That Game

 Purdue goes to Bloomington to play Indiana again this afternoon, and one thing we reasonably can be sure of: No molded plastic furniture will be harmed in the settling of this ancient grudge.

Yes, that's right, ladies and germs. This is the 40th anniversary of That Game, aka The Chair Game, aka The Day Bob Knight Discovered The Aerodynamic Properties Of The Aforementioned Molded Plastic Furniture.

Now IU and Purdue meet again in Assembly Hall, on the very date, and how can 40 years have scooted by so quickly?

It doesn't exactly seem like yesterday, but it does seem like the middle of last week, maybe, because some of the details come back so readily. I was 29 years old then, almost 30, and now I'm 69, almost -- ye gods! -- 70. And, yes, I was there, covering the game for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin, partly because two local guys were playing for Indiana.

Stew Robinson and Winston Morgan, from Anderson Madison Heights. Perhaps you remember them.

At any rate, in those days there was print media seating on the team bench side of the floor -- decent spots, and somewhat remarkable considering Knight's low opinion of the sporting press. I was toward the Indiana end, looking down and to my left at the IU bench. The Hall was a baying, howling cauldron as usual, and Knight was up and down, chirping at game official London Bradley, never one of his favorite refs -- if in fact he had any.

(Quick aside: Unbeknownst to either of us, my future wife was sitting off to my left and maybe 12 or so rows up. We were six years away from meeting one another in the newsroom of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.)

So Knight's carping at Bradley, Indiana isn't playing well, and there's a whistle. Foul, Indiana. (I think it might have been on Marty Simmons, but time has hazed that detail). Steve Reid toes the free throw line for Purdue. And I'm looking down now at Knight, still raging, and I see him turn around and look down at his orange plastic chair. 

A sudden thought -- premonition? -- flickers through my head: No. He's not gonna do this, is he?

A split second later, he does this.

Bends over. Grabs the chair. Gives it a mighty fling -- you could tell he'd had lots of practice, because his form was perfect -- and off it goes across the floor, twirling and whirling, catching some air, skittering past Reid at the stripe and on into the corner where the wheelchair patrons sat.

Missed them by a mile, thankfully. God looks after drunks and crazy basketball coaches, apparently.

Anyway, all hell broke loose after that. Knight drew a tech, then another, and off he stalked toward the IU locker room like a wounded bear. The Hall shuddered with outrage, boos and howls of protest exploding from all quarters. 

And then ...

Something whizzed past my ear. Once. Twice. Sounded like bees, but why would bees be in Assembly Hall in February?  

The guy next to me gets it right.

"Pennies," he said. "They're throwing pennies."

They were indeed. One hit Purdue coach Gene Keady's wife Pat in the eye. None hit me or the guy next to me -- which suggests, somewhat dubiously, that God must like sportswriters, too. In any event, it was the closest to a full-on riot I'd ever experienced or ever would.

Eventually, of course, things calmed down, and Purdue went on to a nine-point victory. It was Indiana's third straight loss in an end-of-season spiral that would see the Hoosiers drop six of their last seven games. Which might have had something to do with Knight's chair-throwin' mood.

Forty years later, it's Purdue who's spiraling a bit -- the Boilermakers have dropped three straight and plummeted from first place to a tie for fifth in the Big Ten -- while Indiana ... well, who knows. The Hoosiers are playing out the string with a lame-duck coach who clearly just wants to pack his bags and get the hell out of Dodge, so guessing what kind of game they'll play today is a fool's errand. 

Maybe pride will compel them to finish the job they couldn't finish in West Lafayette a month ago. Or maybe playing in that hostile red cauldron will fire the Boilers' boiler, and they'll play like Purdue again instead of the imposter of the last couple weeks.

Either way, no chairs will be thrown to commemorate the Chair Game anniversary. Matt Painter's not the type, and Mike Woodson's heart likely isn't in it enough these days.

Also, both of them are getting up there. They're probably not as quick at dodging pennies as they used to be.

Expansion blues

 Comes now the news that the New York Yankees, those old stick-in-the-muds, are easing their no-facial-hair rule, so I guess it's not really 1955 after all -- or even 1895, which is the direction the confederacy of dunces in Washington seems to be taking us these days.

No, it's definitely 2025 out here in America, and I know this because the NCAA is seriously considering expanding its men's basketball tournament to 76 teams. That's eight more beyond the 68 that are already in the field, which are four more than the ideal, which was the 64-team tournament.

I guess madness really does beget more madness -- or in this case, more Madness. Also, greed. Greed begets more greed, too.

Which is the only explanation that makes any sense for expanding a tournament that's already been expanded too much already, at least according to cranky geezers like me. Sixty-four teams was perfect. Sixty-four put the spotlight squarely on the first four days of Da Tournament, which are the four days that sell the whole schmear. 

Sixty-eight?

Well, now we've got this weird prelude over Dayton, which everyone considers just that -- a weird prelude -- no matter how hard the NCAA and the teevees that pay to carry their water try to make it otherwise. They can call it the First Four until their larynxes give out, but most of America still thinks the show doesn't really begin until First Thursday.

Of course, the NCAA is a monopoly run by two or three or four mega-conferences now, and the mega-conferences are an endlessly grasping bunch. The more dough they have, the more dough they want. Which is why Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC, griped thusly last year: "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of (conference) expansion ..."

In other words: Fewer Coastal Carolinas and Bucknells, more SEC and Big Ten bottom feeders.

Uh ... no. No, no, no.

At 68 teams, there are likely already too many mega-conference cruds in the field, it says here. Expanding the field to 76 or 80 or whatever only means there'll be more. It means a whole pile of yawn-inducing first-round matchups between, say, 16-12 Vanderbilt and 15-15 Northwestern.

No one wants to see that. No one wants to see the first weekend be diminished because it gets buried beneath a two- or three-day Prelude Tournament.

Not a chance. What people want to see -- what they tune in to see -- is First Thursday and First Friday. They tune in to see Florida Atlantic reach the Final Four or Oakland and Yale take down Kentucky and Auburn. The latter actually happened last March, and, as always, it was the lifeblood of the Madness.

Now Sankey 'n' them want to muck it up with a bunch of teams that don't deserve to be there, just to add even more to their already immense piles of cash?

Uh ... no. No, no, no.

No-May day

 People think I know stuff. It's the burden a man carries when he spent a good chunk of his life sitting in press boxes eating hot dogs and watching games and then hammering sentences together about them.

And so these days they ask me who will be Indiana's next basketball coach, now that Mike Woodson is stepping down (and who seems already to be checking out, frankly). And I shake my head and look all sage-y and give them the sum total of my revealed wisdom.

"Hell, I don't know," I say.

And I don't. 

I do know whom it won't be, however, and whom I never thought it was going to be.

That would be Dusty May up at Michigan, who won fame coaching humble little Florida Atlantic to the Final Four two years ago and cashed in those chips to grab the big chair at glitzy big-boy Michigan. He's in his first season in Ann Arbor now, and he's already working wonders; the Wolverines, a flat-tire program coming off a last-place finish in the Big Ten, are now 20-6 and 12-3 in the Big Ten, half a game out of first after losing to frontrunner Michigan State.

No matter. The other day, Michigan extended May's contract anyway -- in large part because May, a one-time student manager when Bob Knight was coaching in Bloomington, is an IU grad and therefore the name most prominent on Candy Stripe Nation's lips.

Let me tell you why I never thought that was realistic, with or without May's shiny new deal in Ann Arbor.

I never thought that was realistic because, let's face it, jumping from one Big Ten school to another after just one season would have been a jackass move, and everything I've seen and heard about Dusty May suggests the one thing he's not is a jackass. He is, by all accounts, a standup guy. So to come to Michigan, get paid a carload of jing to do so, and then after one season say "Just kidding!" and sprint five or so hours south to Bloomington seemed highly unlikely.

Now, there are some morals-clause guys I could see doing that, because there are plenty of them out there. But not May. And even though I suppose Mark Cuban or some other moneybags IU alum could have opened enough bank vaults to make it tempting, Michigan's one of the few schools that can go checkbook-to-checkbook with Indiana.

So, Dusty May is out as a potential target in Bloomington. And who's still in?

Hell. I don't know.

Hockey's night

 He was all by his lonesome high in the slot, the wallflower at a middle school dance, and here at last was the lapse that would end it. Best hockey player on the planet, and not a soul in blue marking him. Connor McDavid, just hangin' around.

And now here came the puck to him off the stick of Mitch Marner.

And here was McDavid (of course!) snapping off a perfect shot -- top shelf to the glove side of Connor Hellebouck in the Team USA goal -- and the puck nested in the roof of the goal and McDavid went tearing off into the corner and everyone in red engulfed him in a joyous happy scrum.

Canada 3, United States 2.

Canada 3, United States 2 ... in overtime ... in the 4-Nations Face-Off championship game ... on U.S. soil in the TD Garden in Boston ... in front of a howling America First crowd wearing American flags and  MAGA hats and dressed as eagles and Founding Fathers and who knows what all.

Hell of a W for the Canadians, a whole nation that had its back up because our oafish president decided for some oafish reason to belittle it and threaten it and make juvenile wisecracks about Canada becoming America's 51st state.

Hell of a W for hockey and the NHL, which launched the 4 Nations Face-Off to replace its worthless All-Star game and got a gift from the gods when the Oaf-in-Chief chose to pick on our good neighbor to the north, adding a delicious layer of enmity to the 4 Nations that wouldn't otherwise have been there.

"You can't take our country -- and you can't take our game," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau snarked on social media late last night, a taunt no fair-minded person could say the oaf didn't have coming.

On the other hand, what we all had coming, and got, was that rarest of things: A sequel that not only lived up to the original, and perhaps exceeded it.

That's because what got the 4 Nations Face-Off revved up was the first Canada-USA meeting six days in Montreal, which began with a "Slapshot"-like dropping of the gloves -- three fights in the first nine seconds -- and ended in a 3-1 U.S. victory. That put the tournament on the path to last night's immensely anticipated finale.

Which was 68-plus minutes of everything that makes hockey the best of all our games when it comes down to win-or-else.

Offense? 

How about both teams tearing up and down the ice without a pause, one rush leading to another rush the other way, over and over, all night long?

Defense?

How about U.S. defenseman Jacob Slavin blunting Canadian chances with one heads-up play after another in his own zone? Or Brady Tkachuk wallpapering the glass with various unfortunates wearing the maple leaf?

And then there was the goaltending ...

But honest, now. How could even the most rabid "USA! USA!' shouter not appreciate Canadian goalie Jordan Binnington reaching back five years to his rookie season, when he stonewalled the Boston Bruins in Game 7 to bring the Stanley Cup to St. Louis?

That Binnington was this Binnington last night, making 31 saves including 20 in a row across the third period and overtime, stealing food off the Americans' plates with jaw-droppers like the flailing glove save he made on Tkachuk in overtime?

That should have ended it, Tkachuk camped on the doorstep as the puck skittered around in the crease. But somehow Binnington sprawled across the goalmouth, got the mitt up, swallowed the puck in one mighty gulp.

A few minutes later, and here was Connor McDavid alone in the slot.

A few minutes after that, 37-year-old Sidney Crosby was hoisting the 4 Nations trophy, and the red maple-leaf flag was suddenly everywhere, and the Canadian were standing arm-in-arm as "O Canada" rang through the Garden.

Hell of a night for them.

Hell of a night for hockey.

Hell of a promo for the Olympic hockey tournament coming up next year in Italy.

"I think guys that are at home watching, I'm hoping they're wanting a piece of it," said U.S. forward Dylan Larkin, who plays his NHL hockey in Detroit, Hockeytown itself. "This grew the game really well, but I hope it pushes guys to want a piece of this and then the next generation that got to watch this, they're going to watch the Olympics next year and hopefully there's a different outcome."

And even if there isn't ... who can't wait to find out now?

Criminal minds(less)

 So, remember that part in "Goodfellas" where Jimmy Conway, Henry Hill and the gang pull off the famous Lufthansa heist out at JFK International Airport? 

(And don't say, "I've never seen 'Goodfellas'." If you've never seen "Goodfellas", you are no true Blobophile, and I will politely ask you to leave.)

Anyway, remember what happens next?

One of Jimmy's crew shows up at a Christmas party driving a brand new Cadillac. Jimmy goes ballistic, because he specifically told everyone to lay low and not make any conspicuous purchases -- like, you know, a brand new Cadillac.

So Jimmy has the guy whacked. And for good measure, he has the rest of the Lufthansa thieves whacked in an eliminating-loose-ends sort of deal.

I'm thinking maybe whoever's running the gang of Chilean burglars who've been targeting famous athletes recently wishes he'd followed Jimmy's lead.

This is because the feds have collared three of the seven members of the burglary ring because, like the poor sap with the Cadillac, they couldn't keep their good fortune to themselves. After stealing watches and other jewelry from the homes of, among others, NFL stars Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Joe Burrow and Milwaukee Bucks forward Bobby Portis Jr., they took selfies of one another with items from the Portis heist.

I guess they figured none of the images would ever find its way into the Great Interwhosis Universe, even though they almost always do. Which means these geniuses not only provided the authorities with photos of the items the athletes in question had identified as missing, they put them on and mugged for the camera with their bare faces hanging out.

You gotta wonder how that thought process went. Assuming there actually was a thought process.

"Hey, guys, check it out! Imma gonna take a selfie wearing one of the NBA guy's watches!"

"Cool! Me, too!"

"Think we should wear masks or something to, you know, conceal our identities?"

"Nah, man, what for? It's not like we're gonna show these to the cops or anything. I mean, that would just be stupid."

Yeah, well ...

The odd thing about this is up until the selfie-fest, the burglars had been quite professional about the whole thing. They staked out their targets to determine security patterns. They used burner phones. They dispatched different individuals to rent cars and places to stay to make their movements harder to track, and pawned the watches, rings, gold chains et al for cash using using launderers well removed from the crime scenes.

And then ...

And then, "Hey, world, look at this watch I'm wearing!"

Yeesh. Jimmy Conway woulda had 'em hanging from a meat hook in a refrigerated truck for sure.

A history lesson

Some days I can't keep my inner history nerd in his box. Either I need a stronger box, or I need to just let it go when stupid people say stupid stuff that fairly begs to be exposed to the light.

Which brings us to this morning, sock-puppet Indiana Sen. Jim "Jimbo" "Whatever President Trump Says" Banks, and American military disasters.

And, yeah, I can already hear you whining, Blobophiles.

"Aw, gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying. "History again? Boring names and dates and crap like that? Why can't you write about car racing or hockey or Purdue dropping three key Big Ten games in a row, or how Los Angeles Dodgers Inc. is now the majority owner of Major League Baseball?"

Later for that, Blobophiles. Today ... well, here's a hall pass. Go to the library and watch old boxing movies like we boys used to in school when they were teaching the girls about where babies come from.

Today, the inner history nerd gets some run. 

He gets some run because Sen. Jim-Jimbo got on Elon Musk's propaganda feed the other day and tweeted some celebratory stuff about our wonderful new Secretary of Defense investigating the messy U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. This happened during Joe Biden's time in the White House, which of course is the only reason Pete Hegseth 'n' them want to investigate it. 

Jim-Jimbo figured it was high time someone did. And that's because, in his words, the Afghan pullout was one of the "worst military disasters in American history."

To which my inner history nerd responded: "Whaaaaat??"

Inner history nerd, see, knows from military disasters, and the Afghan pullout, while as tragically chaotic as these types of operations invariably are, simply doesn't pass muster. And, yeah, I get it, it's like a D.C. rule that Sen. Jim-Jimbo and his ilk are required to grossly exaggerate anything bad that happens on the opposition party's watch. Which of course is why you won't hear a peep from them about the role their own president's sellout deal with the Taliban played in the pullout's chaos.

I get all that. And I know I should just dismiss it as the usual nonsense. However ...

Well. Let me tell you about some of the actual worst military disasters in American history.

For instance, has Sen. Jim-Jimbo ever heard of Chancellorsville?

That happened in Virginia in May 1863, when swagger-y old Joe Hooker got his clock cleaned by Robert E. Lee despite the fact Lee's army was half the size of Hooker's. Hooker even stole a march on Lee, crossing the Rapidan and putting his immense army squarely in Lee's rear. So what happened?

Lee about-faced, sent Stonewall Jackson on a flank march directly under Hooker's nose, and blew the Federals' right flank to matchsticks. Two days later Hooker meekly retreated back across the Rapidan despite the fact a good chunk of his army was never even engaged.

Cost: 17,287 U.S. casualties, including 1,606 dead. Afghan pullout cost: 13 American dead.

Or how about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when George Armstrong Custer left more than half his 700-man force behind (in two different places!) and went gallivanting after a huge Native American compound with the rest? 

He and his five companies, as we all know, were wiped out to the man. Cost: 268 dead.

Ever hear of the naval Battle of Savo Island during the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942? The U.S. lost three heavy cruisers, with two more heavy cruisers and a destroyer damaged; only three Japanese cruisers were damaged and none were lost.

It was -- along, obviously, with Pearl Harbor less than a year before -- one of the worst naval defeats in U.S. history. Cost: 1,077 dead bluejackets.

And last but not least ...

What do you suppose Sen. Jim-Jimbo knows about St. Clair's Defeat, which happened a mere 78 miles southeast of Jim-Jimbo's hometown of Columbia City?

This happened in and around present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio, in 1791, when a U.S. army force under the command of Arthur St. Clair was surprised and overwhelmed by a combined Miami/Shawnee/Delaware/Potawotami alliance. In almost less time than it takes to tell, the Native contingent wiped out all but 24 of St. Clair's 1,000-man force, with 656 soldiers and civilians either killed or captured. Native losses were just 21 killed and 40 wounded.

It was at once the worst defeat ever inflicted on U.S. forces by Native Americans, and one of the worst in U.S. military history.

I could go on, but I can see your eyelids drooping. So, class dismissed.

But at least my inner history nerd feels better now.

The fix is in ... place

 Two days from now Team USA plays Team Canada in the finale of the 4 Nations Face-Off,  the best idea the NHL's had since making goalies wear masks. It cut down on the league's stitch count, for one thing, and who needed to see Gump Worsley's Gump-ish mug, anyway?

(This is not to single out poor Gump, mind you. No one was tuning in to gaze upon Glenn Hall's face or Rogie Vachon's or Bernie Parent's, either. And they certainly weren't all excited to see Terry Sawchuck's famously stitch-o-matic visage.)

Anyway, the 4 Nations' final is going to be appointment viewing like nothing else currently on the dead February docket, and if that is a rare victory for NHL commish Gary Bettman -- think blind squirrels and acorns and you've got the gist -- it also illuminates, in the most glaring way possible, the mess that was the NBA All-Star Game or Mini-Tournament or whatever the hell that was last weekend.

I didn't watch a second of it, but many of those who did apparently are still trying figure out what they saw. It was a Rising Stars first-to-40 tournament, and then the past-their-expiration dates 3-Point and Slam Dunk contests, and then some Rising Stars vs. Kenny's Young Stars vs. Chuck's Global Stars vs. Shaq's OGs first-to-40 action. Somewhere in there Kevin Hart appeared for some reason no one's yet been able to decipher.

The end result was a sort of variety show/playground ball mash-up, a steaming pile lowlighted by the OG of OGs, LeBron James, announcing at the last minute he wouldn't be participating on account of a foot boo-boo. That got things off to a rollicking start, and now NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his cohorts are no doubt in red-line panic mode. How to save this off-off-Broadway farce?

The Blob has some ideas. And they start with a fix the NBA already has in place.

That would be the NBA's in-season tournament, which, unlike the current All-Star festivities, the players have actually embraced and seem to care about. So why not steal a page from the NHL's playbook and replace the All-Star Game/Games/Whatever It Is with that?

The early-season timing of the in-season tourney has always been bizarre, except that Silver and Co. apparently figured it would get someone paying attention to the NBA at a time when no one's paying attention to the NBA. Maybe so, but it's wasted there. Why not move it to mid-February?

You could steal a page from the NHL and divide it into a Team USA, Team Americas, Team Europe and Team World round robin. Take ten days or so off to play it, with the two survivors squaring off in the final on what used to be All-Star Game weekend.

Or how about this: Steal a page from Major League Baseball and put together two Eastern Conference teams and two Western Conference teams. Play the semis one weekend; the survivors play an East-vs.-West final the next weekend. The winning team secures homecourt in the NBA Finals for its conference; the winning team's players get the lion's share of a 70-30 split of all ad revenue and TV money from the Finals.

I don't know about you, but I think either of the aforementioned scenarios might perk up a few attention spans. They'd make the All-Star Game about the game again. And the participants  might actually try, or at least appear to.  

Heck. LeBron might even play this time.