A "birdie" for the ages

 They're moving into the weekend down at Augusta National, and so far the defending Masters champ has everyone covered. Rory McIlroy is at 12-under after stacking a 65 atop an opening-round 67, and he's six shots clear of the field. That's the largest 36-hole in Masters history.

Which means he's either headed for an epic rout of the field, or an epic collapse. It's the Masters, so it could go either way.

And speaking of going either way ...

Let's talk about Robert MacIntyre, the most unruly Scotsman since William Wallace.

Rory's the story but Robert gave us the signature moment of the tournament so far as he was defacing the game in the first round Thursday. The No. 8 golfer in the world sprayed golf balls all over the Hallowed Grounds, shooting an 80 that ensured he would miss the cut.

But it was what he did on the par-five 15th hole that made him immortal.

What he did was, he took a gruesome quadruple bogey after finding water twice and then flying his next ball over the green. And then ...

And then, as he was fleeing the scene, he flipped off the 15th green.

Yes, that's right, sports fans. Showed that bleeping-bleep 15th his middle finger. Birdied the hole after quad-bogeying the hole, so to speak. 

This, it was reported, will likely earn MacIntyre some disciplinary action, because apparently you just can't go around flipping off landscaping, at least Augusta. The best part of that is the PGA said it would defer any punishment to the Masters folks, a notoriously humorless lot when it comes to the sanctity of their tournament and golf course. Which of course gets the Blob's notoriously irreverent mind imagining what that conversation will be like ...

Masters Official Howard Buckingham Prescott III: Flipping off Augusta National! Why, how DARE he! I say we pour honey on him and let the fire ants have at him.

Masters Official Wilbur McKenzie Portmandeau IV: But not on the course. After all, it gets defiled enough every year by the common people. And besides, FIRE ANTS? My God, they'll be EVERYWHERE. Perish the thought.

Masters Official Montague Marcus Aurelius V: Oh, there's no call for something so melodramatic, Howie. I say we simply banish the Scottish whelp from the grounds forever. And we instruct our security team to shoot him on sight if he so much as comes within two miles of Magnolia Lane."

Prescott: Just two miles, Monty? When did you get so soft? I say if he steps foot IN THE STATE OF GEORGIA again, it's hollow-point time for the haggis-sucker. Send him back to the old country in sandwich bags. I'm sure we could get the governor to sign off on that.

Portmandeau: Oh, my.

Aurelius: Oh, dear.

Prescott: Well, we have do SOMETHING radical, do we not? Otherwise before you know it people will be peeing in Rae's Creek and saying vile things about the Sarazen Bridge,  and calling the azaleas -- dear God -- "just a bunch of bleeping flowers."

Portmandeau and Aurelius (in horrified unison): No! Not THAT!

Braggin ri- oops

 Those Michigan Wolverines, they've sure been walkin' tall this week. A fan base that's never been accused of thinking too little of itself  has taken its swagger to even more obnoxious heights than usual.

Why, lookie here, America, they're saying. We just won March Madness! And lookie HERE! Our hockey team's ranked No. 1 and favored to win the Frozen Four this weekend! That's two ... two ... two nattys in one!

Or, you know, something like that.

Anyway, the UM backers have bragging rights, and by golly they've been exercisin' 'em. The champion of buckets, and presumed champion of hockey. All their Gretzkys had to do was brush aside troublesome Denver in the semis and then probably No. 2 North Dakota in the national championship game, and--

Oops.

Did I say "brush aside troublesome Denver"?

Well, forget that.

Forget that, because troublesome Denver, those plucky Pioneers, upset the mighty Wolverines in double overtime last night, 4-3. Kent Anderson netted the winner 7:29 into the second OT. Michigan pelted Denver goalie Johnny Hicks with 52 shots, and Hicks said "nuh-uh" to 49 of them. 

Now it's the Pioneers who are on to the title tilt, and -- what's this? -- it won't be North Dakota they'll be playing. The Fighting Hawks got kicked to the curb by underdog Wisconsin, so it'll be a 'dog fight for the championship.

And Michigan?

A refresher course in what happens when you get too full of yourself: Someone will always be there to stick a pin in you and let all that excess helium go whooshing out.

But, hey. You still got Dusty May, Yaxel Lendeborg 'n' them, Wolverines. So party on.

Tinkly pines of azaleas

 The Masters golf tournament began this morning down in Augusta, Ga., and, no, Scottie Scheffler hasn't won it yet. Neither has Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy or any of the other favorites among the twee golf set, who live for these four days like no other.

Me?

I think it'll be tinkly piano music over a Cathedral of Pines and a bed of azaleas in a playoff.

No golf tournament, with the possible exception of the Open when it's at St. Andrews, trades on its flora, fauna and geography like the Masters. It's a lovely place, Augusta, enhanced by all those beauty camera shots CBS puts up to shove the loveliness right down America's gullet. It is, to coin a phrase, Nature Unlike Any Other. 

Also History Unlike Any Other (although not really, considering the Open predates it by about 75 years). Also Self-Reverence Unlike Any Other, and Ritual Unlike Any Other, and -- the Blob's personal favorite -- Mayhem Unlike Any Other.

Weird stuff happens at the Masters, especially on the back nine on Sunday. Greg Norman blows a six-stroke lead. Rory McIlroy hits a ball onto the Butler Cabin's front porch, or nearly so. Drives sail into the pines; irons splash into Rae's Creek; green jackets go sailing off with the angels because, on Augusta's marble-top greens, Ricky Joe Farnsworth IV breathed too hard on a putt and sent it skittering a mile past the cup.

Either that, or Rory finally wins the thing and spends the next 15 minutes alternately weeping and laughing. 

That happened last year -- and, listen, if it didn't suck you in, you must have had a soul-ectomy somewhere along the line. It is, after all, the kind of drama that keeps you watching even though it's golf, and that separates the Masters from your weekly Citibank Mutual of Omaha Rubbermaid Open.

And, hey: There's always a chance Scottie Scheffler won't win.

Or Rory. Or Bryson DeChambeau. Or Jon Rahm. Or -- let's see -- Xander Schauffle, Justin Rose, Ludvig Aberg, Colin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland or Cameron Smith. Or even some random A. Bhatia or S. Im.

And speaking of random ...

I'm putting my dimes on Maverick McNealy.

He's a 30-year-old pro out of Stanford who's 41st on the PGA money list right now, and I'm not picking him just because his name is Maverick McNealy. OK, so, that's mostly why I'm picking him.

 I mean, come on: Has there ever been a better golfer name than Maverick McNealy?

You think Maverick McNealy, you think the suave, sashayin' jerk the hero must vanquish in a Dan Jenkins' golf novel. You think Shooter McGavin from "Happy Gilmore". Heck, you think Happy Gilmore.

Maverick McNealy!

Start sizin' him for that green jacket now. You heard it here first.

Hearing footsteps

 The person you most do not want to be today is named Kim Caldwell, who coaches women's basketball at the University of Tennessee. At least, you know, presently.

I say "presently", and also say Caldwell is the person you most do not want to be, because she is the new president of the Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop Society. Or the Waiting For The Phone To Ring Society. Or the Hearing Footsteps Society.

See, it's not just that she coached one of the most illustrious programs in women's college buckets to levels of mediocrity not seen since the late, great Pat Summitt was driving the team bus and personally washing its uniforms half a century ago. It's because the program has all but deserted her.

Know what the Volunteers' roster looks like, on this eighth day of April?

It looks like incoming freshman Gabby Minus.

That's it. That's the entire roster right now.

Everyone else has either graduated, hit the transfer portal or -- in the case of  Oliviyah Edwards, the No. 2 recruit in the SC Next 100 class of 2026 -- requested a release from her national letter of intent. Every ... single ... one.

I don't know about you, but this would make me a trifle nervous about my future in Knoxville, if I were Kim Caldwell. After all, young women used to crawl over broken glass to play at Tennessee. Now they're fleeing Knoxville like it's in fire.

Now, losing your entire roster, it must be said, doesn't always mean Coach is about to get an anvil dropped on his or her head. Roster upheaval is just part of the landscape now in the age of the unrestricted transfer portal. No one, for instance, is thinking Darian DeVries occupies a hot seat at Indiana simply because another roster turnover seems imminent in Bloomington.

Of course, DeVries is still getting his feet under him, having just completed his first year at IU. Not even the delusional Hoosier fan base is calling for his scalp quite yet.

So you could argue it's a tad melodramatic to portray Caldwell, who just completed her second season in Knoxville, as dangling from a fraying rope. But it's harder to make that play after the season the Vols had in Caldwell's second crack at it.

A preseason top-ten pick, Tennessee went 16-14 and lost its last eight games. The Vols lost by 30 to former nemesis UConn in February, the second-worst loss in program history. They lost seven games by 15 or more points. One of those was a 76-61 first-round loss to North Carolina State in the NCAA Tournament.

It was only the third time in 44 years they'd lost in the first round of the Madness.

So, yeah. Maybe Kim Caldwell dangling from a fraying rope is not so melodramatic.

Nor is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or waiting for the phone to ring. Or hearing footsteps.

A champion for these times

 The Michigan Wolverines are your NCAA men's basketball champions, and, listen, no carping from Statler and Waldorf up there in the peanut gallery. This is how it's done now, in the Transient Twenties. You can either get with the program, or continue to mourn the death of the set shot and basketballs with laces.

I say this because the Wolverines were sneered at in some quarters as store-bought, which wasn't entirely untrue. Almost all their key parts, after all, came from somewhere else: Aday Mara from UCLA; Elliot Cadeau from North Carolina; Morez Johnson Jr. from Illinois; and the piece that fused all the others from UAB.

That would be Yaxel Lendeborg, gimping around out there on a shaky knee he injured in Michigan's 18-point leveling of Arizona in the national semifinals. He scored 13 points in the title game but wasn't anywhere close to 100 percent -- which is probably why Michigan only beat UConn by six, 69-63.

But back to this store-bought business.

The rebuttal to that is, who isn't these days?

Yes, Michigan was a collection of vagabonds, but with few exceptions (cough, Purdue, cough) almost everyone is. Did Lendeborg, Mara, Johnson and Cadeau get NIL dough from Michigan's deep, deep pockets? Of course they did. Did they also transfer to Michigan because they were promised, and got, something they weren't getting elsewhere?

What do you think?

Look, even that paragon of the old school, Robert Montgomery Knight, didn't win his third and last natty until he broke his longstanding embargo on junior college transfers. And, yes, that's not quite the same, but in a way it's exactly the same. Because just as he wove JC transfers Keith Smart and Dean Garrett into the IU system in 1987, Dusty May -- a student manager in Knight's program way back when -- wove Mara, Johnson, Cadeau and Lendeborg into a cohesive whole 39 years later.

He took Lendeborg and made a first-round NBA pick out of him. He took Mara and Johnson, the two big men, and turned them loose. And he took Cadeau and standout freshman Trey McKenney and molded them into a devastating backcourt.

It was almost exactly the way Cori Close built UCLA into the juggernaut that won the women's title 24 hours earlier. Like May, Close had a pile of NIL money to spread around. And like May, she susequently built her team around two homegrowns -- Kiki Rice and Gabriela Jaquez --  and a core of transfers: Lauren Betts from Stanford, Gianna Kneepkens from Utah, Charlisse Leger-Walker from Washington State and Angela Dugalic from Oregon. 

 In other words, both Close and May took a lot of disparate pieces and figured out the best way to fit them together. And isn't that what every good coach at every good program has done since ... well, since there were laces on the basketballs?

And so raise a glass to the Wolverines, the best team in college basketball for a good part of the season and now its champion. They're the first Michigan team to win a natty since Glen Rice. Rumeal Robinson and Steve Fisher 37 years ago, and the first Big Ten team to win it all since Mateen Cleaves, Tom Izzo and Michigan State in 2000. 

Champions for those times, Fisher's Wolverines and Izzo's Spartans. And now, a champion for these times.

Bragging rights of a fashion

 UCLA's women utterly demolished a good South Carolina team yesterday to win the national championship, and good on the Bruins.

Good on Lauren Betts, the indomitable 6-7 center. Good on Gabriela Jaquez, who had the game of her life (21 points, 10 rebounds, five assists, one steal). Good on Kiki Rice and Gianna Kneepkens and Charlisse Leger-Walker, and head coach Cori Close, who at last grabbed the ring after 15 years in Westwood.

Their championship banner will fly now with all the others in Pauley Pavilion, and if there's any harmonic convergence in all that, it's that 10 of those banners hang there because of John Wooden. Who didn't win his first national title at UCLA until he'd been there for 15 years -- or, in Wooden's case, 16.

Of course, the Big Ten can't claim bragging right rights for any of Wooden's titles. It can, sort of, for Cori Close's.

In fact, if the Michigan men roll over UConn the way they did over Arizona the other day, the Big Ten will be able to claim utter dominance over college hoops, sort of. They'll have BOTH the men's and women's championships in their barn.

Sort of.

"Why do you keep saying 'sort of', Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Because ...

Well, because the Blob is old. And cranky. And stubborn. And doesn't hold with newfangled .... stuff.

See, nothing against UCLA, but in Blob World it's not a Big Ten school, even though it's a Big Ten school. Yes, technically, I suppose, the Big Ten can claim the women's title as its own. But to cranky stubborn geezers like me, no way, because UCLA will never be a real Big Ten school.

Neither will Oregon, Washington and USC, fellow refugees from the Pac-12. Or Rutgers. Or Maryland. Or even Nebraska, although the Cornhuskers at least fit the geographic and cultural footprint.

I know, I know. And nothing will ever be as good as Atari, Betamax and eight-track tapes, either.

But I can't help what I can't help, and I can't help thinking it's kind of cheating for the Big Ten to claim the women's title, and -- if what happens tonight is what I think will happen -- to lord it over everyone as King of Buckets. I mean, how can big an achievement is that, really, if  half the major schools in the country are Big Ten schools? The odds will always be in your favor, to quote "The Hunger Games."

"Wow, you're quoting 'The Hunger Games' now?" you're saying. "How modern of you."

Yeah, well. I'm not that much of an antique yet. At least occasionally.

This, however, is one of those occasions. On this, I'm as antique as your grandma's lace doilies. On this, I am hopelessly, irrevocably lost in the past.

Bragging rights for the Big Ten?

Of a fashion, it says here. But only of a fashion.

A vote for Mee-chigan

 Ah, those clever Wolverines of Michigan. They've got me painted into a corner, the rascals.

Last night in the national semifinals they disposed of the team I told everyone was the best still standing -- Arizona -- like the Wildcats were a used tissue. Led wire-to-wire, the Wolverines did. Led 10-1 2:26 in. Led by double digits at the 5:31 mark. Won by 18, 91-73.

It was Arizona's third loss of the season. Its other two were by four and three points, respectively. 

And so, on to the national championship game tomorrow night. And here's where Mee-chigan has me hog-tied.

Waiting for the Wolverines, you see, will be UConn, which held off Illinois 71-62 in the other semifinal. It will be the Huskies' third trip to the title game in four years. They scooped nattys in the other two.

I devoutly hope they don't scoop a third in 36 hours or so.

This is because the Huskies are coached by Dan Hurley, a terrific coach but also a singular asshat. Most of America agrees with me on that, I think. And so most of America, I think,  will be rooting for Michigan -- including me.

Which is the problem here. Because I've never been overly fond of Michigan, either.

I think they're snobby. I think they think they're better than everyone else, always going on about the Big House and what-not. I think maize is not a color, dammit. It's a vegetable.

And so when Michigan fans call it "maize-and-blue" when they're actually dressing in yellow-and-blue?

I think they just sound pretentious.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, I really like their basketball team.

I like the way they play. I like the way their coach, Dusty May, coaches. I also like the fact he's NOT an asshat, but a classy guy with a great basketball mind and an ironclad work ethic.

Know where Dusty was during the first half of the UConn-Illinois semi, for instance?

He was sitting courtside like an ordinary Joe, scouting both teams. 

I like that.

I think focus like that deserves to be rewarded. I think not being an asshat deserves to be rewarded. I think, for one night, I can call yellow "maize."

OK. So, no.

I mean, there are limits. There just are.