Hello sports fans. I'm sitting out on the balcony of the Vatican, having my morning espresso, going over the sports page of L'Osservatore Romano. Let me tell you, I don't like what I see.
The Catholic Church started out with ten--ten!--schools out of 64 on the Road to the Final Four. So far, 8 have been knocked on their donkeys like St. Paul and are lying in a ditch next to the breakdown lane. We have only two teams in the Sweet 16. This is not good.
"Nothing but net!"
Let me tell you, Villanova or Xavier better make it at least to the Final Four, or there will be hell to pay. Literally.
Mark Few
I'm thinking, for example, of Gonzaga. Every year, the Zags are the darlings of March Madness. This year--eliminated in the first round! I've got a call into the Archdiocese of Spokane. This guy Mark Few--the head coach--as far as I'm concerned he's leftover tuna noodle casserole about to be scraped into the cafeteria garbage bin of college basketball history. And there won't be any nun standing by to tell me to take my tray back to my seat and clean my plate because there are point guards starving in Bosnia-Herzogovinia.
Emeka Okafor
Here comes Francis Arinze, the Cardinal from Nigeria. He's been completely insufferable since he picked UConn to go all the way in 2004. Big deal, he knew Omeka Ekafor, or Emeka Okafor, or however you spell it. Wants to be called "the patron saint of Hoops". Puh-lease. Makes me want to gag. Thank God we have St. Blaise, the patron saint of people who get things stuck in their throats. How ya doing, Frank--nice to see you too. Yeah, see you in the gym later.
St. Blaise: "Try a throat lozenge."
Blow it out your shorts you overgrown ball boy.
I'm looking at my sheets and wondering where I went wrong. Davidson beat Georgetown in the second round--I sure as hell didn't see that one coming. Screwed up my whole Midwest bracket, and the entire game I was throwing everything I had at the TV. Leaning into the low-post to help the Hoyas get better position, setting invisible moving picks to get G-town open looks. Then Arinze walks in and says "It won't do you any good--the game's on tape delay." What a wise-guy. All because he figured out how to work the DVD player in the Vatican rec room first.
I'm pretty sure I'm still the Pope, the direct descendant and living embodiment of St. Peter. They were eliminated in the first round, too. No wait--that was St. Joseph's. And St. Mary's.
If Kansas beats Villanova, and West Virginia beats Xavier, I'll have nothing to watch but boring half-court NBA basketball until next fall.
Remember to check Baltimore Catechism and see if suicide is still a mortal sin.
NEW YORK. Encouraged by the success of its business-casual dress code in reforming the league's "hip-hop" image, NBA officials today announced that they will push for a "tattoo cap" when the current collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of the 2011 season.
Stern: "A tasteful 'Mom' on your bicep will not count against the cap."
"We feel it is important that our players not scare the bejesus out of affluent demographic groups with gangsta-style tattoos," David Stern said at a press conference here today. "Otherwise we might as well name the next two expansion franchises the 'Crips' and the 'Bloods'," he added, showing off his "street cred" to the admiration of NBA beat reporters.
"This kid's got a lot of heart, and a lot of epidermis."
Under the proposed cap, teams would be limited to a total tattoo coverage of 61% of the upper arms and necks of players on their twelve-man rosters. Teams could free up cap space by trading a power forward from an "urban" school for a shooting guard from Brigham Young or a flat-footed center from Gonzaga.
Seattle SuperSonics' owners: "Well, there was this girl named 'Tina' . . ."
Player representatives reacted angrily to the proposal. Mark Madsden of the Timberwolves said he wanted to see the bodies of NBA owners in the showers before agreeing to any cap. "Some of these guys may have 'Semper Fi' on their butts. Let them drop their pants and show the players what they got."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
