by John Walters
Starting Five
Duke Done
Three of Duke’s five starters will be taken among the first seven picks, at worst, of this spring’s NBA draft, but that wasn’t enough. Michigan State takes down the Blue Devils, who’d been living dangerously ever since the second round, 68-67.
Meanwhile, Coach K inexplicably fails to follow the Jimmy Chitwood Rule (“Give the ball to your best player in a win-or-lose possession”) and lets R.J. Barrett go for the winning bucket. Barrett makes just one of two free throws, Zion Williamson never gets a touch, and that’s the end of this mini-Duke era. Great talents, yes, but in the end Duke only advances as far as Purdue, Gonzaga and Kentucky.
Our old friend Matt Zemek pointed out that the Blue Devils, for all the attention they garner (no college hoops teams garners more, and certainly didn’t this season; ESPN basically held a memorial service for Zion on SportsCenter last night), have only been to two Final Fours in the past 15 years. Here is a list of schools that have advanced to as many or more in that same time span: Louisville, Villanova, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Butler, Florida, Michigan State, UCLA, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, Butler and Syracuse in the same time frame.
Meanwhile, Geno Auriemma and Connecticut just advanced to their 12th consecutive Final Four. Is there less parity in women’s basketball (yes) but given that both coaches routinely pick from the top of the recruiting tree, one of them has a more bountiful harvest.
Louisville Sluggers
Edwards was outstanding in defeat
Somebody lost in Louisville on Saturday evening, but that’s only because the rules dictate somebody must. Purdue and Virginia played an overtime classic. Carsen Edwards was unconscious, burying ten threes and scoring 42 points. Kyle Guy of Virginia was nearly as special, though, with five threes (all after halftime) and 25 points. Although, on UVA’s season-saving play, three different Wahoos (Ty Jerome, Mamadi Diakite, Kihei Clark, and again Daikite) touched the ball, none of them guy.
The Louisville regional was bonkers. On Thursday night, Tennessee led Purdue by 2 in the 3 seconds and lost in overtime. Two nights later, Purdue led UVA by 2 in the final 6 seconds and lost in overtime.
It’ll be a Duke-free (for the 13th time in the past 15 seasons, mind you) Final Four, but what will be un is that three of the four schools have never cut down the nets. Only Michigan State has.
3. We Were At Your Funeral, Denise
We’d never heard of writer/cable news provocateur D.C. McAllister before last week (and surely she’d never heard of us), but then she sent out a nasty tweet about The View, and then Meghan McCain launched a meme in reply (“You were at my wedding, Denise”). That got the ball rolling.
Then McAllister sent out a tweet about being a good wife and getting her hubby a beer and shutting her trap during the UNC game (they live in North Carolina) and advised fellow ladies to do the same by their men. Then Twitter got all “You ain’t woke, girl!” on her, after which she clapped back at fellow writer Yashar Ali, who is gay, for being among the pitchfork-toting horde, with a series of tweets:
“A gay man commenting on a heterosexual relationship is just. Sad. Pathetic really,”
“I think @yashar has a crush on me. Maybe I’m making him doubt his love of penis,”
“Oh so sad. @yashar is lost. He doesn’t know his purpose as a man. He doesn’t know his purpose as a human being. He doesn’t know his purpose as an Individual. So he wallows and tries to find himself in another man’s asshole.”
And then The Federalist decided to, how do we say it in 2019, “part ways” with her. And of course now will come the “what ever happened to free speech” brush back from her defenders. So it goes…
4. Zagat’s Gonna Explode
NYC’s finest culinary establishment
Props to the Los Angeles Times for not forgetting today’s date with their “For Cramped New York, An Expanding Dining Scene” piece.
“Surrounded by rats, black trash bags and graffiti-tagged storefronts on Broadway Street, New York’s primary thoroughfare, I wondered aloud if I would be able to find a decent meal in what was surely a culinary heart of darkness.”
(This would have been an accurate observation in 1977)
5. Nobody Wins! (Again)
Race founder Gary “Lazarus Lake” or “Laz” Cantrell, who is himself not nor has he ever been, a runner
At the annual Barkleys Marathon, a rural Tennessee race inspired by the escape of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, nobody finished. Yet again.
Forty runners went out this weekend on the 100-mile multi-loop course, including the only man to ever finish Barkleys three times, Jared Campbell, and the last man to finish it, two years ago, John Kelly. They, too, tapped out before the deadline.
What makes the Barkleys so near-impossible (15 total finishers since 1986) is that the course is nearly unmarked and the weather and terrain is inhospitable. But mostly it’s the getting lost. The Barkleys is like doing a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded, pretty much.
Music 101
Juke Box Hero
When Lou Gramm sings, “One guitar!” two guitars suddenly jam. Just sayin’… We never really got into Foreigner, but they had quite the successful run in the late Seventies/early Eighties. This, off their fourth album, 4 (at least Spinal Tap took the time to conjure album titles like Intravenous De Milo and Shark Sandwich), was one of a plethora of Top 40 hits.
Remote Patrol
The Tender Trap
6 p.m. TCM
Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds and Celeste Holm (she was a glue guy of Fifties films) star in a 1955 romantic comedy. I doubt any of you will watch this, but just humor me.