Starting Five

1. “LOUIE, LOUIE, LOUIE, LOUIEEEE….VILLE”

Within a span of a couple of hours on Easter Sunday night, both the Cardinals men’s and women’s basketball teams created tremors in their resepective NCAA tourneys. First, the No. 1 seeded men found themeselves tied at 42-42 with  No. 2 seed Duke at the 16-minute mark only to outscore them 43-21 the rest of the way. They advance to their second consecutive Final Four.

The No. 5 seeded-women pulled off the biggest shocker of either tournament, dethroning No. 1 Baylor, the defending national champion, 82-81. The Bears had won 74 of their previous 75 games and beaten their first two opponents in the tourney by 42 and 38 points, respectively. How did the Cardinals do it? By shooting an outrageous 64% from beyond the arc (16 of 25) and going all African fire ant on Baylor’s 6-8 physical marvel, Brittney Griner, whenever she stepped into the post.

History will show that Baylor went 74-2 in the final two seasons of Griner’s career (and that of Odyssey Sims, who had 29 points in the defeat). Both losses came this season, to the Cardinal of Stanford and the Cardinals of L’ville.

Thus endeth the career of Griner, who finishes 111 points shy of breaking Southwest Missouri State’s Jackie Stiles’ NCAA career-scoring record. Had the Bears gone all the way to the championship game –three more contests –that prize would have been in reach.

Jackie Stiles: 3,393 points

Brittney Griner: 3,282 points

2. WHO. WHAT. HOW. WHEN. WHY. AND WARE.

Of course, the indelible moment of yesterday’s contest occurred when Louisville’s Kevin Ware broke his lower right leg in two places, a gruesome sports moment that belongs in the Joe Theismann/Marcus Lattimore/Randy Livingston/Lindsay Vonn pantheon of the Hall of Pain. Ware broke his leg while landing awkwardly after leaping to block a jump shot by Duke’s Tyler Thornton. Ware never touched anyone else. The break released a torrent of tweets, of course, and was itself a spark in terms of how the media handles, well, everything:

1) SB Nation tweeted: “We’ve made an executive decision not to gif that Kevin Ware injury.” (If you want to know how far –although in what direction, I might ask?– sports journalism has traveled in the past 15 years, just reread that sentence to someone from 1998. It’s a foreign language). Dan Wetzel replied on Twitter — well, I cannot tell you exactly what Dan tweeted, because he has since deleted his Tweet (OWN YOUR ERRORS!!!), but it was something akin to, “Do they want a cookie?”

 

2) Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated won friends in the Commonwealth and elsewhere when, only minutes after Ware suffered the horrific injury, he tweeted out a link to a story he had written for the New York Times that revolved around Ware’s recruitment.

3) CBS, which on Thursday demonstrated how sensitive it is to whatever Twitter’s prevailing mood happens to be (hello, Mr. Barkley), chose not to re-air even one replay of Ware’s injury at halftime, even though it was certainly the most eventful moment of the first half, if not the tournament.

4) SI’s “Extra Mustard” column had an entire story about Kevin Ware-related tweets without ever mentioning Thamel’s. The piece had 39 tweets — two by Thamel himself — and yet not THAT tweet. That’s like a synopsis of the Old Testament that never mentions Abraham.

5) Finally, immediately after the injury occurred, while most of us viewers were still unaware of what had happened, CBS showed an overhead shot of three Louisville players (none of them Ware) sprawled in the free throw lane as if they had all just been mowed down by a hit-and-run vehicle (go to the :23 mark). I wondered if two of them had collided. It took a few seconds to realize that the trio were reacting to the injury they had just witnessed. That aerial view, whether or not the CBS producer who cut to it intended it or not, was one of the most provocative and poignant shots I have ever seen.

My Thoughts: They dovetail pretty much with those of Clay Travis, who had his up first last night. Let’s tackle Thamel first. I honestly don’t think Pete was attempting to be self-promotional — he works for SI now, for one, and this is a story from his tenure at the New York Times — as much as he is guilty of being tone-deaf. Yes, Jason Whitlock, nobody died, but it was still an awful moment for Ware. That Pete found a link to his old story and then tweeted it out at the speed of, well, Peyton Siva, is a huge, huge tell about where his priorities rest. I really just think he was trying to provide more information. But that tweet revealed far more about Pete than it did about Kevin Ware…

…AS for CBS, they blew it. Nobody needs to see the torture porn that SportsCenter is oft-guilty of committing when it comes to epic moments no matter who is the victim (How many times did they air Jadeveon Clowney’s ht in the first days of January?). But at halftime CBS took the supposed high road by not even showing the replay of the injury once. This was huge news and CBS is choosing not to show it? Why? So as not to unleash a Twitter backlash and then Charles Barkley will have to come on later and remind us, yet again, to get ourselves a life (because watching basketball for a living and opining on it apparently means that you have a life)? CBS should have had Greg Gumbel inform viewers that they were going to show this, once, that the footage was graphic in nature and so that we should not watch if we did not want to toss our Honeybaked hams, and then air it. And react to it. CBS abrogated its responsibility here.

…I’m even more disturbed by those in sports media who are saluting SBNation, USA Today, and CBS for not re-airing either the gif or clip of Ware’s injury. I’m quite certain that those of you who share my sentiments feel every bit as bad about Ware’s catastrophic injury as those people do. But we recognize that news is news.

…Finally, if you’ve ever stood on a raised basketball court inside a football stadium (as last night’s court, at Lucas Oil Stadium, was), you quickly get an appreciation for an altered frame of refrence. The closest analogy I can make is being on a trampoline and, when you leap, being keenly aware of how close you are to leaping off the edge. I have no idea if that altered frame of reference has anything to do with why Ware landed as awkwardly as he did. Perhaps not. I know that other players have suffered gruesome leg injuries when that was not a factor. I guess we’ll never know. But I don’t discount the possibility.

3. Happy Anniversary to Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell, and to the motorcycle ride that shook up the SEC West. As Coach Petrino can now tell you, curves are a dangerous thing to navigate.

 

4. The man whom sports fans saw on-air more often than any other talking head last month? It’s not complicated. It was the AT&T pitch man, whose name is unknown to most. Until now. He’s Beck Bennett, 28, an alumnus of both New Trier High School (located in the John Hughesian North Shore suburb of Wilmette, Ill.) and the University of Southern California. Here’s Beck and a pal from his comedy troupe, Theatre of Life, pulling a Mystery Science Theater 3000 at the Strand at Venice Beach.

5. It’s Opening Day of baseball season (pipe down, Astro fans) and it’s April Fool’s Day, and so I’d direct you to a link of Jason Gay’s classic 2007 piece for GQ, “The Boy of Summer”, if I could find it anywhere on-line. Very sorry that I cannot. If any of you do, please send it along and I will link it. Simply outstanding, and it fooled some huge names in the sports media biz.

RESERVES

 

She cannot get into her dream school, perhaps, but Suzy Lee Weiss did get published in the Wall Street Journal. So she has that going for her, which is nice.

Game of Thrones meets Game of Throws. Winter is here! Spring is here! The third season of Game of Thrones premieres just an hour or so after the first pitch of the 2013 baseball season. Lots of gruesome deaths and all, but notice that every Lannister and Stark child still lives.

REMOTE PATROL

Opening Day

ESPN 1 p.m. to midnight

Last Friday: Pray. Bawl. Today, Monday: Play ball! Let the true start of spring –and summer! –begin.