty verdict, seeing in it payback for all the bogus guilty verdicts people of color received down the years -- and then a pariah, and then just an empty shell who ended his own life three decades before his heart stopped beating. By the end he'd become little more than a punchline, an occasional meme in the pitiless landscape of social media.

Yesterday, for instance?

Before the day was out, the first images of a white Bronco photoshopped to look like a hearse began popping up all over the Interwhosis. And then the jokes. And then more memes, and more jokes.

America can be a cruel place.

Never more so than the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman crossed paths with a madman, and a madman's knife.

100 Days to Good PR

 Finally got around to binging the 2023 Netflix series on IndyCar, "100 Days to Indy", and let me say right up front that my review is not some lazy take about it being a cheap knockoff of "Drive to Survive," Netflix's outrageously successful F1 series. I mean, it is, sort of, but it's not.

That's because F1 and IndyCar are entirely different animals, a "Well, duh" statement to be sure. And thus so are their respective documentaries.

"Drive to Survive," like F1 itself, is much more soapily operatic, if that's a thing. It's kind of like "The Housewives of (Name The City)" if the housewives in question  drove really fast in incredibly sophisticated pieces of machinery, and every once in awhile said "What the (bleep) was that?" on the in-car when some other housewife ran into them.

And "100 Days to Indy"?

Not like that at all. Oh, the format is pretty much the same -- every episode focuses on one race, and in some respects on one team or driver -- but everyone seems much more aware of the presence of the Netflix cameras, and thus largely are on their best behavior.

What emerges is a public relations infomercial in which everyone seems to get along and never misses an opportunity to promote the IndyCar brand.

But you know what?

I have no problem with that.

I have no problem with it because one of the chronic complaints about IndyCar is that the series does a lousy job of selling itself, and selling the personalities of its drivers. And I'll be the first one raise my hand as one of the complainers.

"100 Days to Indy" is clearly IndyCar's attempt to remedy that, and it does a damn good job of it. The youthful exuberance of Pato O'Ward, for instance, makes him impossible not to like. Ditto Santino Ferrucci. You find yourself rooting for Scott McLaughlin, who so badly wants to be the Next Big Thing in IndyCar, and for Robert Juncos and the racing organization he built from nothing. And of course there's a dash of Helio and a pinch of Tony Kanaan, and a heaping helping of the always-on Josef Newgarden.

For me?

Well, as someone who covered the Indianapolis 500 for 40 years , what was most revealing were the segments focusing on Will Power. I always found him a bit wary with the media, particularly with those like me whom he didn't know well. "100 Days to Indy" not only revealed how he coped with the serious illness of his wife, but also gave us a side of him -- a goofy, fun-loving side -- I never saw.

My favorite moment in the six-part production, for instance, is when Newgarden, McLaughlin and Power are hanging out at the Penske complex, and Power, who is Australian, is poking fun at the fitness-obsessed Newgarden. Even tries to imitate him with an American accent that is, shall we say, less than stellar.

Newgarden cracks up.

"That is the worst American accent I've ever heard!" he exclaims, as Power grins and laughs with him.

I don't know if that sort of moment can make an IndyCar fan out of someone who's not. But it surely can't hurt.

Pillow talk

 One Shining Moment is in the rearview. The Masters lies just ahead. And last night, on a glorious April evening, the Fort Wayne Tincaps celebrated 15 years downtown in Parkview Field, the prettiest minor-league ballpark this side of damn near everywhere.

I guess now we can finally hit pause, then, and take a day to salute America's weird sports.

The Weird Sports you can find on at least one screen during the slow time of the day in your favorite sports bar, and it is a teachable moment if ever there was one. Did you know, for instance, there's such a thing as professional cornhole? Professional axe-throwing (Lizzie Borden remains its Babe Ruth, or so I've heard)? Some bizarro Frankenstein's monster called Table Volleyball, which is essentially beach volleyball played on a ping-pong table?

(No, really. I've seen it. Two-team players ripping a volleyball off a ping-pong table. They even play it on sand, apparently to fool you into thinking it actually is like beach volleyball. It's sillier than kittens on ether.)

So weird, all of it. But one day on the Weird Sports Screen  appeared the mother of all Weird Sports.

Two guys in a boxing ring.

Holding pillows.

Each trying to land, I don't know, a crushing left feather-hook or something.

Yes, that's right, America. There is indeed something called professional pillow fighting.

And it's not a Monty Python skit!

No, sir. The fighters all look like, I don't know, Marvin Hagler or Jerry Quarry or Roberto Duran. The referee looks like legendary boxing ref Mills Lane. I've got no idea how they score  these things, although I assume it has something to do with whacking the other guy in the head, body or spleen with their fiercely soft pillows.

As far as I know, the action is not sponsored by the Crazy MyPillow Guy. Though as Wooderson says in "Dazed and Confused," it would be cooler if it was.

Anyway, the whole deal is just as ridiculous as it sounds, enhanced rather than diminished by the fact everyone involved is obviously serious about it.  And of course ridiculousness is what launches the Blob into  Full Absurdity Mode, which lies pretty close to the surface most of the time anyway.

And so here we go whirling back in time with a bunch of  Absurdity Mode what-ifs ... 

Question: What if boxing had been pillow fighting?

* Would every division be the featherweight division? And would contour pillows be allowed?

* Would Ali-Frazier III have been dubbed the Pilla In Manila?

* Would Ali's famous line have been "Float like a butterfly, sling like a frat boy during pledge week"?

* Would "Raging Bull" have been "Goosedown Bull", and would Robert De Niro have played Jake LaMotta as just a cranky guy in need of his nightly eight hours?

* Could Ivan Drago have actually killed Apollo Creed with a pillow? And if he couldn't, would Rocky have ever gone to Russia, trained in the snow, beaten Drago, and said "If youse can change ... and I can change ... we can all change the sheets!"

* Also, there would go the whole "Creed" franchise, and Michael B. Jordan would be forced to take a series of really bad roles, which is how he'd wind up getting his ass kicked by Pam Grier in the "Foxy Brown" reboot.

* And don't even get me started on "Cinderella Man." Or as it would come to be known: "The Princess And The Pea Man."

OK. I'm done now.

Welp ...

 ... which is about all that's left to say now that Purdue went down like everyone else last night, flattened by the relentless steamroller that is UConn.

The Huskies won the national title in a 75-60 game that wasn't really in doubt after halftime, and, listen, it wasn't because the Boilermakers didn't do what they could do. It's just that UConn did what it could do, and does, like, pretty much all the time.

Oh, Zach Edey got his points, 37 of them, but the Huskies cared very little about that. The game plan was to silence everyone else around him, and they were so good at doing that the Edeyettes barely uttered a whisper.

A team that needed a flurry of threes even to have a chance not only made just one, it barely managed to get off any as UConn's length, speed and aggressiveness made the three-point line a no-let-fly zone. The Boilers managed just seven shots from the arc --18 fewer than Purdue hoisted against North Carolina State in the national semifinal, and three fewer than it made against the Wolfpack.

The Huskies virtually erased Purdue's best shooter, Fletcher Loyer, who scored no points in 30 minutes and was so fiercely harassed he managed just five shots. That was the story pretty much everywhere else, too; aside from Edey's 37 and a sparkling 12-point, eight-assist, one-turnover night from Braden Smith, no one else wearing Purdue colors scored more than five points. The Boilers got just two points from their bench, a source of strength for them all season.

In other words: UConn was damn good. Best team in America, and not by a little.

And Purdue?

Damn good, too.

That the Boilermakers fell a W short of their first national title diminishes very little what they managed to do this season, a landmark one by any measure. Big Ten regular-season champs for the second straight year. Most wins (34) in program history. First Final Four appearance in 44 years; first title-game appearance, and second ever, in 55 years.

And, oh, yeah: Best Performance By A Purdue Team In Wiping The Sneers Off A Lot Of Faces.

Hard to fathom now, but before March began there were a scattering folks saying right out loud that if Matt Painter didn't make the Final Four with this team, Purdue should think about moving on from him. Because, you know, a program makes its bones in March, and Painter was a March choker of the first orde-

Oops. Guess not.

Guess not, because Purdue vaporized its first two opponents in the Madness by a combined 67 points, and on it went. Its average margin of victory on the way to the title game was 19.6 points. It didn't always play well, but it played hard -- where have we heard that one before, Gene Keady? -- and with a smoldering focus that never once wavered.

Problem was, so did UConn.

Problem was, the Huskies were on a mission, too, trying to become the first program in 17 years to win back-to-back titles, and only the third program to do so in 25 years.

Duke, Florida, UConn. That's your list.

So there was a large pile of history squeezed into last night, and not all of it belonged to the Huskies. A good chunk belonged to Purdue, too, and there were echoes of Rick Mount in '69 in it, and of Joe Barry Carroll and the gang in '80, and of all those granite-nosed Keady teams that in a sense taught this one how to play the game. And then sat back and watched that team take Purdue to the very brink.

Speaking of which, Keady was in the arena last night, because of course he was.

He sat there with that legendary bulldog jaw jutted out a mile -- smaller, at 87, than we remember, if not diminished -- and a Purdue cap jammed down to his eyes. And when he lifted it, you could see something else: A "P" cut or stenciled or whatever into the back of his head.

Here's to the man. And here's to a basketball team that gave him, and every Boiler Up soul in America, the ride of their lives.

Snubbing the snubbers

 They say the grass is always greener on the other side, but I don't know what they say when the grass on this side is blue. I suppose John Calipari is going to find out now.

Coach Cal hasn't gotten Kentucky to the Final Four in a pile of years, so he did the next best thing, which is lob a grenade into  the middle of it. This upon the frankly stunning news that he's leaving  the Bluegrass State to take the job at SEC rival Arkansas -- a story that broke, of course, on the day of the national championship game.

Now, it's well documented Coach Cal has been under some heat from the Kentucky fan base, which tends not to like it when the Wildcats don't win a national title every other year. They especially don't like it when it hasn't happened in over a decade, and they really don't like it when the Wildcats get knocked out of March Madness early by some scruffy peasant  from the Horizon League.

Which is what happened a couple of weeks back when Oakland, a 14-seed and the Horizon champion, sent the third-seeded Wildcats back to Lexington on the first day of the Madness (not counting the play-in games, which the Blob doesn't).

Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that set off in  the UK kingdom, Some people thought Calipari was going to get fired, but UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart stood by his man -- even if, by standing so close to the target of Wildcat Nation 's wrath, he, too, caught some shrapnel.

Now Calipari is rewarding this brave show of loyalty by saying, "I'm outta here." And you can make of that what you will.

Me, I'm letting my imagination out to play again. I'm popping the hood on Coach Cal's head and imagining what he's thinking right now as he heads off to Arkansas: 

You want me gone, you ungrateful hilljacks? Fine, I'm gone. I'm headed for Little Rock, where I'll have the immense pleasure of kicking your hindparts two or three times every year. You think I've lost it? Yeah, wait'll we drop 100 on you some night. You'll be losin' it, all right -- maybe even in the bathroom if you make it that far.

Oh, and you wanna know something else?

Your bourbon sucks. And I never liked horses, either. 

Later, dudes.

A traitorous pick

 I grew up in a Purdue family. Let's get that out there straight off.

My uncles and cousins on both sides of the family are or were passionate Boilermaker fans. My one uncle's son is a Purdue grad. I have a niece who's a Purdue fan, which she gets from her mom, my sister, which makes sense because our mother was a Purdue grad.

Which is how I wound up in our driveway growing up, pretending I was Rick Mount. "Pretending" being the operative word.

Anyway ... I just wanted you all to know that.

Because I'm not picking Purdue tonight. I'm picking UConn.

"He always was a traitor," everyone in my family just said.

Yeah, well. I yam what I yam.

Which is a former sportswriter afflicted with a sportswriter's eye, meaning I lost most of my ability to take sides a long time ago. I make decisions based on what my eye tells me -- and what my eye tells me is Purdue is up against a team tonight for which even the Boilermakers won't have  the answers.

Way I see it, Zach Edey gets his points for Purdue, but so will Donovan Clingan and any number of other Huskies for UConn. As Purdue coach Matt Painter so astutely put it yesterday, Purdue hasn't faced anyone like UConn this season. The Huskies are big and athletic and come at you from any number of angles, and they do it with a relentlessness every bit the equal of Purdue's.

They are pitiless, these Huskies. As Painter also observed, they make you pay for every mistake, and they do so immediately. Purdue will have to play its best game of the season to beat them -- and the last two times out, the Boilers haven't come close to doing that.

They couldn't hit the broad side of a Walmart from the three-point arc against Tennessee. And they played an atrocious floor game against North Carolina State, turning it over 16 times with point guard Braden Smith committing five of those throwaways.

Do that tonight, and this is over by halftime.

The good news: I don't think it will happen tonight. I think this will be a battle to the end.

This is the game, after all, for which Purdue has been preparing an entire year, since tiny Fairleigh Dickinson knocked the Boilers out in the first round of the 2023 Madness and made of them a laughingstock. Their largely unimpeded march through this year's tournament has in great measure been fueled by that laughter. They're sick of hearing it, and they've taken it out on everyone standing in their way.

All this is my way of saying there are ways Purdue could win tonight. If UConn has a weakness, it's from Threeville, where they've shot a tick under 37 percent this season. Purdue, on the other hand, is one of the best three-point shooting teams in the nation. The Boilers bounced back from their uncharacteristic bricklaying against Tennessee to splash 10 threes against North Carolina State, which is a big part of why they led by as many as 20 points in the second half and  wound up winning by 13.

Oh, yes: And with the exception of Tennessee in the regional final, no one Purdue has faced in the tournament has shot better than 33.3 percent against it. Grambling, Utah State, Gonzaga and North Carolina State were a combined 23-of-77 (29.8 percent). Which means Purdue has defended the three pretty zealously.

And then there's one other thing, of which my friends and family never cease to remind me: I am frequently wrong about stuff. Specifically, lately, stuff about Purdue.

I thought Utah State was an accident waiting to happen in the second round, and the Boilers eviscerated the Aggies by 39.

I worried Gonzaga might get 'em in the Sweet Sixteen, but, no, Purdue dispatched the Bulldogs by a dozen.

I thought Tennessee was dangerous, and the Volunteers were for awhile, but the Boilers gutted out a six-point win.

And, of course, I thought North Carolina State was a Cinderella to be reckoned with because it had the muscle inside to deal with Edey. But he went for 20 and 12 and Purdue was never really challenged.

So when I look at tonight and think, again, that Purdue's in deep doo-doo ... 

Well. Think of that as a reverse curse, or something. And be glad I'm picking UConn.

"Ah, you're still a traitor," the fam just said.

Darn. And I thought that would work.

All Boilered up

 OK, then. UConn vs. Purdue, for all of it.

The defending national champions vs. a proud basketball school that somehow hasn't played in a national championship game since there were laces on the basketball -- and, listen, if you bleed black-and-old-gold and you're not invoking the spirit of Terry Dischinger or Rick Mount or the Big Dog or whoever, you just ain't tryin' hard enough. Because the only thing the proud basketball school is missing is a banner.

And I don't know if they get it this time, either.

I don't know if anyone beats UConn, which fiddled around with Alabama before turning it on late and winning by 14 in the Final Four semis. I don't know if you can beat a team with that kind of talent and that kind of drive and that many ways to murdalize you, which is why the Huskies have murdalized everyone who's stood in their path so far in this tournament run.

However.

However, what I just wrote about UConn you could write about Purdue, too.

The Boilermakers didn't bring their A game last night against North Carolina State, and point guard Braden Smith barely brought his D game, and still they wore down the Wolfpack in the second half to win by 13. Smith scored just three points on 1-of-9 shooting , but the "1" was a three-ball that gave the Boilers an 18-point cushion down the stretch.

And, yeah, you can say the Purdues got away with one, if only because North Carolina State was a 14-loss team and an 11-seed. But the Wolfpack won the ACC tournament by beating Duke and North Carolina, and then they beat 6-seed Texas Tech by 13 and 2-ssed Marquette by nine and 4-seed Duke again, this time by 12, to get to the Final Four.  So they weren't exactly pushovers.

And Purdue?

Well, Purdue did Purdue things. And by that I mean "things that win basketball games."

Smith, for instance, turned it over five times against the Wolfpack, a mortal sin for a point guard. But he also took eight rebounds and dished six assists, and Zach Edey dropped a 20-point, 12-rebound double-double on a North Carolina State front line with some beef to it, and Purdue made 10 threes on a night when it had to make threes.

Oh, and the defense harassed the Wolfpack into 36.8 percent shooting, including 26.3 percent (5 of 19) from the arc.

It wasn't pretty, but it never is because this is not a pretty team. It's a Purdue team, is what it is. It wins with less style than UConn does, but with every bit the will and passion.

In short, Monday night will be a Gene Keady kind of night: Two teams whose mantra was Keady's mantra. Play Hard!

And if you're looking for ultimately meaningless omens for this one, a couple of things to consider: The zone of totality, and 1969.

The first because Monday a total eclipse cuts a broad swath right smack through the heart of Indiana, and, well, everyone said the sun would go  black before Purdue ever won a national title.

And the second?

The second is that one previous national championship game appearance, won by John Wooden and his UCLA legions over Rick Mount, Billy Keller, Herm Gilliam and Purdue in a 92-72 rout. And it was UCLA who had dominant post player in that matchup: Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 

This time?

This time, of course, it's Purdue who has Edey.

Maybe it's karma. Maybe it's nothing. You decide.

That call

 You want to listen to Paige Bueckers this morning, because the young woman is as right as ham on rye. You want to listen to the kid because her head's screwed on straight and, even in the immediate aftermath of a crushing defeat, her wide-angle perspective is 20/20.

That offensive foul on Buecker's UConn teammate Aaliyah Edwards that Iowa's Gabby Marshall sold and the game officials bought?

Didn't cost UConn the game.

Didn't cost it the game even if it happened with 3.9 ticks left, UConn down one with the ball and plenty of time for hero shot.

Buecker's take on that?

"Everybody can make a big deal out of that one single play, but not one single play wins a basketball game," she said after Iowa won 71-69 to reach the national championship game for the second straight year.

 Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am with a cherry on top.

First things first: The call on Edwards was one of the worst calls you're ever going to see. Marshall's chasing Bueckers, Edwards steps out to set a hard screen ... and, whoa, Marshall runs into it and bounces off it like Ricochet Rabbit (an admittedly ancient reference, so no geezer jokes, please). Even exercised a little dramatic license by flinging her arms up in the air.

Yeah, she sold it. And the refs bought it. And it sealed the W for the Hawkeyes.

But it didn't decide anything, as Bueckers said. It certainly contributed to the decision, but it wasn't the only thing that did.

Every athletic contest is a ladder of "what-ifs", see, and there are any number of steps to that ladder. What if UConn, which had a 12-point lead with 5:24 remaining in the first half, hadn't gone the next three minutes without scoring, allowing Iowa to cut the lead in half by halftime? What if Caitlin Clark doesn't go 3-of-5 from the 3-point arc in the second half after  missing all six of her tries from Threeville in the first half?

What if Clark doesn't score 15 of her 21 points in the second half? What if Iowa doesn't outrebound UConn by eight? What if Edwards does a better job inside against Hannah Stuelke, who led all scorers with 23 points?

What if Bueckers hits one more three? Or Edwards one more two?

Then the bogus call doesn't matter. Then Marshall makes her Oscar bid for nothing.

But because none of the above happened, it did matter. And it wasn't for nothing.

And we're all talking about it.

Travelin' men

 I hate to fly.

I hate everything about it, from the TSA shakedown ("Take off your shoes, socks, pants, underwear and that nose ring, please") to the flight delays ("We have been informed your flight is enroute and will be here a week from Thursday in 2035") right on up  to the group boarding ("If you are in Group 247, you may board now").

I hate the guy who insists on cramming his steamer trunk in the overhead bin.. I hate "We are now 137th in line for takeoff." And mostly I hate being stuffed into the seating like cattle into a chute, and realizing that for the next four hours my knees will be getting intimate with my chin. 

In other words, I sympathize with Dan Hurley and his UConn Huskies, and the airline nightmare they endured to get to the Final Four.

Equipment issues. Pilots timing out with no replacements available. Weather delays.

I feel their pain. 

I just don't think it's all that painful, basketball-wise.

"I ruminated a lot," Hurley said of the Huskies' ordeal. "I spiraled. I had my head in my hands a lot. It was a real mindful exercise from 11:30 to like 1:45 on the tarmac."

Again, I get it. And, again, I'm compelled to say, "Oh, please."

I mean, Hurley made it sound like Frank Pembleton was sweating him in the box on "Homicide: Life On The Street," the best cop show of all time. He wasn't. It was just regular flying crap --  which is no fun, but isn't exactly the Spanish Inquisition.

And even if the Huskies finally arrived in Phoenix at the ungodly hour of 3:15 a.m. Thursday local time ...

Well. I'm not very good at math, but even I can figure out that means UConn arrived  roughly 66 hours before the tip of its national semifinal against Alabama.

I figure that's plenty of time for everyone to catch up on their sleep. Plenty of time for the Huskies to get back into their routine, and to make the proper preparations for sending 'Bama back to Tuscaloosa in sandwich bags.

Even Hurley finally seemed to understand that, once he was done drama queening.

"Who doesn't deal with problems with the airlines?" he said at one point Thursday afternoon.

No one I know.

Cruds break!

 We're a week into the baseball season now, and I'm looking at the National League standings, and, whoa, what's this?  My Pittsburgh Pira-

Excuse me. You in the back there, wildly waving your hand.

"I have to go to the bathroom!"

"But didn't you just go?"

"Yeah, but I gotta go again! Like, real bad! Just came on me kinda sudden!"

"Is it because I mentioned my Pittsburgh Pira-"

"Ahhh! Here it comes again! I REALLY gotta go!"

And, yeah, OK, I get it after all these years: Some people will do anything to bail on a Blob post about my Cruds.

But, hey! I don't care! 'Cause holy Rennie Stennett, they have the best record in the National League! 5-1 to start the season, baby!

And, yeah, before you ask, I know what's going on. They're jerking me around the way the Cruds always do. I am prepared for this. I am prepared for them to haul off and win a bunch of games for a week or two or maybe a month, and I'll start to think "Hmm, maybe Bob Nutting knows what he's doing", and then I'll catch myself and say "What are you, nuts?"

And pretty soon they'll be in last place again, their ancestral NL Central home. They ain't foolin' me.

Though I always wish they would.

Anthem angst, Part Infinity

 The outer boundaries of the American mind are where no man (or woman) should ever go, but sometimes the Blob can't help itself. Lunatics fascinate me. They also make me see red sometimes, until I remember they're lunatics and can't help themselves.

Example for this morning: Remember all that super-patriot performance outrage that went on when a bunch of NFL players knelt with their heads bowed for the National Anthem in silent protest of racial injustice?

It's baaa-aack!

This time the Outer Boundaries got their shorts in a bunch because the other night the LSU women's basketball team WALKED OFF THE FLOOR DURNG THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. How disrespectful! How un-American! Why, they should have been immediately THROWN OUT OF THE TOURNAMENT!

As someone surely has said: And now for the reality check.

One, LSU's team did not walk off the floor during the National Anthem started. They were off the floor well before then.

Two, they were following the routine Kim Mulkey's teams have always followed, which is to leave the floor with 12 minutes left in warm-ups, go back to the locker room and, as Mulkey patiently explained later, go over their pregame stuff.

It wasn't intentional. It wasn't a protest. It wasn't a slap at the anthem or the flag or the troops or 'Merica. It was just a basketball team hewing to its normal routine the way every basketball team led by a detail-obsessed coach hews to its normal routine.

Now, I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I bet if you dug into it, you'd find a whole pile of teams that aren't on the floor for the National Anthem. Iowa was that night not because it's more patriotic or 'Merican or because its players were raised better, but because it was part of Hawkeyes' coach Lisa Bluder's routine. Every successful coach has one, and you mess with it at your peril.

Pageantry is pageantry, you see. But basketball is basketball.

So Mulkey took her team to the locker room, and Bluder didn't. And if you think that was some sort of protest approved by Mulkey, I'd love to know what you've been smoking. Because like a lot of authoritarian coaches, Mulkey's as right wing as right wing gets. She'd sooner cut off a limb, or one of her player's limbs, than let them intentionally kneel or turn their backs or raise a gloved fist during the anthem.

Now, as it turns out, LSU was thrown out of the tournament later that night. But it wasn't karma or cosmic forces or the ghost of George Washington coming down from on high to smite the Tigers with his righteous anger.

Nah. Mostly it was Mulkey putting Hailey Van Lith on Caitlin Clark, and Clark lighting her up for 41 points and nine threes and 15 assists. Mostly it was Iowa defending a little better at one end, and beating LSU down the floor before the Tigers could set up at the other end.

In other words, it was basketball that sent LSU home.

Just as it was basketball that took the Tigers off the floor and into the locker room  before the National Anthem was played, and America's lunatic fringe lost its damn mind.

Appointment viewing

 Maybe you had to be there then, to appreciate the road to now. Maybe you can't fathom how long the journey has been, the leaps and bounds it's made, unless you were in a tiny high school gym almost 50 years ago on the day a couple of girls basketball teams played in front of almost no one.

I was in that gym, see. And leaps and bounds ain't the half of it.

The year was 1977, the high school gym was in Lapel, In., and the two girls basketball teams were playing a sectional game when sectional basketball games for girls were still so new you could hear the crackle of the wrapper they came in. It was just the second year for the IHSAA girls tournament, and there were a gazillion turnovers that day and a bazillion jump balls. It was basketball, but only vaguely.

I 5hought about that last night as I watched Caitlin Clark and Iowa and Angel Reese and LSU race up and down the floor in front of a packed house in Albany, N.Y. I thought about the turnovers and the jump balls and the scattering of fans in that game 47 years ago. I thought about how, in those days, the girl who could dribble up the floor without looking at the basketball was the wonder of the age.

What I saw last night did not resemble that in the slightest.

What I saw last night was solar systems and galaxies and light years beyond 1977, a  game so entirely different the girls of '77 literally could not have imagined it possible. They would have been cavewomen staring at fire, watching what Clark and Reese and the rest were doing. 

To be sure, it is not the men's game, as the misogynists who miss the point insist on reminding us.  But if you couldn't appreciate what it was -- if you couldn't marvel at the spectacle it has become -- you simply didn't know what you were watching.

I know what I was watching. I was watching basketball.

I was watching Caitlin Clark sling threes and Angel Reese command the paint and two teams of whip-smart players play the game at cartoon speed. I was watching two teams penetrate and dish and reverse the ball and find the open look, and burying that look more often than not.

It was a rematch of last year's national championship game, and it lived up to the billing. Reese went for 17 points and 20 rebounds and four assists before fouling out late on a suspect call. Clark dropped 41 points and nine threes and dished a dozen dimes. And Iowa won 94-87 to advance to the Final Four.

Where the Hawkeyes will face UConn and Paige Bueckers, who sidelined top-seed USC and freshman phenom JuJu Watkins. Bueckers, who's been on a positive tear since the tournament began, went for 28 points and 10 rebounds to lead the Huskies. Watkins scored 29 for USC to finish the season as the highest-scoring freshman in the history of the women's game.

Bueckers vs, Clark in the Final Four. Think that's not appointment viewing?

Think it's not as intriguing a matchup as you're going to see on the men's side?

Think, "Yeah, but it's not the same game"?

Then you've missed the point. Again. 

The point being, it's basketball. And not just basketball, but damn glorious basketball.

Marvel at it or miss out.

Final(ly) Four

 We begin with a refresher of sorts, on the morning after Zach Edey and Co. took the Purdue Boilermakers where no Boilermaker has gone before, or at least since a day lost in the mists of time.

In other words, class: Just how long ago was March 1980, the last time Purdue reached the Final Four?

Well, in March 1980, Jimmy Carter was still president.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were NBA rookies.

John Lennon was still nine months away from meeting Mark David Chapman.

John Belushi was alive. Tiger Woods was 4. The Star Wars franchise was still just one movie; the Star Trek franchise still just one TV series; and  no one in West Lafayette, In., had yet heard of a man named Gene Keady, then the 43-year-old head basketball coach at Western Kentucky.

A month later he was the new head coach at Purdue.

Forty-four years after that, on the last day of March, a 7-foot-4 Boilermaker 66 years Keady's junior clipped a few strands of net in Detroit, Mich., then marched over and handed him a strand. And hugged him.

I don't know if you can call that closing a circle, or anything so high-falutin' and cosmic.  But it sure as hell was something.

It was something because the program Gene Keady built on guts and will and the decidedly un-cosmic mantra of Play Hard finally reached a place he could never quite take it, and here was Zach Edey acknowledging it even if he never played for the man. This is, after all, Matt Painter's program now. But damned if it still doesn't have Gene Keady's fingerprints all over it.

Everything about this team breathes Keady, and it was hard not to see that Sunday as Edey punished Tennessee with 40 points and 18 boards, and Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer and all the rest gutted out an uncharacteristically lousy shooting day. These Boilers, they are tough and relentless and selfless in a way hardly seen anymore, and did we mention tough and relentless.

Sure, Tennessee dinged them for 11 threes in 26 attempts to keep it close. But the Purdues harassed the Volunteers into 13-of-36 shooting from everywhere else -- 36 percent, if you're keeping score at home. And when the Vols missed, Edey or someone else was there to clean up the mess; Purdue finished with a gargantuan 47-26 advantage on the glass, perhaps the biggest reason it survived and advanced.

And what is rebounding, boys and girls? What is getting in the face of the shooter?

Thaaat's right. Ain't nothin' but Play Hard. Ain't nothin' but settin' the jaw and gettin' after it.

And so the Boilers set their jaws and got after it -- has anyone ever set his jaw like Braden Smith, for pity's sake? -- and Edey got a huge block as the outcome teetered, and then he took a pair of scissors and went snip-snip-snip. And then he handed most of what he snipped to Gene Keady, because without Gene Keady there's no Matt Painter, and without Matt Painter and the Keady legacy upon which he has so worthily built, there's no Final Four for the first time in 44 years.

Hang onto that hunk of nylon, Coach. It's been a long time in coming.

Strange and stranger

 The Oakland A's have lost all three of their games so far on opening weekend in the Bay Area, and only 22,784 fans showed up for those games. This will happen when you deliberately put a minor-league product out there and charge major-league prices, which is what A's owner John Fisher is doing.

Fisher, see, wants desperately to get the hell out of Oakland, despite the fact the A's have called it home for almost 60 summers.

He wants to move the team to Las Vegas, even if the A's don't have a ballpark there yet, may never have, and are in negotiations with Sacramento and Salt Lake City for temporary accommodations.

He wants to move the team there even though Vegas seems profoundly lukewarm about the idea -- the mayor even said Fisher should try harder to keep the team in Oakland -- and Oakland just offered to extend the team's lease for five years with a three-year opt-out. This would keep Fisher from moving the team to temporary quarters.

In other words: Oakland is offering Fisher a measure of security to actually make moving the team to Vegas easier.

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has unanimously approved Fisher moving the team, even though he's gutted the ballclub and you'd think MLB would want to distance itself from the Vegas crowd now that the best player in baseball, Shohei Ohtani, either got himself mixed up with an interpreter who stole Ohtani's money to place huge bets, or Ohtani was using the interpreter to place bets for him.

Strange days for the former Pastime. Strange days indeed.

In the meantime, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred promises what he hopes is a speedy investigation (and by "speedy", he means, "I hope like hell we can clear Ohtani really fast"). This while the A's-to-Vegas chatter continues apace.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking it might be time for MLB to cool that chatter for a bit. And maybe investigate John Fisher's ownership of the A's while they're at it.

Or would that not be strange enough at this point?

Still dancin'

 So I look up now, and North Carolina State -- North Carolina State! -- is in the Elite Eight. Beat 2-seed Marquette by nine the other night in the Sweet Sixteen, after leading by double digits most of the way. All this after the Wolfpack lost seven of their last nine games in the regular season, including the last four.

But then the Pack somehow jacked around and won the ACC Tournament, which earned them an 11-seed. Now they play 4-seed Duke to go to the Final Four while 6-seed Clemson takes on 4-seed Alabama -- which means the ACC comprises almost half the Elite Eight, and gets to be all snotty and superior again.

But enough about that.

Let's talk about Your Purdue Boilermakers, for whom North Carolina State might be a cautionary tale if the Boilers weren't already full up with cautionary tales.

Full up ... and fed up.

Because here came 5-seed Gonzaga last night, and here came Zach Edey and Co., saying "Nuh-uh, we've already seen this movie." Saw it last year and the year before that and the year before that, and decided enough with this bull***.

Which is why Edey went for 27 points and 14 boards last night, and point guard Braden Smith, who like all of these Boilers takes no guff from anyone, added a stat line for the ages: 14 points, 15 assists, eight rebounds. Lance Jones and Fletcher Loyer added 12 and 10 points, respectively, and Purdue shot 57 percent and 45 percent from Threeville, and Gonzaga was swept away, 80-68.

Three tournament games; three double-digit wins.  Average margin of victory: 26 points.

And so the Eff You, Doubters Tour rolls on, unless it's the Call Us Chokers, Will Ya? Tour. As has been observed in several quarters since the Madness began, this is one locked-in basketball team. 

Or pissed off basketball team. Or mountain-sized-chip-on-the-shoulder basketball team. Or all-of-the-above basketball team

And look, I don't know what happens tomorrow against 2-seed Tennessee, which is playing some damn good basketball itself. The Midwest region is the only one that's gone chalk to this point, and if it goes chalk tomorrow Matt Painter will be in the Final Four and the knuckleheads who said Purdue should move on from him can just shut the hell up already.

Will it happen? Beats me. The difference between a 1-seed and a 2-seed is virtually invisible, so either way it'll be no shock. And it could, because as North Carolina State has shown, chalk sometimes gets dusted in the Madness. That's why they call it the Madness.

Me, I'm thinking Purdue wins. The Boilers are still dancin', and it's big-mad dancin'. And with apologies to Kevin Bacon, there ain't nothin' footloose about that.

As if.

Lunacy unbound

 Poor old Gonzaga. Here's hoping the Bulldogs have their green cards in order.

And, no, not because Purdue could expose them tonight as a bunch of ILLEGAL INVADERS from, I don't know, Gonzagia, maybe, infecting America like PARASITES and VERMIN. As a certain ranting demagogue likes telling his deranged true believers these days when he's in 1930s Germany mode.

"The hell are you talking about, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now, with some justification.

I'm talking about a certain foot soldier in the ranting demagogue's army, Michigan loon Pete Hoekstra, who tweeted  a photo of Gonzaga's basketball team de-boarding a plane in Detroit with this notation: "Happening right now. Three busses (sic) just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they're headed with their police escort?"

Um, well, Paranoid Pete, my guess is the team hotel. But then I'm not a BATSHITE CRAZY NUTBAR like you and your ilk.

The Blob generally tries to refrain from generalizations, but it's tough to do when you hear the foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria coming from the increasingly unhinged right these days. And so I'll just go ahead and say that an element of that hysteria, particularly where the southern border is concerned, clearly is racist in nature.

Omigod look at all these awful brown people swarming our border, speaking their dirty foreign language, raping and murdering our (white) daughters ...

Maybe that's not the perception they mean to create, to give them more credit than they likely deserve. But it sure comes off that way when Fearless Leader uses loaded words like "vermin" and "invaders" and "parasites" to describe people who, for the most part, are merely desperate to escape poverty and/or violence in their native countries.

Do some of them have criminal records? Sure. Are some of them bad people intent on committing bad acts? No doubt. Are they overwhelming available security along some parts of the border? Certainly.

But would they be so obviously characterized as subhuman if they were, say, white Europeans?

Well ...

Look. I'm not trying to start a whole thing here. I'm just pointing out how, um, interesting it is that Pete Hoekstra saw several people of color boarding a bus and immediately assumed they were "illegal invaders" imported by the Democrats to bring down America and vote for Democrats -- even though as "illegal invaders", they couldn't do so.

Something to think about.

Hizzoner

 The mayor of our fair city passed away peacefully last night, four months after he was elected to a fifth term and a month after revealing he had stomach cancer and it had spread pretty much everywhere.

Two months ago, his beloved wife died of cancer, too. Which reminds us yet again that cancer is a platinum-grade son of a bitch, because it kills both the good and the bad without distinction.

Tom and Cindy Henry were both on the good side of that ledger, and not by a little. They were as good a couple as the city of Fort Wayne, In., has ever known, and their passing is a double blow that will be felt far beyond the tight circle of their immediate family and friends.

In a lot of ways they were Fort Wayne, and not just because Tom was an exemplary mayor for 16 years. On his watch downtown Fort Wayne went from sleepy backwater to vibrant city center; if no one used to go downtown because, you know, it was just downtown, everyone goes there now. 

All of that you'll read elsewhere today, of course. Here, though, you'll read not  about Mayor Henry but Mayor Tom, who was just a regular guy like the rest of us.

Back in the day, see, fellow sportswriter and longtime friend Steve Warden and I used to bug out for lunch to the Green Frog Inn, a wonderful old place down on Spring Street which was owned by Cindy Henry. We still do it occasionally, though both of us are now retired.

Anyway, one day we're sitting there and here comes Mayor Tom, who recognized us as Journal Gazette staffers. Mayor Tom was limping a bit. We said "Hey, you're limping", something like that, and Hizzoner immediately went into Regular Guy mode.

Which is to say, he spent a couple of minutes telling us about his groin pull.

Now, I don't know how other mayors in other towns do things, but I don't imagine many would regale a couple of newspaper grunts with tales of a, um, rather intimate injury. I mean, it's not like we were lifelong buddies or anything. At best we were casual acquaintances.

But Mayor Tom was Mayor Tom, a Fort Wayne guy with a Fort Wayne lack of pretension who lived his whole life here, and who devoted more than 40 years of that life to serving his hometown as an elected official.

"Man," I marveled to Steve that day at the Frog. "In what other city would the mayor tell two people he barely knows about his groin pull?"

Think we know the answer to that.

Opening Day

 In northeast Indiana it's 31 degrees right now, and there was frost on the lawn when I let the dog out this morning.

This means nothing because the forsythia is blooming.

It means nothing because the grass is green again, and here and there it looks as if it could use a haircut.

It means nothing because, in Baltimore and Chicago and Los Angeles and ten other places, the umpire will shout "Play ball!" today. A pitcher will come set. A batter will step into the box and scrunch his feet around until he feels comfortable.

It may not feel like spring in a lot of places yet, But spring is here because baseball is here again -- and today is either opening day or Opening Day, depending on how you feel about it.

How a lot of America feels about it these days is "meh," and that's unfortunate. It's also proof of the immutable law of the universe that dictates change is the one constant. Baseball, cleaved to its history as it is, failed to change for far too long, and now it's trying desperately to play catchup.

Maybe it will catch up, in time. But right now it's losing the next generation of fans, and its demographic skews older every year. When a significant chunk of your fan base is on Social Security and Medicare, that's a problem.

But enough gloom and doom. Enough, too, about Shohei Ohtani, who continues to claim he was ripped off by his interpreter and is not-not-not covertly betting huge sums even as his sport cozies up to the gambling industry. 

(Latest sign of the apocalypse: On ESPN's MLB website this morning there is a video clip of baseball writer Jeff Passan talking about how the Ohtani mess could haunt the Dodgers all season. Right below it is an item slugged "MLB Betting" offering betting tips for the baseball season. Oh, irony!)

Later for that, however. Today is about balls and strikes and Omigod the Royals/A's/Reds are gonna suck again.

And my Pittsburgh Pirates?

The Cruds open in Miami tomorrow night, if you care ("We don't," you're saying). As far as I know, they did as little as they could get away with in the offseason. Some people think there's reason to believe they'll be better this season, maybe even third-or-fourth-in-the-division better, but I'll reserve judgment.

Instead I'll go shopping for a few nice throw pillows to spread around the NL Central cellar. If my Cruds are going to return to their ancestral home, after all, there's no reason they shouldn't be comfortable.

Play ball!

Shut up and play

 Even Caitlin Clark's dad is fed up with it.

Read something the other day that, as his daughter pissed and moaned her way through Iowa's second-round NCAA Tournament win over West Virginia, Brent Clark appeared to yell at her to shut up and play. And, yeah, OK, apparently he didn't say exactly that, but he did appear to say "Stop" or something along those lines.

In the days since, social media has taken its cue from Dad, and, because it's social media, it's been far less gentle about it. And now there's talk in some precincts that Caitlin is only getting ripped for it because she's a woman and women aren't supposed to be quite so, um, fierce about things, and therefore the criticism of her is a misogynistic double standard.

Let me first say that tends to be true when society reacts to the way men move through the world and the way women do. You can deny it, but you'll just sound silly and, well, misogynistic if you do.

Now let me say something else:

In this particular case, there is no double standard. And it's a load of horse pucky to say there is.

Look. I get it. I'm just a male of the species, so what do I know. But I'm also a male of the species who spent almost 40 years working the sports beat, and I have an intermittently good memory. So when I say ripping an athlete for constantly bitching and moaning is an ecumenical proposition, I have data to back it up.

In other words, I remember Christian Laettner.

Who was, like Caitlin Clark, an incandescent talent. And who was, or could be on occasion, an absolute horse's ass. And was duly slammed for it with as much vehemence as Clark is being slammed for it now.

As was Bill Laimbeer, a notorious whiner and flopper. As was Rick Barry, whose prima donna bitching at the zebras was legendary. As were any number of other male whiners and floppers down through the years. 

No one I can recall said they were all just fierce competitors, as some of the double-standard people are claiming ("If Caitlin were a man, she'd just be a 'fierce competitor'"). No one's saying anything about Clark they didn't say about Laettner or Laimbeer or anyone else. They were cut no more slack because they were men than Clark has been because she's a woman.

The lesson here is nobody likes a whiner, and that sentiment is not gender specific. The other lesson is when you reach a certain level of fame, the number of people who call you out on your whining -- and the volume with which they do so -- is going to rise exponentially.

Right now Caitlin Clark is the face of college basketball, men's or women's. With that comes a level of scrutiny that is sometimes unfair but not exclusive to either gender. And social media has raised that level of scrutiny to heretofore unimagined heights.

 And you know what?

That's not going to go away.

It comes with the territory when you lift public awareness of your game the way Clark has for women's college buckets. The women's game is experiencing an unprecedented surge of popularity which has been a long time in coming, and good on that. But with more popularity comes more exposure, and with more exposure comes the realization that the women's game is just as fierce and competitive and entertaining as the men's -- and that those who play it are just as prone to being jerks sometimes.

America picking on Caitlin Clark for being a whiner?

That's not misogyny. That's success.

Because once upon a time, no one would have cared enough to pick on her.