Coach Dale

 In his long and decorated life, Gene Hackman, who died this week, drove race cars, flew planes, got off one of the funniest ad libs in one of the funniest movies ever made (See: "Young Frankenstein"), and played narcotics agents and submarine commanders and psychotic western sheriffs and every other damn thing. And did it as well as anyone ever did.

But if you live in Indiana, he was one thing and one thing only.

He was Coach Dale.

He was the guy who told the refs "My team's on the floor" ... and the guy who proved the rim in Hinkle Fieldhouse was 10 feet above the floor ... and the guy who got himself thrown out of a game so Shooter could run the picket fence at 'em. He was the guy who got Jimmy Chitwood to play, and the guy who knew Ollie was gonna make those free throws.

If you're a Hoosier, the only movie Gene Hackman ever made was "Hoosiers." And we will brook no argument to the contrary.

The irony, of course, is Hackman hated "Hoosiers" while he was making it, thought its creators, Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh, were amateur hacks, crabbed about this and that the entire shoot. Told Dennis Hooper, who played Shooter, it was a career-ender. Figured it would play to empty theaters everywhere but Indiana.

He was, in short, a perfect ass, according to people who were around the production. He was also as wrong as a man can possibly be.

Because "Hoosiers", an earnest little film about a high school basketball team in a small town in Indiana in 1952, became a smash hit. It earned Hopper an Oscar nommy for Best Supporting Actor and Jerry Goldsmith an Oscar nommy for Best Original Score. And to this day, 39 years later, it remains at or near the top of any list of the best sports movies ever made.

And Coach Norman Dale?

Right up there on the most memorable fictitious coaches list, too.

Get people naming all of them they can remember, it'll only be nanoseconds before they get to Coach Dale. Coach Eric Taylor of the Dillon High Panthers? Sure. Gordon Bombay of the Mighty Ducks? Of course. Ted Lasso, Jimmy Dugan, Morris Buttermaker, Lou Brown?

Absolutely.

But Norman Dale?

Now we're talkin'.

It wasn't Gene Hackman's most decorated role; in his obit this week, "Hoosiers" isn't even listed among the films in which he played. Doesn't matter. He's still Coach Dale, and around our state, "Hoosiers" is still the film everyone thinks of first when you mention Hackman's name.

When he was found dead in his New Mexico home this week, the old gym in Knightstown that was the film site for the Hickory Huskers gym honored his passing. It's a tourist site now, that old barn, and people come from all over the world to visit it. They make pilgrimages to visit it, for God's sake.

I can't think of any other Hackman film site where that happens. Maybe they exist, but if so I haven't heard about 'em.

That's why there was a special poignancy to the timing of Hackman's death this week, because it came the week before the start of the boys Indiana high school basketball tournament. The geezers and cranks will tell you it's not the same since they went to class basketball 28 years ago, but it still defines March in Indiana. It's the demarcation line between winter and spring in these parts, and it starts up again in four days.

Hickory vs. Terhune again, in the universe of "Hoosiers." Tip it up, boys, and remember to make four passes before you shoot. And, Buddy, stick so tight to Terhune's hotshot you can tell me what brand of gum he's chewing.

My guess is Dentine.

Combine time!

 The NFL scouting combine is happening this week in Indianapolis, and it's my favorite part of February. This is not because I find the combine particularly riveting. It's because it's February.

I mean, something's gotta break up the monotony, right?

The combine is just the ticket, because it provides endless opportunities for mirth for those of us who find the NFL's obsession with minutiae weird and hilarious. And the combine is a veritable minutiae-fest.

It's an entire week of weighing top-end prospects and looking at them in their underwear and interviewing them ("If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"). It's seven days of watching them lift and run 40s and measuring their verts, which is combine-speak for "vertical leap." The various NFL teams poke and prod and measure and check under the hood of psyches, and the only thing they don't do is determine whether or not a guy can actually play.

The best part, though, happens tomorrow through Sunday.

That's when the various position groups do their on-field workouts, or at least some of them do. More and more prospects are opting out of that part of it, preferring to wait until their respective schools' Pro Days. This generally includes most of the quarterbacks and some wide receivers and running backs, but not always.

And then there's the Sunday workout group. Which might or might not be the NFL saving the best for last.

Sunday, see, is when they roll out the big boys,, aka the offensive linemen. Great blocks of humanity line shorts and T-shirts line up and run 40s. They run shuttles. They leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Well, OK. So probably not.

What's hilarious about this, to me anyway, is watching these tanks do stuff that has nothing to do with an OL's skill set. Running 40s, really? When does an offensive lineman run 40 yards in one burst? 

Don't know about you, but I don't want to know how fast an offensive lineman runs the 40. I want to know how fast he runs the 5. Seems to me that would be a more accurate read of how quickly he gets off the ball.

I also don't really need to know an OL's hang time. This may be a failure of imagination on my part, because I can't really see a bunch of NFL scouts standing around ooh-ing and aah-ing at 350-pound Marvin "Bridge Abutment" Clampett's jumping ability.

GOOD LORD! A 35-INCH vert! We could put him at tight end down on the goal line! And think how awesome he'll be on the jump ball when the NFL replaces the onside kick with that!

Even more exciting, no doubt, is hearing Bridge Abutment's answer to the tree question.

"I'd be an African baobab tree," quoth Bridge Abutment.

And well-traveled, too! Sign him, boys.

Goin' OG

 So I see by the interwhatsis that an unidentified NFL team has called for the banning of the tush push, which is back in the news now because the Philadelphia Eagles just won the Super Bowl and are most famous (notorious?) for the play they call the Brotherly Shove.

And now I can hear Willie Heston and Pudge Heffelfinger and that whole crowd, having a big guffaw out there in the celestial void.

"The Brotherly Shove?" they're chortling. "Hell, man, that ain't nothin' but football."

And so it is. Or was, long, long ago when the Hestons and Heffelfingers played and the game was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins.

We're talking the 1890s, early 1900s here, when football was the sole province of your Yales and Harvards and Princetons, with an occasional Michigan or Notre Dame thrown in to make it look national. No one had invented the forward pass yet. The wishbone was a wish dream. The triple option was still missing two of 'em, and even the off-tackle run was regarded as exotic and therefore suspect.

No, sir. Football at the turn of the last century?

It basically was just a bunch of guys surrounding another guy and shoving him forward until they couldn't shove him forward anymore.

A century and a quarter later, you saw the Eagles do the exact same thing in the Super Bowl.

Lined up some big guys behind Jalen Hurts. Shoved him over the goal line/past the first down marker. A play as OG as Grover Cleveland, and as elemental as force and mass and the application of the latter to enhance the former.

That's all football was in those prehistoric days, when the flying wedge was a revolutionary act and players went by colorful names like Tack and Belf and Pudge, and of course the immortal T. Truxton Hare, who lined up for Penn during the McKinley administration. Protective gear was either unknown or for sissies in those days, which is why a pile of players died and the flying wedge was eventually outlawed. That, too, was football then.

Now it's all these years later, and we're still arguing about the flying wedge's spiritual descendant, the tush push.

The risk of injury, some people say, makes the play dangerous (sound familiar?). On the other hand, it's an extremely effective throwback; the numbers say the Eagles and Buffalo Bills have run the tush push 163 times, and have gotten a touchdown or first down out of it 87 percent of the time.

And now I can hear Willie and Pudge 'n' them again, having another big guffaw.

"Hell, yes, it works 87 percent of the time," they're chortling. "Why do you think we did it?"

A pause. 

"And we didn't have any of these fancy-dan helmets and pads and junk like that. We were football players, man, not a buncha nancy boys."

More guffaws, echoing down the years. 

Broken compass

 (Your standard disclaimer: This is not a Sportsball post. It is not about the Cubs, or the Lakers, or the Indianapolis 500, or why the designated hitter is an abomination to all right-thinking humans everywhere. Thus, the usual instructions apply. If you don't want to stick around, grab a hall pass and go sit in the library until we're done here.)

We used to know who the bad guys were, here in America.

We looked at Hitler, with his lank hair and his shitty little 'stache and his martial strut, and we knew he was up to no good. Ditto Mussolini, with his arrogance and the bully's itch he scratched by beating up on poor Ethiopia. Ditto, too, Josef Stalin, who occasionally starved and murdered his own people in droves just for the hell of it.

You looked into that guy's eyes, and you knew what you were dealing with. Cruiser-class psychopath, oh, you bet.

Now?

Well, let's consider how our spectacularly unqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, answered a reporter's question the other day.

Reporter: "Fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine three years ago tomorrow?"

Hegseth: "Fair to say, it's a very complicated situation."

Only if you're a Russian toady, Petey old boy.

For those of us with functional brain cells, see, it's not complicated at all. Three years ago, Russia launched a surprise attack on another sovereign nation and decimated a goodly chunk of it before the Ukrainians gained their footing and started to fight back. It was as stark an example of naked aggression as North Korean tanks rolling across the 38th parallel in the predawn hours of June 25, 1950, or Hitler's blitzkrieg crashing into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. 

Of course, had the current regime been running America then, they'd likely have blamed the South Koreans and Poles. Or said, "It's a very complicated situation."

We used to know who the bad guys were. But now?

Now we side with 'em.

Now the President of the United States and his handpicked confederacy of dunces spout Russian propaganda with a startling lack of self-awareness or shame, and treat it like revealed wisdom. One of the President's flunkies, Elon Musk, even tweeted the other day that if Russia "went too far" at the beginning of the war, Ukraine was going "too far now."

Which I guess means if Poland had been able to put up a longer fight against Hitler, it, too, would have been going too far. That's how twisted is Apartheid Clyde's logic, and those of his ilk.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

Now we try to make the bad guys into the good guys, or at least the not-really-bad-guys. We blame, not the violators, but the violated, against all common sense and decency. And rather than take up for the violated, the way the United States at least tried to do occasionally when it still had a working moral compass, we go behind their backs to strike a deal that doesn't include their input. 

Think for a second about what a massive betrayal that is. Then think about the President of the United States getting up in, say, 1950, and announcing that, in addition to negotiating with the North Koreans without the South Koreans, the U.S. was also going to extort half the South's mineral deposits as payback for American aid.

That's the idea the Felon in Chief floated the other day, vis-a-vis Ukraine. You can look it up.

I don't know if betrayal is a strong enough word for something that breathtakingly vile. I don't know if a strong enough word exists for it.

We used to know who the bad guys were.

And the corollary to that?

Our allies used to know we wouldn't turn our backs on them.

Now all of that is gone. Now the moral compass lies broken on the floor, and the heel that ground it to shards is the same heel that's busily crushing whatever honor we once had as a nation.

If that doesn't make you weep, I don't even know what to say to you. 

Nor do I wish to say it.

An Indiana sighting, yet again

 And now some numbers this fine morning, to baffle and amaze:

21-4.

28-3; 32-7.

48-21.

44-18.

19-1.

And finally: 73-58.

Which was the score up there on the big board above the Assembly Hall floor when the clock showed zeroes, and for the first time in six weeks it was the home team on the heavy side. In a game bizarre even for a rivalry crowded with the bizarre -- check out where Mike Woodson was sitting yesterday, for example -- Indiana crushed No. 13 Purdue in the second half after Purdue crushed Indiana in the final minutes of the first half.

So, Indiana 73, Purdue 58, fourth straight loss for the spiraling Boilermakers, and, oh, yes, about those numbers:

Purdue finished the first half with a 21-4 run that sent the Boilers to the locker room up 12 and seemingly in position to beat Indiana again, ho-hum, nothing to see here.

Except ...

Except Indiana, in the second half, outscored Purdue 28-3 and 32-7 to start, outscored the Boilers 48-21 for the entire half, and outscored them 44-18 in the paint for the game. Oh, and outscored them 19-1 off turnovers in the second half.

You call that a butt-kickin', in some parts of this world. You call it a rump-roastin', a sheep-shearin', a woodshed-takin', a strap-you-to-a-rail-and-run-you-up-the-Monon-line-in'.

Mostly, though, it was a cleanse of sorts for an Indiana program that's tasted way to much bitter this strange season, and that it happened on the 40th anniversary of Bob Knight throwing a chair in the midst of a dreary loss in the Hall to these same Boilers added an element of poignancy or something to it. Which gets us back to where Woodson was sitting yesterday: In the very chair Knight flung four decades ago, rescued from some broom closet somewhere.

Or so the story goes.

Woodson said in the postgame he "happened to get my hands on it," and maybe he did, although others have gone looking for it and have never known for sure which chair was The Chair. Suffice it to say it was one of the chairs that comprised the IU bench on Feb. 23, 1985, and therefore the symbolism still holds true.

No matter, in any case. What mattered this day was not a thrown chair, but Indiana throwing the book at its too-often tormentor.

Down and looking out again at the end of the half as Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer and Myles Colvin rained threes on their heads and celebrated loudly, the Hoosiers somehow found the key to beating Purdue that three other teams have in the last two weeks: Pound the ball inside, defend the arc, rattle the suddenly rattle-able Smith and Co. into coughing up the rock.

So in the second half, they went to Malik Reneau, who responded with 15 points, six rebounds and four assists. Fellow big man Oumar Ballo added a dozen points and five more boards. Out on the perimeter, meanwhile, Trey Galloway, Luke Goode and Anthony Leal combined for 34 points, 13 assists, 10 rebounds, four steals and two blocks, and, along with Myles Rice, did the lion's share of harassing Smith and Loyer  into seven of Purdue's 16 turnovers -- six of which came from Smith in another shaky outing, and 11 of which came in the second half.

In the second half, Indiana shot 64 percent. Purdue shot 30 percent. 

When it was done, the Hoosiers had their first win in the Hall since Jan. 8, and another big step toward an NCAA Tournament berth that's gone from "no way" to "weeeell, maybe" in the last couple weeks. And for 20 minutes, at least, they gave the nation a peek at the team they were supposed to be after Woodson spent last summer mining the transfer portal.

That team has been only sporadically in evidence this season, which led to Woodson agreeing to step down when it's done. Sunday afternoon, though, sitting in the infamous chair/one of the infamous chairs, he not only beat Purdue but beat the dog out of  Purdue, and this strange coda got even stranger as his players mobbed him and rubbed his shiny bald head and a March run -- an authentic, by-god last hurrah -- suddenly looked possible.

How weird would that be, after all that's happened?

Weirder than getting outscored 21-4 to end the first half yesterday ... and then outscoring Purdue 28-3 to begin the second ... and then going on to blow out the Boilers by 27 points in the second half?

Nah. No weirder than that, surely.

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 third 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.

Girls' weekend

So how did you spend your basketball weekend, boys and girls?

Did you spend it watching Shaq's OGs (whoever they were) beat Team Chuck (whoever they were) in the we-got-next carousel that used to be the NBA All-Star game? Or did you catch No. 1 Auburn taking down No. 2 Alabama in what used to be a great football rivalry, but now has morphed into a great men's college hoops rivalry?

Or maybe you watched the Michigan State men come from behind to beat Illinois, 79-65, which pushed Tom Izzo past Bob Knight into first place in career Big Ten victories.

Izzo has 354 conference Ws now, and that ain't an easy thing in the Big Contusion Conference. In the postgame he said he hoped Knight, Izzo's dad and Izzo's predecessors at MSU, Gus Ganakis and Jud Heathcote, were having a drink together somewhere in the Great Beyond.

Nice moment, that, in a stellar weekend for the basketball males.

And for the basketball females?

Well, consider this: I spent lunchtime yesterday watching the two best women's teams in the Ivy League, Columbia and Harvard, duke it out for conference supremacy.

This is not necessarily because I'm six flavors of weird, although my friends and family would heartily second that assessment. And it's not necessarily because sporting events sometimes come winging out of nowhere to grab my attention.

Nah. It's because it felt like the thing to do in a spot-lit weekend for the women, too.

Girls' weekend actually started on Thursday, when No. 1 UCLA took on No. 6 USC in maybe the biggest UCLA-USC collision since O.J. Simpson and Gary Beban went Heisman-on-Heisman in 1967's Poll Bowl. This time it was Juju Watkins 'n' them going bucket-on-bucket with Lauren Betts 'n' them -- and, just like in '67, Watkins and USC got the best of it.

Although "got the best of it" might be understating it a trifle in Watkins' case.

Surely there must be some more high-end adjectives to describe Juju's night, which included 38 points, 11 rebounds, five assists, a steal and eight blocked shots. Oh, and she dropped six threes on just nine attempts, too.

It added up to a 71-60 win over the Bruins, who came in 23-0 and left 23-1. Betts, UCLA's stickout 6-7 pivot, put up an 18/13 double-double and added two assists and a block, but it wasn't enough to stop the Juju-nami. No. 1 got swamped.

But that's not all, as a game-show host would say.

Come Sunday, there was No. 3 Texas holding off No. 5 LSU 65-58 in a showdown between SEC powers with just three losses between them; and No. 12 North Carolina clipping No. 10 North Carolina State, 66-65; and of course Harvard, now 19-3, coming from behind on the road to hand Columbia its first Ivy loss, 60-54.

Oh, yeah. And after that, here came UConn and South Carolina. 

The fourth-ranked Gamecocks were 23-2 and had won 71 straight home games, but Sunday they had nothing for the No. 7 Huskies. Ten days ago Geno Auriemma's crew came up empty against Tennessee, but in the interim they rediscovered their essential, I don't know, UConn-ness or something.

First they floor-waxed Providence by 37. Then they blistered St. John's by 38. And then came Sunday.

When Azzi Fudd went for 28, Paige Buechers added 12 points, seven rebounds and 10 assists, and Ashlynn Shade came off the bench to stick a trio of triples in nine tries. And the Huskies shot 46.7 percent from the arc (13 of 28) and utterly matchsticked South Carolina's home streak, 87-58.

Hell of a performance. Hell of a weekend. Take a bow, ladies.

Daytona Whatchamcallit

 Word has arrived at Blob headquarters that William Byron won the Daytona 500 for the second year in a row yesterday, somehow surviving the annual end-of-the-race crashes  that happen because everyone commences to drive like idiots in the last 15 laps or so.

So there was a red flag in there somewhere, per usual. It happened 11 laps after a Big One took out Joey Logano, Kyle Busch, Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott, and it took out Bubba Wallace, Kyle Larson, Daniel Suarez and Brad Keselowski. That all happened before another Big One pushed the race into overtime for the sixth time in the last eight years, and before yet another Big One wiped out the front of the field in OT and allowed Byron to go from ninth to the checkers on the final lap.

All of this occurred  sometime last night, I am told. I say "I am told" because I wasn't watching by that time, having tuned in at 1:30 to watch Air Force One buzz Daytona International Speedway, and then watch our illustrious president take a ceremonial lap in his Brink's armored car before flying right back home.

(And, OK, so it wasn't a Brink's armored car. It was more like a stylish armored half-track. Or maybe a stylish Sherman tank.)

Anyway, that all happened, and the race started, and then, after just 11 laps, it rained. That's when I stopped watching, because it looked like it was going to rain for awhile. And then, later on, I just kinda ... well, forgot about it.

A gearhead like me, forgetting about the Daytona Whatchamacallit. This is what it's come to with the Great American Race, at least in this precinct.

Time was I used to go to watch parties on Daytona Sunday, and we'd eat wings and drink beer and hope that dweeb Jeff Gordon didn't win again. Daytona was appointment viewing in those days, back when NASCAR still mattered. It was Super Bowl Sunday, only faster.

And then ...

And then, I don't know what happened.

The watch parties fizzled out, gradually. I started watching the 500 (aka, "that silly car race" according to my wife) on the couch at home. Then I started watching only the first 50 or so laps and the last 20 or so laps. And then, yesterday, I watched 11 laps before the rains came, checked out, and never checked back in.

I don't know if that constitutes a eulogy of sorts. But it kinda feels like one.

Sunday thoughts

 Where I live it snowed in the night, and this morning a fresh blanket and deep silence lay over a monochrome world. It's a study in grays and whites, this world -- frosted tree branches reaching for a battlement sky -- and every other color in the palette has dried to a crust, its own day still a month or two off.

I don't know if this has made me more contemplative than usual. Maybe so.

What I do know is I'm not thinking this morning about Team USA beating Team Canada in a damn fine game of hockey last night ... or about some guy fresh out of ideas jumping over a car in the NBA slam dunk contest, something Blake Griffin did years ago ... or about the Daytona 500 trying to beat the rain down there in Florida this afternoon.

No, sir. I'm thinking about someone I know.

I won't tell you who she is, or even how I know her, but the other day she lost her dream job for no legitimate reason. A longtime elementary school teacher, she was a U.S. Park Service ranger out east. It was something she'd always wanted to be, and the only thing good you can say about the vandals who took it away from her is they didn't single her out. A whole lot of other rangers across America lost their dream jobs, too.

 According to the chief vandal and all his little cyberpunk vandals, see, they're government waste, fat to be trimmed and discarded so the chief vandal and the rest of the leisure class can help themselves to another superfluous tax cut. The other day, the chief vandal (with typically elitist disdain) dubbed them the "Parasite Class," and all true hard-working Americans should be glad they're gone.

They should be like the chief vandal, who celebrates like his team won the Super Bowl every time he gets to issue some civil service employee his or her walking papers.

This is because the chief vandal is the richest man in the world, and so doesn't have to concern himself with the little people. It's also because he's an asshole, although the latter too often seems naturally to follow the former.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about this person I know. I'm thinking about the park rangers at some of my favorite Civil War sites who also lost their jobs this week -- dedicated professionals who were worth every dime they made. And I'm thinking about another person I know who works for a different federal agency, and whose job therefore may be in the chief vandal's crosshairs, too.

I'd use the chief vandal's name, but you know who he is. Me, I just call him Apartheid Clyde because of his South African roots, and also the fact his family got rich on the backs of black labor back when Nelson Mandela was in prison.

Anyway, I'm thinking about Apartheid Clyde whooping it up over putting people like my friend out of work, and it makes me want to send his sorry ass back to Johannesburg in a leaky boat. The people he's turning cartwheels over firing, see, are human beings with spouses and children and mouths to feed, and mortgages to pay. They are not government "waste" or "fraud" or the beneficiaries of "corruption." Nor are they "parasites," for the love of god.

No, I'd sooner think that term applies to Apartheid Clyde, who gets fat off our tax dollars thanks to the millions in government contracts he rakes in. And over which he's now allowed to sit in judgment.

You want to talk fraud and corruption, let's start there.

In the meantime, I won't think about the chief vandal and the rest of the vandals, and all their unproven claims about the waste, fraud and corruption they're supposedly cleaning up. They never tell us how they're doing this, see, or even if what they consider waste, fraud and corruption are actually that. And so from here all it looks like they're doing is plumping up the nation's unemployment numbers.

Which brings us back to this person I know. 

Like the many others upon whose unemployment graves the chief vandal likes to dance, she in no way deserved such a vile little waltz. She in no way deserved to lose her dream job, and she for damn sure doesn't deserve to be slandered on top of it by the likes of Apartheid Clyde.

Who came to America to get rich. And who got rich, because, as we were all told in school, America is the land of opportunity.

Yeah, well. Not for everyone these days, it seems.

A W, on ice

 They say you'll never go broke betting on the National Hockey League to do the wrong thing, the dumb thing, the what-the-hell-were-you-thinkin' thing. But they also say every dog has its day, so give Gary Bettman 'n' them a hand for once.

They figured out the All-Star thing.

Which is to say, they killed it dead and buried it in an unmarked grave.

What the NHL did, see, was replace the usual Farce Capades All-Star weekend -- a skills competition followed by a riveting 19-14 "game" -- with an actual by-god international mini-tournament. It's called the 4 Nations Faceoff, and it features Team USA, Team Canada, Team Finland and Team Sweden. Buncha NHL guys playin' for their national flags, in other words.

Canada beat the Swedes in overtime the other night, and the U.S. flushed the Finns 6-1 on Thursday. Today they play each other in a rivalry game which might or might not be a tad spicier than usual, on account of our brilliant new administration decided to start kicking our neighbors to the north around for no discernible reason.

Canadians have been booing our national anthem at hockey and basketball games since. Just desserts, you might say.

At any rate, the 4 Nations Faceoff is a landmark moment in Sportsball World, because it might be the first time in recorded history the NHL had a bright idea and the NBA and NFL didn't. The latter two should have knifed their All-Star weekends by now, too, but so far haven't figured out how to do it.

That's why the NFL's All-Star weekend has devolved into Field Day at Millard Fillmore Elementary School. And as for the NBA's All-Star extravaganza ...

Well. It's happening this weekend out in the Bay Area, and it's, I don't know, Shirts-Vs.-Skins, Make-It-Take-It In The Park or something.

It began Thursday with a celebrity game featuring "celebrities" old white guys like me had never heard of. Tonight 's highlights are the 3-point and increasingly irrelevant slamdunk contests; last night was the Rising Stars game, which wasn't really a game but a mini-tourney of three mini-games -- first two to 40, the last to 25 -- among three teams of first- and second-year players and a fourth team comprised of G-Leaguers. 

Team C won, and will now advance to play Shaq's OG team in the All-Star game tomorrow. Which, again, isn't actually a game but three mini-games to 40/25 because last year's All-Star "game" was such an utter joke.

I think the final score was 932-912. Something like that.

No word yet on whether Sunday's exhibition will be shirts-vs.-skins or make-it-take-it. Though it would be cooler if it were.

Bottom line, both the NBA and NFL are still floundering around trying to breathe life into a concept that's been demonstrably cold on the slab for awhile now. The NHL, by contrast, recognized that and went in a totally different direction.

So give 'em the W. On ice.

Some valentines

 Today is Valentine's Day, so get out there, men, and do your manly duty. Buy the flowers. Buy the candy. Suck it up, venture into Victoria's Secret and browse through the negligees like you're not at all skeered that people will point and laugh at you.

That's what a man does, on Valentine's Day.

What the Blob does is break its rule (first advanced by the great Dan Jenkins in one of his novels) that a journalist should never write anything that rhymes.

Well. Today I'm gonna write stuff that rhymes. I'm gonna write some poems (or "poimes", in my case) because poimes are a traditional Valentine's Day thing, too.

Let's start with a poime from fans of the Dallas Mavericks to their ownership, whom the fans have been abusing since ownership decided it would be a good idea to trade away the face of their franchise (Luka Doncic) in his prime. This was not a good idea, as it turns out. It was, in fact, an unfathomably bad idea, and the fans have been loudly reminding them of that at every Mavs home game.

Today, I figure they can remind them in verse:

Roses are red

But you clowns traded Luka

And so we just say

You guys make us all puke-a

* Moving right along, pitchers and catchers reported this week, which means baseball is starting again, which means the first stirrings of spring are in the air and the gladdened hearts of baseball fans everywhere. Well, OK, so not everywhere, maybe ...

Baseball is back!

Hope springs fresh from the box

Oh, wait, not so fast there

You Chicago White Sox

* The New York Jets have officially told Aaron Rodgers to hit the bricks, and the bidding will now begin for a washed 41-year-old quarterback who, in his one full season in New York, ranked 25th in the league in QBR. That was one spot above Daniel Jones, four spots below Geno Smith and five below Bryce Young, if you're keeping score at home.

At any rate ... let the romancing begin:

Hey, Raiders, what's shakin'?

Saints and Browns, how you farin'?

Whoever's most desperate

That's the market for Aaron

* The Great American Race That Includes Cars Made In Japan takes the green Sunday in Daytona, and you know what that means: Half-a-dozen crashes in the last 10 laps, a red flag, a couple of green-white-checkers or some combination of the three.

It's what always seems to happen in the Daytona 500, which means predicting the winner is virtually impossible. Usually it's the guy who just happens to be in front when the last crash happens; last year that was William Byron, who took the white flag a millisecond before the Big One and therefore won this annual spin of the roulette wheel.

So who wins this year? 

Here's a poime about it:

Won't be a Cale

Won't be a Dale

Could be Cole, Chase or Dan-o

Or some rando from Plano

And last but not least ...

* On this date in 1929, Al Capone's hired guns greased seven members of rival Bugsy Moran's gang in a garage in Chicago. It was called the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and  everyone knew Capone was behind it. But he was in Florida at the time, and therefore had plausible denial, sort of. 

Even wrote a poime to that effect, some say:

Don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'

But I heard cops turned green-y

So much bloodshed! I'm sickened!

Waiter ... one more martini

Land(s) of Lincoln, and others

 Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday, so social media is bristling with Abe Lincoln memes, including one where Abe is wearing a paper bag over his head like, I don't know, a New York Giants fan or something. Presumably this is because he can't stand to look at what the Felon in Chief and his gang of drunks, cyberpunks and constitutional vandals are doing to the country.

This is cute, but as a history nerd I have to say it's not entirely accurate. During the Civil War, after all, Abe did his share of constitutional vandalizing, too, suspending habeas corpus and jailing political opponents and the like. He was kind of a tyrant-in-chief himself.

Of course, Abe had little choice in the matter then, because America had a war going on -- and not just a war, but a war against itself. The Felon, on the other hand, is doing what he's doing just because his buddies in the Totalitarian Club are doing them. A legendary narcissist like him, you have to think, simply couldn't imagine being left out while Vladdy Putin and Vik Orban and the rest of the Felon's jackboot pals bellied up to the club bar.

For one thing, they might be making fun of him behind his back. And you know how much the Felon hates being laughed at.

But enough of that. Back to Abe.

Thinking about his birthday got me thinking about places and the names we give them, and what an eye-of-the-beholder thing that is. Sometimes absurdly so.

Three contiguous states, remember, claim Lincoln as their own. He was born in Kentucky. He was raised in Indiana. And Illinois calls itself the Land of Lincoln because that's where he eventually settled.

As a native Hoosier, of course, I consider the latter to be presumptuous in the extreme. Land of Lincoln, my left clavicle. Abe's a Hoosier, and that's all there is to it. Those Illini-come-latelies from next door can sit on it and rotate.

This brings us back to the Felon, who has already decided the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America no matter what anyone else says. Now, he has no more authority than you or I to do that -- if he can call it the Gulf of America, I can call it the Gulf of Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing -- but, dammit, he's gonna do it anyway. So there.

As night follows day, naturally, the Felon's congressional bootlicks have caught that spirit, too. One Republican lint brain from Georgia (what is it about Georgia?) proposed the other day that the Congress authorize the Felon to buy Greenland and rename it Red, White and Blue Land.

I actually had to look that one up to make sure it wasn't a satirical bit. It's not.

At any rate, in response to this (and the Felon's threat to strong-arm Denmark into turning over Greenland to the U.S.), the Danes are doing some next-level trolling. Thousands of them, apparently, have signed a tongue-in-cheek petition for Denmark to buy California from the U.S. In return, the Danes promise California "rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries."

Which I suppose would make California, I don't know, the Land of Brigitte Nielsen or something. 

It would also do something else, come to think of it.

With the Rams, Chargers and 49ers all located in California, it would finally allow Roger Goodell to fulfill his dream of having not just one European NFL franchise, but three.

Win-win!

Stuff happens

 Hey, I don't know. Maybe Bob Knight had something to do with it.

Maybe somewhere up there in the celestial realm he looked down and saw Michigan State's Tom Izzo about to pass him as the Big Ten's all-time winningest coach, and he got his back up. Threw an ectoplasmic chair. Stomped around the ether. Looked down at these Indiana Hoosiers and said, "(Bad word he's not supposed to say where he is), now play some basketball, you (other bad word he's not supposed to say)."

Whatev'. All we can say for sure is what was on the Breslin Center scoreboard there at the end Tuesday night: 71-67. In favor of the visitors.

"But ... but I thought Michigan State was 19-4 and ranked 11th," you're saying now.

They were.

"And they were at home."

Indeed.

"And Indiana had lost five in a row and seven of its last eight, and Mike Woodson had stepped down, which means they were a ghost ship riding the Limbo Sea for this last month of the season."

Horrible metaphor, but ... yup.

So how to explain Indiana 71, Michigan State 67?

How to explain Oumar Bello, who'd been AWOL the last two games, going for 14 points and 10 rebounds despite being saddled with foul trouble? How to explain Malik Reneau, who'd been virtually invisible since a knee injury knocked him onto the sidelines for 20 days in January, coming off the bench in beast mode, busting the Spartans with 19 points and a dozen boards?

That's 33 points and 22 rebounds between them against the Michigan State bigs, if you're keeping score at home. The Hoosiers still couldn't throw it in the Gulf of Mexico from the 3-point line -- they missed 13 of their 16 tries from the arc -- but Luke Goode, who started in Reneau's place, got two of those on four attempts and made four steals on the other end. 

Michigan State, meanwhile, shot even worse (38 percent overall, 4-of-23 from the arc), and Indiana played a remarkably clean floor game, turning it over just nine times. That included Nervous Time down at the end, where for once the Hoosiers didn't blow it with an opponent filling their mirrors.

Hit six free throws in the last 13 seconds. Outscored Sparty 11-4 over the next three minutes after the home five got within two with 6:17 left. Stuff like that.

"Why, that doesn't sound like Indiana at all," you're saying.

Nope. For one thing, it was the first time they'd beaten a top 25 team all season.

So, who knows, maybe Sir Bob of Knight was pulling some heavenly strings. Or maybe with all the Woodson drama finally resolved, the tension is gone now. The Hoosiers had been playing like a held breath as they fumbled away games and their fans turned on them and the speculation about Woodson's future mounted. Now, finally, they can exhale.

Which of course would be the irony of ironies, if there's anything to that.

For Mike Woodson's team to play the way Mike Woodson wanted it to, Mike Woodson had to leave.

It's a theory.

Some Big Super Game Bowl thoughts

 The Philadelphia Eagles painted New Orleans green last night, so laissez les bon temps rouler and all that -- and, please, Philly, no sacking the Liberty Bell to celebrate. Thing's already got a crack in it, remember. And the Eagles did enough sacking for everyone.

Six times they brought Patrick Mahomes to earth behind the line, and not once did the zebras dock 'em for it, which spoiled the Tinfoil Hat Brigade's pet theory. Turns out you can lay a finger on the Pampered One without drawing laundry for it, just as it turned out the Chiefs were not immune to the penalty phase.

Seven times they were flagged last night, after all, for 75 yards. The Eagles were penalized eight times, but for only 59 yards. And, yes, they even got away with a couple. 

A moment of silence, then, for The NFL Is Rigged crowd. May your brain cells work better in the next life than they do in this one.

A few other thoughts on the evening's festivities, which -- Dammit, ya jamokes, I told you to keep your mitts off the stinkin' bell!:

* The Eagles D-line vs. the Chiefs O-line might have been the biggest mismatch in Super Bowl history.

Six times the Iggles sacked Mahomes, as noted; a pile of other times they scored pressures or chased him around the backfield like Rocky Balboa (Philly guy!) chasing that chicken in "Rocky II." The Chiefs O-line was reduced to grabbing fistfuls of green jersey, and Mahomes, his rhythm in shambles and his ability to read the field stolen, threw two picks.

Most ruinous, of course, was the pick six he threw to rookie Cooper De Jean, who got to celebrate his 22nd birthday in the most wondrous manner possible. That pumped a 10-0 Eagles lead to 17-0 and started the cave-in.

Eye-popping stat of the night: The Eagles came within 34 seconds of holding Mahomes and Co. scoreless through three quarters.

Second eye-popping stat of the night: Not only that, the Chiefs didn't even cross midfield until the 2:30 mark of the third. 

Third eye-popping stat of the night: The Eagles did all of this sacking and pressuring of Mahomes with a four-man rush. Not once did their defensive mad scientist, Vic Fangio, dial up a blitz. Not. Once.

* Jalen Hurts deserved his MVP. But they shoulda cut it in half.

That's because Josh Sweat had a game for the ages on the other side of the ball, and the other side of the ball was as much responsible for the 40-22 blowout as Hurts' and the offense. 

Jalen's numbers: 17-of-22 passing for 221 yards and two touchdown, and 11 carries for 72 yards (a Supe record for quarterbacks) and another score. Plus a superb job of beating  Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo's dreaded blitzes.

Josh's numbers: Six tackles, 2.5 sacks, another two tackles for loss. Plus untold disruption of Andy Reid's best-laid plans.

Co-MVPs. Or so it says here.

* Tom Brady is not very good at this.

And by "this", I mean the broadcast thing.

 The guy is just too stiff for this gig, sadly enough. His camaraderie with his broadcast partners seems forced (sometimes painfully so), and his insights are not particularly insightful; too many times last night, I found myself saying "Well, duh" when he made a point. Also, he kept saying "If the Chiefs don't do such-and-such now, this game is over" long after the game clearly was over.

I give it a "D+", Dick Clark. Doesn't have a beat and you can't dance to it.

 *The halftime show brought out the thinly-veiled racism in a bunch of folks.

Or so I gathered from scrolling through the interwhatsis.

Old white people (and some not so old) of a particular ideological bent thought it was the WORST HALFTIME SHOW ever, with one troll snarking he hoped everyone liked the Black Nationalist halftime show. Apparently there were just too many black people out there for his tastes.

Me?

Hell, I'm a thisclose-to-70-year-old white guy who thought Kendrick Lamar was Saquon Barkley's backup. So what do I know?

I thought the choreography was tight. I also realized I was the wrong demographic for a Grammy-winning hip-hop star, which meant my almost-70-year-old ears didn't understand a word the man was saying -- or even if I was supposed to.

But the Samuel L. Jackson part was cool. Also the Serena Williams cameo.  

I give it an  "A-", Dick.

*  Speaking of Saquon Barkley ...

... how did you not get a little misty, seeing his unrestrained joy as the clock got skinny?

Dude gets rescued in the offseason from the vast wasteland that is the New York Giants,  and less than a year later he's hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after one of the greatest seasons a running back has ever had. The Chiefs D kept him mostly in check last night -- he ran 25 times for 57 yards, a measly 2.3 average, and his longest gain was a 10-yarder -- but you think he cared? 

He did not. He looked like Papillon escaping Devil's Island, only with better teeth. Hey, you bastards! I'm still here!

And last but not least ...

* Someone in IndyCar seems finally to have grown a clue.

"And what exactly does this have to do with the Big Super Game Bowl, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Well, it has to do with it because the Big Super Game Bowl ads have become a thing in themselves, and there were three IndyCar ads in the mix. And they were pretty awesome.

One featured reigning IndyCar champ Alex Palou. One featured Pato O'Ward. And one featured Josef Newgarden, whose chiseled good looks were spoofed with a cameo by Tom Brady, who scoffed, "He's not THAT handsome."

Anyway, they were all snappy and hip and did what IndyCar enthusiasts have been screaming at the sport to do for years: Throw a spotlight on all its dynamic young talent and have some fun with them.

As for the rest of the Supe ads ...

Pretty weak crop, frankly. The Harrison Ford ad for Jeep was decent ("Even if my name is Ford"). The Dunkin' Donuts ad taking barely disguised shots at Starbucks was kind of amusing.  A lot of the others were simply trying too hard -- especially that weird ad featuring Seal as a seal.

Only the Chiefs O-line was worse.

Postscript

 And now the endgame, as Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson makes it official that Mike Woodson will step down at the conclusion of this season. The endgame, or ... or ...

Well, what do you call this last month, with Woodson still running a program that has moved on?

Postscript? Coda? Epilogue? The Long Goodbye?

Strange and stranger, these deep winter days down in Bloomington. Yesterday, for instance, 24 hours after Dolson's announcement, Woodson got a nice round of applause in Assembly Hall as his team took the floor to face Michigan. No one booed. No cries of "Fire Woodson!" floated like mustard gas from the upper reaches. There was even full-throated support for Woodson's Hoosiers as they roared back from a 17-point deficit to almost, but not quite, get the W.

Instead, they lost again for the seventh time in eight games, 70-67.

They're 14-10 now, 5-8 in the Big Ten, and even Woodson admitted in the postgame his players were adrift both mentally and emotionally. But then how could they not be at this point?

They, too, heard the fans who booed them off the floor the last time they were in the Hall raucously cheer them yesterday.

They, too, heard those same fans applaud their coach.

And they, too, heard them also applaud Michigan coach Dusty May, IU alum and now an official object of desire for Candy Stripe Nation.

Strange days, indeed.

In the postgame yesterday, Woodson spoke of how it's his job now to lift his team emotionally for the stretch run, but it remains to be seen how he does that. From here on out, after all, "his job," amounts to keeping a seat warm, because someone has to. From here on out, in the minds of everyone in B-town, it is already someone else's job.

Dusty May's?

Yeah, maybe, but doubtful. He's only in his first season at Michigan, where he has indeed already lifted the program.  But despite his success there, and the miracle he worked at Florida Atlantic,  there's still the tiniest flavor-of-the-month feel to him. And even if Indiana decided it wanted him badly enough to throw very large green at him, Michigan's one of the few schools that can go checkbook-to-checkbook with it.

So who else?

And please don't say "Brad Stevens," although some IU fans deep into the hallucinogens these days will. Stevens is one of the best front-office talents in the NBA and a Celtic through-and-through after a dozen years in Boston. Indiana would have better luck getting Red Auerbach to come to Bloomington, and Red's been dead for 18 years.

So who, then?

Beats me. The field of candidates is wide open. The only prerequisites, it seems, would be A) a college buckets guy who gets how college buckets work in 2025, and who isn't yet sick of it; and B)  a college buckets guy who gets how college buckets work and isn't yet sick of it, and who also has a long record of consistent success, particularly in March.

Alas, Tom Izzo ain't comin'.

Meanwhile, Mike Woodson and his team soldier on, with the rest of February and a piece March still stretching out before them. They soldier on -- through a dead present and a live future, travelers on a road that has already ended.

Strange and stranger.

And now ... the Big prediction

 All week long, dammit. All week long, these voices in my head.

One voice says this: Ya know, Philly has the kind of team that can beat the Chiefs. Physical. Strong up front on both sides. Clock-munching running game.

The other voices says this: What are you, nuts? You never pick against Mahomes in the playoffs. Never, ever, ever.

First voice: Yeah, but ... Jalen Hurts. Jalen Carter. Saquon Barkley.

Second voice: Travis Kelce. Chris Jones. Andy Reid with two weeks to prepare.

First voice: Eagles down seven vs. Chiefs O-line. Mismatch.

Second voice: Mahomes, Kelce, Xavier Worthy, Hollywood Brown et al vs. young Eagles secondary. Mismatch.

And then ...

First voice: Also, remember whose head we're occupying.

Second voice: Ah. Good point.

Good point, because I am hardly ever right about these things. I am, in fact, notorious among my circle of family and friends for being hardly ever right about these things. And  there's no reason to believe that trend will change with the Big Super Game Bowl tomorrow. 

In which cases, condolences in advance to Reid, Mahomes, the Kelce family, Taylor Swift and the entire Chiefs Kingdom. 'Cause I'm picking Kansas City.

Actually, I figure it will go one of two ways tomorrow night in New Orleans, either of which is entirely plausible. 

In one scenario, the Eagles dominate up front, Hurts and Barkley go for eleventy-hundred yards apiece, and Philly wins laughing, 37-20.

In the other, the Chiefs are down 21-17 after three, but then Mahomes runs for a score and throws for another in the fourth quarter, and the Chiefs win 31-27.

I'm going with the second scenario. Partly because I'm history-struck by the whole three-Super-Bowls-in-a-row thing, and partly because the Chiefs just know how to win these deals.

They've been there. They've done that. And they're a better team than they were last year, with more speed on offense and a killer D folks tend to overlook because they're too busy watching Mahomes pull rabbits out of hats.

My only qualm -- OK, so my biggest qualm -- is every time I turn on the TV, another yapping radio poodle or ex-jock or Mina Kimes is picking Kansas City, too. Which is usually a bad sign.

Meh. Don't care. I'm pickin' the Chiefs anyway.

A guy's gotta be strong in these situations, after all.

History on a loop, Part Deux

 Multiple news sources are reporting Mike Woodson and Indiana have come to some sort of accommodation (or not) regarding his employment, which suggests (or not) he's either going to retire or be gently ushered out the door. Apparently some sort of announcement will be made prior to Indiana's home game tomorrow against Michigan.

Or, you know, not.

Truth is, no one really knows for sure until they know for sure, and that moment has not yet come. But if -- if -- the news sources have the story straight, it appears the money boys have at last grown disenchanted with Woody. And when the checks stop coming, the parting of ways is always the next item on the agenda.

So, then. Let's say the newsies do have the story straight, and Woodson is a dead man walking. What does that tell us about where Indiana basketball is here in February 2025?

"That it's not where it was four decades ago?" you're saying now.

Well, duh. 

"That it's still chasing the long-dead glory days?" 

Warmer.

"That it clings to the notion that if only Indiana could hire the right coach, it could be 1987 again -- when Keith Smart hit The Shot down in New Orleans, and time pretty much stopped?"

Now we're talkin'.

Now we're talkin' the crux of the problem here, which is that time never stops, really. It just keeps rolling on and on, and landscapes roll on and on with it, changing irrevocably along the way. 

The only constant in nature is change, surprise, surprise. That's why 1987 might as well be 1387 for all relevance it has to 2025. In every conceivable way, college basketball is not the same game anymore, nor will it ever be again. They might as well have been shooting basketballs with laces at peach baskets when Smart hit The Shot.

Who doesn't know that, except for a certain subset of IU basketball fans?

That subset grows smaller by the year, thankfully, but it still animates the constant dissatisfaction that's vandalized IU hoops since Bob Knight fire-bombed his own legacy.  That happened 25 years ago, and Woodson, a Knight acolyte, is the sixth head coach IU has had since. If he's gone, at the end of this season or immediately, the next guy will be the seventh.

Seven head coaches in a quarter century. That's an average of one do-over every 3.5 seasons.

You see the problem here.

Now, this is not to say the do-overs weren't warranted. Kelvin Sampson turned out to be a crook. Archie Miller turned out to be whatever Archie Miller was. And it's not like the latest man in the barrel hasn't earned his walking papers.

In four seasons under Woodson, the Hoosiers have made the NCAA Tournament twice -- both times with Trayce Jackson-Davis -- but have never gotten out of the first weekend. He's 77-49 overall, but a distressing number of those 77 wins have come against non-marquee opponents. In Big Ten play, Woody's a .500 coach (36-36).

Last season the Hoosiers went 19-14, lost to Nebraska three times by an average of 19 points, and failed to make the tournament. By the time the Cornhuskers shucked them one last time by 27 in the Big Ten tournament, everyone was so sick of the season they decided not to play in any postseason event.

And this season?

Well, you know how it's gone. Woodson loaded up on more big-deal transfers, enough that some observers thought Indiana had a legit shot at the Big Ten title. Instead ...

Instead, the Hoosiers enter the Michigan game 14-9 and 5-7 in conference, tied for ninth. They've lost six of their last seven and are 2-9 against Quad 1 opponents. The two wins are against an Ohio State team rated 25th and a Penn State team rated 60th.

Not the sort of resume that gets you into the Madness. Which is why all the projections at the moment have Indiana not getting into the Madness.

But could it someday, with the Right Coach?

Sure, if that aforementioned subset of fans let him stick around for more than 3.5 years.

And could the Right Coach get IU back to the Final Four, where it hasn't been in 23 years?

Of course. After all, it was Mike Davis who got them there last time, not Saint Bob of Knight. 

Mike Davis: Who, four years later, resigned under fire in the middle of his sixth season.

But, hey. He beat the average.

The matriarch

 Virginia McCaskey breathed her last this week at the stubborn age of 102, on the cusp of yet another Super Bowl in which her football team will not play. 

I guess if you could sum her up in one sentence, that would be it.

On the one hand, she was the matriarch of the NFL, having sat in the big chair longer than any other current owner. She took over the Chicago Bears when her daddy, George Halas, died in 1983, and she was still at the top of the letterhead when she passed 42 years later. 

Whether she should have been, and whether her family still should have been, is a topic currently being hotly debated in Chicago and its environs. And that's other part of her legacy.

Under her, and her family's, direction, the Bears played in two Super Bowls in 42 seasons. They won in 1986 with Walter Payton and the greatest single-season defense in league history. They lost to another Peyton and the Indianapolis Colts in 2007. They haven't been close to being back since.

Since losing a wild-card game to New Orleans in 2020, the Bears haven't sniffed the playoffs, going 21-47 in the four seasons since. They've burned through two head coaches in that time (the Matts, Nagy and Eberflus) and drafted two alleged franchise quarterbacks -- one of whom (Justin Fields) they gave up on so they could pick the other one (Caleb Williams). The jury's still out on the latter, although he did just have the best rookie season in franchise history while playing for an awful team.

It got so bad this season, cries of  "Sell the team" were heard in Soldier Field, directed of course at Virginia and her family. This was a cut above the advice you usually hear from the bleachers, but realists understood the chances of the McCaskeys actually taking that advice hovered somewhere between zero and zero.

Now?

Well, you'd think the matriarch's passing might lead to an organizational shakeup, but probably not. The McCaskeys are as entrenched in Chicago as the Germans were at the Somme, after all. Maybe Virginia's passing will lead to mystical, magical things on the football field this fall, or maybe it won't. Bears fans can only hope.

Less fanciful minds, of course, realize the Bears are still the Bears, and will no doubt continue to do Bears things. No matter what celestial strings Virginia and her daddy pull from the great beyond, that seems the more likely scenario at this point.

But, hey. Wouldn't it be a great storyline if it wasn't?

Bigotry in disguise

 So I see the Felon in Chief waved his Magic Executive Order Wand again the other day and banished transgender athletes to the nether regions, which he's not empowered to do but did anyway. Afterward, he announced the "war on women's sports" by those freaky vandals was officially over.

Well, that's a relief.

I used to lie awake at night wondering when some icky transgender was going to take Caitlin Clark's job.

I also used to wonder when I would go to a girls high school basketball game or volleyball match or swim meet and see no REAL GIRLS out there anymore, because boys posing as girls had taken all their spots.

Thank god the Felon and ideological brethren like our Bible-thumping reverend/lieutenant governor Micah Beckwith -- who the other day championed Indiana's own version of the transgender athlete ban -- were on the case.

I feel better now. Female athletes can feel better. Heck, Caitlin Clark can feel better, knowing some Stephanie Curry won't be coming for her job.

Now if only the Felon and the Rev and their ilk would do something about all the dolphins taking over Olympic swimming.

"Oh, please,"  you're saying now. "That's a ridiculous analogy. There are no dolphins in Olympic swimming -- although the jury's still out on Michael Phelps."

Yeah? Well, maybe you're just not paying attention.

Dolphins are everywhere in Olympic swimming these days, cleverly made up to look like humans. Why, the evidence is irrefutable. You think Katie Ledecky is a real human? Aw, HELL, no. The woman is Flipper.

The Blob stands foursquare against such trans-species perversion. Now it's time for America to address this serious threat to fair athletic competition, too.

He said, tongue deeply imbedded in cheek.

Because, listen, claiming dolphins pose a threat to Olympic swimming is ridiculous. Of course it is. But it's not a very long jaunt down Ridiculous Street from that to what the Felon and the Rev have been saying about transgenders taking over women's sports.

"No more robbing girls of championships, scholarships, and lifelong dreams," the Rev tweeted the other day. "This bill (HB1041) exists because we've watched biological males ... shatter girls records that took years of dedication to achieve! Dominate competitions, leaving female athletes demoralized! Snatch college scholarships that were meant to empower young women!"*

(*Exclamation points mine)

And now for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say.

All those icky transgender athletes shattering girls records and demoralizing female athletes and stealing scholarships?

They must really get around, because there are hardly any of 'em.

Two months ago, for instance, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified he knew of only ten or so transgender athletes among the NCAA's 510,000 student-athletes. Moreover, guidelines exist in both national and international sports -- testosterone levels and what-not -- to safeguard against exactly the sort of sky-is-falling scenarios the Felon and the Rev falsely present.

And if transgenders really are "taking over girls and women's sports", how come the research shows states permitting them to compete have more girls competing in sports than states that ban them?

So ... yeah. Hysteria, all of this. Solution in search of a problem. Bigotry dressed up as fairness, because folks like the Felon and the Rev apparently do think transgenders are icky and freaky and perverted, and want to keep them marginalized by banning them from sports under the guise of "protecting" girls from imaginary threats.

Me?

Only experience I've had with a transgender athlete was years ago, when I covered the U.S. Clay Courts in Indianapolis. One afternoon I covered a match between Chris Evert and Renee Richards, who was named Richard Raskind before he had underwent gender-affirming care.

Now, Raskind was a decent athlete who played tennis at Yale and was a good enough baseball player to bring the Yankees sniffing around. So according to the anti-transgender narrative, Renee Richards was therefore a threat to women's tennis because surely the former Richard Raskind would mop the floor with all those defenseless girls, steal their records and championships, and utterly demoralize them.

Ahem, no. Instead, Evert mopped the floor with Richards in straight sets. At the time, Richards was at the tail end of five seasons on the women's pro circuit, during which she was never ranked higher than 20th in the world and never came close to winning a major. 

So much for taking over women's sports.

Those dolphins, though, man. Now there's a real problem.

History on a loop

 The stars in their courses held true last night in the basketball universe, and that was a good thing. At least there's some status that remains quo in these mad times.

Which is to say, Purdue was its usual efficient self in handling a hot Iowa team on the road, 90-81. Same old Boilers.

Which is also to say, Indiana lost in Madison, Wis., for the 21st straight time, going down 76-64 in a game that was essentially over six minutes in.

Same old Hoosiers.

Fun fact to know and tell: The last time the Hoosiers won at Wisconsin, head coach Mike Woodson was 39 years old. He's 66 now.

Other fun fact to now and tell: The last time the Hoosiers won at Wisconsin, the oldest players on the current roster were still three years away from being born.

That's because it was 1998, right after the 27-year-old Bradley Center opened. That's so long ago, Bob Knight, who died in 2023, was still coaching Indiana. It's so long ago A.J. Guyton, who's 46 now, was playing for him.

In other words, it's been a long damn time since Indiana figured out the Badgers in Madison. And it sure didn't get any shorter last night, when history maintained its loop and the Hoosiers maintained theirs.

Once again, in other words, they couldn't throw it in the ocean from the 3-point arc, missing 20 of their 27 attempts. Couldn't defend the 3-point arc, either, where Wisconsin shot 41.4 percent (12 of 29). Got 15 points on 5-of-13 shooting from Mackenzie Mgbako; 11 on 4-of-12 shooting from Luke Goode; and 10 from Myles Rice. And not a whole lot from anyone else.

As has been noted, the evening's suspense lasted all of six minutes. By that time, Wisconsin led 24-4, the Bradley Center was howling, and for the rest of the night Indiana was essentially trying to climb Everest in board shorts and flip-flops.

Needless to say, the Hoosiers didn't make the summit. It was the sixth loss in their last seven games, they've gone from 13-3 to 14-9, and March is just a month away.

Remember last fall, when Woodson gathered his latest crop of high-end recruits and transfer portal studs, and even people who should have known better were picking the Hoosiers to contend for the Big Ten title, and maybe even win it?

Seems like a long time ago.

Seems like, I don't know, 27 years ago, maybe.

Stirrings

 It hit 56 degrees here in the Fort yesterday, and the snow is down to a few stubborn piles where the plows have run. So I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up the S-word.

That word would be "spring", of course.

Oh, it's not close to being here yet -- Elvis not only is not yet in the building, the building is not yet in the building -- but for awhile yesterday the sun on your face didn't feel quite so winter-sterile. And every so often, you caught, perhaps not a whiff, but at least the memory of a whiff of living things in the air.

The world is still deeply asleep in this precinct, and next week February will likely break our hearts again in its usual jerkwater February way. But for one day, or part of the day, there were stirrings. For one day, or part of a day, we got to pretend February wasn't the SOB it usually is.

Also, something happened over the weekend down in Winston-Salem, N.C.

What happened, at an ancient historical site known as Bowman Gray Stadium, was a bunch of muscled-up rolling billboards went rumbling and blaring around Bowman Gray's well-worn quarter-mile of asphalt.

The Clash, NASCAR's annual preseason kickoff event, happened Sunday night, which means Daytona is right around the corner, and that means -- along with pitchers and catchers reporting -- winter doesn't have much left on the clock. The Clash used to be run at Daytona, which made it even more of a kickoff event. But last year NASCAR ran it in the Coliseum in L.A., and last weekend it landed at Bowman Gray as a tip of the cap to its mostly dead past.

Bowman Gray, see, played host to a regular NASCAR soiree from 1958 to 1971, before Winston brought the big money to the series and launched it on its current trajectory. Put simply, it outgrew quaint little places like Bowman Gray. Just like the NFL outgrew, say, Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, War Memorial in Buffalo and the Pontiac Silverdome, all  merely memories now.

So this was a sweet dip into nostalgia, NASCAR returning to Bowman Gray for one night. Chase Elliott won -- which, unlike when it ran at Daytona a week before the 500, offered no hint about how he'll run on Daytona's 2.5 miles and 31-degree banking. 

No matter. The point is, if the stock cars are running again, maybe 56 degrees in early February in northeast Indiana wasn't quite the outlier it seemed. 

A body can imagine so, anyway.

Imports and exports

 Been following with some interest lately the Felon in Chief's misbegotten trade war on Canada and Mexico, and it got me to thinking about last fall. My wife and I vacationed north of the border then, see, and now I'm wondering now if we shouldn't have stayed. 

People actually were sane there. The beer was cold, the music in a certain blues club was fine, and no one was running around with his or her hair on fire ranting about the Haitians or Venezuelans or Africans.

Hell, down on Rue St. Denis in the university district of Montreal, some of 'em even had their own restaurants. And, wonder of wonders, the immigration gestapo wasn't kicking down their doors. Refreshing.

Anyway, one night we were in the aforementioned certain blues club on St. Denis and struck up a conversation with a bartender, who somewhat surprisingly didn't think the Felon was batshite crazy. He thought no one had much to fear from the Felon, that a lot of the talk that he was Training Wheels Mussolini was overblown. He sounded quite reasonable, in the reasonable Canadian way.

I wonder what he's thinking now.

Because now the Felon is trying to bully Canada because, as he always does, he thinks the Canadians are taking advantage of their vastly richer and more powerful next door neighbor. And so he's strapped an across-the-board 25% tariff on both Canadian goods and Mexican goods, and Canada's retaliated with its own 25% tariff, and now we've got a completely unnecessary trade war just like the trade war with China that backfired so badly in the Felon's first term.

Some guys never learn. No matter how much remedial help you try to give them.

At any rate, because my job was covering Sportsball World for almost 40 years, I got to thinking about all the cool sports stuff that's come down over the years from the Great White North to enrich the lives of its ungrateful neighbors. And I figure this is the perfect time to remind everyone of some of it, and what would happen if someone back in the day had gone full Felon on Canada.

We never would have gotten to mangle Yvan Cournoyer's name, for one thing.

Also, we wouldn't have gotten the full effect of Ted Lindsay's crooked smile, or learned the meaning of a "Gordie Howe Hat Trick" (a goal, an assist and a fight), or laughed with as much appreciation when Strother Martin said "Oh, f*** Eddie Shore!" in "Slapshot." Heck, "Slapshot" wouldn't have been "Slapshot" without all the Canadians in the cast. 

And that's just hockey.

For instance, where would Purdue basketball have been last season without Toronto native Zach Edey? Not in the national championship game, surely.

And speaking of basketball, know who the best player is on the team with the best record in the NBA right now?

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Oklahoma City Thunder. Canadian.

Or how about those Chicago Cubs?

Would their star-crossed history be complete without Ferguson Jenkins, the first Canadian to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Shoot, the MVP of last fall's World Series was Freddie Freeman, a Canadian-American. Vlad Guerrero Jr.? Joey Votto? Justin Morneau? Jason Bay? Hall of Famer Larry Walker?

Canadian-American. Canadian-American. Canadian. Canadian. Canadian.

And speaking of Chicago ...

Let's hear it for your Chicago Bears!

Who've got your George Halas and your Walter Payton and your Gale Sayers and your Dick Butkus in their long and spangled history, among many others. And whose first superstar, arguably, was Bronko Nagurski.

Bronko Freakin' Nagurski. Canadian.

"And, hey, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Don't forget all those NFL guys who played in the Canadian Football League, like Warren Moon and Cookie Gilchrist and Joe Theismann, who started his career with the Toronto Argonauts."

Absolutely not. Although I'll never quite understand that weird deal where the CFL had two teams with the same name: The Ottawa Rough Riders, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. 

At least the Felon hasn't slapped a Duplicate Nickname tariff on 'em yet, though. So at least there's that.