Pepper

3/26/2012

• John Calipari and Rick Pitino are not the same person. Honest to God, I had no idea.

Can you tell them apart?

• My alma mater lost in the Elite 8 this weekend. It wasn’t that they lost, but that they got totally handled. After the first period, it wasn’t close. Even after pulling their goalie for the last three minutes, the soon-to-not-be-the-Sioux couldn’t put together a decent shot. Good on the Gophers, who were humiliated on their own ice a couple weeks ago when we scored six unanswered against them on the way to the Broadmoor Trophy. The Gophers advance to the Frozen Four to face top-seeded Boston College. On the other side of the bracket, Union will face Ferris State. That’s two very storied franchises playing for a trip to the finals (for those of you who don’t believe/know that college hockey is a real thing, it would be like Duke playing Kansas) to face one of two teams playing in the finals for the first time (Lehigh playing Norfolk St.). Dear NCAA Hockey: You might want to spread those power teams across the brackets next year.*

• I’ll be staying up until the wee hours to watch the Mariners play the A’s in Japan for the first MLB game of the season. I believe it begins at 2 in the morning. I teach seven hours later. That should be a good class.

• The NFL is almost comically negligent in how it treats player injuries. Especially concussions. Justin Morneau had a not-ridiculously-serious concussion. Not the sort of concussion you get it you smash your helmet into another helmeted head while both of you are moving at a rapid pace and are both among the strongest men on the planet. He was out for over a year. NFL quarterbacks are back in the same game, or at most, they take a week off. And that’s just the quarterbacks. I would guess that every NFL player gets concussed every season. At least mildly. And teams just keep running the dudes back out there. We praise a player’s toughness. We say nothing of the stupidity of such behavior, nor anything about the teams that treat their players as a commodity, to be used until broken, and then replaced. Like lightbulbs. It would be comical if we weren’t talking about actual humans. “They get paid really well.” “It’s a free country, they can do something less dangerous if they want to.” Yep. True. No less idiotic, but true. I don’t know how I got on this tangent.

• Tiger Woods won at Bay Hill, ending a 2+ year winless slump, during which he lost pretty much everything: wife, house, kids, reputation, game. I’m not sure why nonracists root against Tiger Woods, but it has something to do with his on- and off-course demeanor. He isn’t like Phil. He hates the media. He doesn’t joke around. I wouldn’t want to have a beer with the guy. He’s prickly. Some kid fainted during his swing, and the kid’s mother screamed, causing Tiger to hit a drive pretty much identical to every drive I’ve ever hit, and Tiger didn’t ask if the kid was okay during his press conference. Tiger’s a petulant child, who drops his club, yells, pumps his fist when things are going well, blah blah blah. Tiger Woods is a pro golfer, people. His only job is to win, and he’s been programmed since birth to do so. He’s the Todd Marinovich of golf, only he managed to hold it together for longer, and get addicted to sex rather than drugs. Tiger reminds me of a lot of the really great writers or artists. They are so singularly focused on their craft, that they don’t give much of a shit about anything but the thing that they do better than anyone else on the planet. And for the most part, they are terrible people. Drunks, long lines of failed marriages, mean-spirited, abusive. But they produce great art. And so does Tiger. It always amuses me when society creates monsters, and then indicts the monsters for having been created to be such good monsters.

• I shouldn’t write these after I teach Writing I. I apparently hate society after I teach Writing I.

• The NFL was not too hard on Gregg Williams, Sean Payton, or the Saints organization. Isn’t the sport violent enough? Do they really need to pay the players extra for hurting their opponents? Why couldn’t someone have hurt Hines Ward a long time ago? Anyway, I imagine this isn’t the only head-hunting program in the NFL. I imagine it’s one of 32. But like SMU, the Saints were the ones who got caught, and the punishment is severe. Coach gone for a year, assistants gone for six games. Gregg Williams gone indefinitely (I can’t imagine he’s out of football more than a season). Organization loses draft picks. Too severe for something that probably occurs across the league? As long as the league pretends that it is concerned for the safety of it’s players, no.

*for more on the bungling of this year’s post-season college hockey coverage and the tournament in general, see Ashley’s comment, which is sure to appear below any time now.