As good a Sweet Sixteen as we’ve had in years; Mechanism of writing for the regionals

If last weekend is my favorite part of the NCAA basketball Tournament this weekend is my least favorite.

I’m looking at it, mind you, from a purely selfish standpoint. It has nothing to do with the potential quality of the basketball to be played; in fact, this is as good a Sweet Sixteen as we’ve had in years because so many non-power schools have made the second week. Here’s my dream Final Four: Cornell, St. Mary’s, Northern Iowa and Butler—which gets the nod out west over Xavier because it is located IN Indianapolis and because it plays in Hinkle Field House, still one of the most historic places in basketball. (Think ‘Hoosiers,’ if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

For me though—and for my writing brethren—this weekend is a nightmare. On Thursday and Friday the first games don’t start until almost 7:30 which means at the pace tournament games are played these days it is close to 10 o’clock before that game ends. With all the NCAA rules about cooling off periods and the clunkiness of taking players to interview rooms it can take 45 minutes to an hour to get enough in your notebook to think about writing. That means even someone who is fast like me isn’t going to finish writing anything off the first game before 11:30, which is fighting deadline for the home edition of the newspaper (we still care about stuff like that believe it or not) and means that you pretty much miss the first half of the second game because you’re writing.

There’s no chance to write anything that’s going to make any editions off the second game since it won’t tip until at least 10:15—why the NCAA lists “9:57,” I have no clue because there’s no way the game is starting then—and will end about 12:30. So you go to the locker rooms hoping to get a column to write for the next day while the guy writing the game story—here in Syracuse it is Zach Berman for The Post—tries to write a running story (written during the game with a quick lead that goes on top at game’s end) that makes some semblance of sense.

There is nothing worse than trying to write during a game. For one thing you MISS a lot. For another, something that seems critical and worth three paragraphs at one point can be meaningless 10 minutes later. My worst experience with a running column—which is different than a game story because it doesn’t need to contain that much play-by-play--was the national title game in 2008. With a 9:22 tipoff and the game ending after 11:30 I needed to hit the send button within two minutes of the buzzer or the column would miss more than half the newspapers printed that night.

I had written my entire column on Memphis winning the national championship, on how it had proved that its record coming out of Conference-USA was not the result of a weak schedule and that it had beaten two of the great traditional programs of all time in The Final Four: UCLA and Kansas, to finally exorcise the ghosts from its Final Four losses in 1973 and 1985.

Then Memphis’s Achilles heel—free throw shooting—kicked in, Mario Chalmers hit the three just before the buzzer when John Calipari decided not to foul and the game went into overtime. Every word I had written was worthless. I instantly began rewriting on the premise that Kansas was going to win the game. I kept the ‘Memphis-wins,’ column as backup, figuring I’d go back to it if Memphis won, but I was pretty convinced Kansas was going to win at that point.

Of course it did and the paper pushed the deadline for all of us writing to midnight and we just got in under the wire. The screaming and cursing directed at Chalmers and Calipari from press row that night wasn’t personal on any level. We were all just followed the first rule of journalism as explained by the great Dave Anderson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The New York Times: “You are always allowed to root for yourself.”

So tonight, here in Syracuse, I will be rooting for Cornell—how can you NOT root for Cornell if you aren’t a Kentucky fan?—and I will be hoping that something happens in the West Virginia-Washington game that will give me a column of some kind I can write QUICKLY so that I can watch most of the Cornell-Kentucky game.

The other thing about covering the regionals is there’s too much time to kill. I got up here yesterday afternoon in time for the practices and press conferences so I could write a column for today (Column: In NCAA Tournament, Cornell's Big Red and Kentucky's 'Blue Mist' are miles apart on the spectrum). It’s nice that the NCAA opens the locker rooms during the press conference period but it didn’t help anyone that during the time that Steve Donahue was on the podium, the NCAA pulled Ryan Wittman, Jeff Foote and Louis Dale—Cornell’s three best players—out of the locker room and had them sit and twiddle their thumbs in a holding area next to the interview room.

As it was, people were falling over one another in the Cornell locker room, which is about as big as my hotel room, even with Wittman, Foote and Dale not in there. In a dome like this they can’t find four reasonably-sized locker rooms?

Anyway, as soon as I finish this I’ll go swim. That will take me to noon and then….we wait. The first weekend you have afternoon games so you get up, swim (I hope) grab something to eat and go to the arena. That’s fine. Some guys don’t mind down time in a hotel. I go nuts. I like to be doing SOMETHING.

Those who are going to stay for the regional final—not me, I’m out of here tomorrow after I write my column for Saturday’s paper—have TWO days to sit around and do nothing. They can go to the dreary off-day press conferences—no access to practice or the locker rooms—and find something to write and then they SIT until tipoff on Saturday at either 4:30 or 7. Brutal. One year at the Meadowlands I drove home on Thursday night and then drove back for the final on Saturday at 7. Life’s too short to sit around. If we were in Florida or a big city it might be different. But we’re not.

So, I’ll hope for the best tonight, knowing I’ll be lucky if I write something mildly passable. It’s like Bob Woodward said to me years ago when I was wrestling with a lead: “Johnny (he’s one of three people on earth, my mother and David Maraniss being the other two, who ever called me Johnny on a regular basis) some days you just have to fill the space.”

Tonight, unfortunately, is probably about filling the space—and filling it fast.

Tiger Woods decided to pull an A-Rod, but great NCAA Tourney puts in on the back burner for me

It was a spectacular weekend of basketball, sullied only by Tiger Woods deciding to pull an A-Rod by showing up un-announced and un-invited in the middle of the NCAA basketball tournament to give his first two, ‘interviews,’ since the morning of November 27th.

Let’s dispense with Tiger first because it won’t take long. He said absolutely nothing new. This was nothing more than another staged step in the ‘Tiger Over America Image-Rehab Tour.’ Although Golf Channel reported Sunday night that Ari Fleischer was leaving ‘Team Tiger,’ (maybe because people are catching on to his act) this had his fingerprints all over it.

Hand-pick two interviewers: in this case Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman and ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi and tell them they have exactly SIX minutes on camera. That makes follow-up virtually impossible, allowing Woods to duck and weave whenever specific questions were asked. He’s always been good at talking in generalities and now he’s added, “that’s private,” to his arsenal.

So, he essentially said nothing. He repeated that his behavior was ‘disgusting,’; said it all happened because he quit meditating and got away from Buddhism (seriously) and said he loved his wife very much.

Specifics? Forget it. What are you in rehab for?—a legitimate question since he brings it up every 30 seconds—that’s private. What happened on the morning of November 27th?—legit again because he insists that Elin never did anything to him and those who said she did are lying—it’s all in the police report. No, not exactly. What’s your schedule like the rest of the year after Augusta?—don’t know. Of course he knows, he knows EXACTLY what he’s going to be doing on July 18th at 10:48 a.m. That’s who he is.

You know what—it’s fine. At this point I think 99 percent of us simply don’t care anymore. Just tee it up and go play Tiger. Except one thing: don’t tell us you’ve changed. You’re still an absolute control freak; you still got yourself logo’ed up for your 12 minutes on camera; you still are the king of dodge-ball on almost any subject and you’re still dictating terms to anyone and everyone who is willing to let you dictate.

Yes, you are still Tiger Woods. Go win The Masters and a bunch more majors; go sell yourself to a public that no doubt will be willing to be sold. But don’t tell us you’ve changed. Maybe—MAYBE—you can change your on-course behavior. That would be a step in the right direction. Maybe you can sign more than 12 autographs a year. That would be progress.


Okay, now for the important stuff that happened this weekend. Let’s start with the three teams I’d most like to see at The Final Four: Cornell, Northern Iowa and St. Mary’s. Each is a great story in a different way.

The Northern Iowa-Kansas game was one of the wildest and most entertaining games—not to mention stunning—I’ve seen in years. The Panthers were rock solid for about 36 minutes and then, when they had the upset in their sights, they woke up and realized where they were. Suddenly, they couldn’t get the ball inbounds. I actually found myself thinking, ‘this is going to be the game Kansas looks back on as the key moment of the year when it cuts down the nets in Indy.’

Wrong again. Ali Farokhmanesh hit one of the all-time gutsy shots with the lead down to 63-62 and Northern Iowa held on. As my friend Tom Brennnan, the former Vermont coach said later, “there are going to be an amazing number of kids named Ali in Iowa in the next couple of years.”

I had the chance to talk to Northern Iowa Coach Ben Jacobsen on the weekly radio show I’m doing during the tournament and I asked him what went through his mind when Farokemanesh launched the shot. His answer, I thought, was interesting: “I figured we had a better chance with Ali taking the shot than trying to dribble the clock for 20 seconds and probably getting trapped again.”

You have to feel for Bill Self and his players. They had a spectacular season but their year will be defined by the loss on Saturday. That’s the way college basketball works. For all the paeans being sung to Maryland’s Greivis Vasquez and his gutty teammates here in the DC area today, the bottom line is they didn’t make the Sweet 16. And, even though the Vasquezites are saying he’s one of the best five players in Maryland history the stat the matters most is this: wins. In four years, Vasquez played on Maryland teams that won three NCAA Tournament games and never got to the second weekend.

Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter—comparable because they played in the same era as Vasquez, unlike guys like John Lucas, Len Elmore, Tom McMillen, Albert King, Buck Williams, Len Bias and Walt Williams to name a few—won 13 tournament games, played in two Final Fours and won a national title.

Don’t get me wrong. Vasquez had a fabulous year. He deserved ACC player-of-the-year and he hit a bunch of big shots, including the one that gave Maryland the lead on Sunday with six seconds left. And you can’t criticize him for shooting too soon because when you’re down one you need to get a shot up and hope for a rebound if you miss.

But let’s not overstate all this. The Terrapins got into a habit of falling too far behind and figuring their press would bail them out. Often, it did. In postseason—Georgia Tech and Michigan State—it almost did. But almost doesn’t count. On the other hand, they got a lot closer to the Sweet 16 than Georgetown did.

Back to the Cinderellas. If you think Cornell is a fluke, look again. If the Big Red did nothing else this weekend they proved without any doubt that the committee must have been watching another team when it evaluated them and thought they were a No. 12 seed. Their two wins over Temple and Wisconsin, both solid, very well-coached teams, were dominating. In 80 minutes of basketball they trailed for, I think, about one minute. Their margins were 13 and 18 and in both cases they backed off at the finish because the deed was done.

Look, I’m not insane enough to say they’ll beat Kentucky. But I do think it will be a great basketball game. Maybe Kentucky will be too athletic for Cornell over 40 minutes. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is this: Cornell won’t be intimidated. This is a team that’s already played at Kansas and at Syracuse—where this game will be played with a lot of the crowd pulling for the underdog. I just wish it wasn’t tipping off at some time after 10 o’clock—God sometimes I hate CBS—because it means I’ll be up way past my bedtime—but I can’t wait to see it.

Finally: A few words on different conferences. The Pac-10 proved me completely wrong this past weekend and I attribute it to me being silly enough to write the league off because it was lousy in pre-conference play. Teams DO get better—all credit to Washington for what it did and to Cal, which couldn’t handle Duke’s defense, but dominated Louisville.

As for The Big East and the ACC, well, as Ricky Ricardo used to say to Lucy: they’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do. The Big East advanced two of eight teams to the second week. That said, I think both Syracuse and West Virginia are capable of making Indy and if they do all will be well as far as the folks in Providence are concerned.

As for the ACC? ONE team still playing, meaning it matched the Ivy League, The Missouri Valley and the WCC—among others. In fact, here’s a stat worth considering: In the last five seasons, the Missouri Valley has placed four different schools in the sweet sixteen: Bradley, Wichita State, Southern Illinois and now Northern Iowa. During those same five years the ACC—with a LOT more bids—has played THREE of its schools in the sweet sixteen: North Carolina, Duke and Boston College.

Think about that for a minute. Then call the ACC offices in Greensboro, ask to speak to John Swofford and say this: So how’s that football expansion working out for you John?