Last Call: Nobody's Perfect
Pleszczynski, Wladyslaw
"Last Call: Nobody's Perfect" by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski Nobody's Perfect LIKE ALL GREAT AMERICAN SPORTS metaphors, "March Madness" isn't simply about basketball anymore. In a typical recent...
...In a typical recent sampling, one hockey writer used it to characterize a goalie's three shutouts in four games...
...The wife of one of our finest contributors, for instance, is friends with Dean Smith's niece, and was absolutely thrilled to run into an admirer of that outstanding North Carolina coach...
...Recruited heavily by UCLA, he opted for the less crazed environment of USC...
...They came back from a lot this season, and they dealt with a lot of off-court distractions," Terrapin coach Gary Williams said before his team was selected, adding that he wanted his "guys to get the respect they deserve...
...a local resort organized a weekend March Madness Ski Festival (snow volleyball, anyone...
...Mediocre was the kindest word to describe the performance of its key seniors, one of whom was suspended for several games after taking out a fishy loan to pay off thousands of dollars in campus parking fines—this before it turned out that two of his teammates owe thousands of their own in similar fines...
...He was stylish and he could play, a not unnatural condition for conservatives since time immemorial...
...This year's edition was the slowest in memory—but more importantly didn't win against a single top opponent, winding up 19-12...
...Five weeks later it had another shot at UCLA, but lost 73-62, the winner going on to take the NCAA tournament...
...LAST CALL by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski :k1,1 ri;IrtnAlkoa 446• Nobody's Perfect LIKE ALL GREAT AMERICAN SPORTS metaphors, "March Madness" isn't simply about basketball anymore...
...At a lively reception for the book I even picked up some basketball trivia...
...THE STAR OF THAT USC TEAM was Paul Westphal, who would flourish in the NBA as a player and coach, most recently in Phoenix, where he also won fame as an original Limbaugh dittohead...
...In fact he did so twice in three days, accusing Republicans of giving new meaning to the concept in their budget proposals...
...And all of them feeling just as entitled...
...Since at least half of the contributors have written for this magazine, some since the 1970's, who's calling whom stodgy...
...The near-perfect loser was USC, and it went nowhere...
...The inclusion of Indiana University, our former Bloomington neighbor, was particularly unnecessary...
...The NCAA tournament was about to start, and CBS had forty-eight games to televise in four days—starring sixty-four teams, many of them as undeserving as the beneficiaries of Daschle's spending programs...
...The rules were clear—coming close still mattered only in horseshoes...
...Twenty years ago, another Knight team set a different standard, winning the NCAA in the last undefeated season in college basketball...
...TAKE THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND TERRAPINS, the ACC's fifth-place team that finished 17-12, having defeated maybe one major opponent on the road in a season that saw it lose most every other game that mattered, home or away...
...How right he was...
...And the madness continues," he warned on March 13...
...As IT TURNED OUT, SIX ACC TEAMS were chosen, and only its best two survived into the final sixteen...
...Bobby Knight is a great coach and all that, but if it isn't time that's passed him by, then surely a lot of faster players have...
...And that's just what they got...
...A team like that might have reason to compete in the Ivy League, but not for a national championship...
...The top team in the country turned out to be UCLA, led by the mephistophelean Sidney Wicks, which finished 29-1...
...Very predictably this time—in the same spirit that has turned Al Franken's surprisingly witless Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot into a number one bestseller— Senate minority leader Tom Daschle applied the term to his friends from the GOP...
...In those days, only league champions competed in the post-season...
...I'd first heard of Westphal when we were high schoolers, and he was maybe the only right-handed high school guard in southern California who could dunk with his left hand...
...His trendy support of ERA and the nuclear freeze a few years back is another matter...
...two analysts, rather predictably, wrote about "this year's March madness in the Taiwan straits...
...Selection inflation also affected five Big 10 teams, none of whom lasted the first weekend...
...Twenty-five years ago, something even more remarkable occurred...
...The second-best team that year wound up 24-2, and for a time was ranked number one —until it played Pacific Eight rival UCLA on February 6, 1971, and lost 64-60, having led 59-50 with nine minutes left...
...I asked one writer whether the coach of his favorite college team, which had a dismal season, was going to be canned...
...78 May 1996 • The American Spectator...
...Smart, savvy, hip, and hilariously irreverent," the publisher hyped, "these writers define the conservative movement and shatter its stodgy blue-serge-suit image...
...In an early afternoon game in the middle of nowhere in the tournament's opening round, they lost to an obscure Santa Clara University squad led by a British Columbian...
...I forgot to inquire whether that came before or after his team had won a slot in last year's tournament...
...Two years ago his Hoosiers played in the NCAAs in nearby Landover—a friend who was in attendance thought they were using a medicine ball...
...Turns out the fellow was nearly fired a year ago, after leaving his wife for the cheerleader he'd impregnated...
...No word yet on what they owe the library...
...I mention this, having recently seen a press release for Backward and Upward (Vintage Books, $13), a new anthology of off-beat conservative writing edited by David Brooks...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
