The headline to this post refers to an amazing 1955 Sports Illustrated piece about the Kentucky Derby by some Faulkner dude who could write a little.
It also refers to the fact that unlike most of America, I have worked Saturdays for my entire adult life. This not only doesn’t bother me, it’s an enormous relief. Consider the errands and “home improvement,” projects I’ve missed. Consider the time spent in odious places like Wal-Mart and Lowe’s I’ve avoided.
When you work at a Sunday paper, though, Saturday can be a long day. I was at Millersville’s first spring football practice at about 9:10 this morning, and the sports dept. won’t be done with its work until around midnight, especially since Kansas-North Carolina likely won’t be over until around deadline.
While they are long days, they aren’t often unrelentingly busy. Blogging in this case is a more productive version of, say, doing Sudoku, or a crossword puzzle. In fact, at various points in the evening I’ll be blogging and doing a Sudoku.
The Phils just blew one to the Reds, and we’re about two hours from UCLA-Memphis. This will be a simple brain-purging session….
I was thinking that one of the more remarkable things about this year’s NCAA’s has been how little griping there’s been about Billy Packer. Then I saw this.
Packer has gone downhill as he’s gotten older and has said some incredibly dumb things, but he sometimes gets an unfair rap. Here’s an example from the link above:
Packer, a man with a tradition for eating his shoe, similarly criticized the 1979 Indiana State team, which went on to play in the championship game and featured the clearly overrated Larry Bird.
I’ve heard this essential claim 100 times. While it’s not strictly speaking utterly false, it’s at best an extremely deceptive. Bird’s ISU team was undefeated until the national final vs. Michigan State/Magic. But for most if not all of the regular season it wasn’t ranked No. 1 in the country. DePaul was, and strength of schedule was the entire reason. ISU was in the Missouri Valley Conference, which wasn’t nearly as top-to-bottom strong then as it is now. DePaul, then an independent, was playing a killer national schedule. ISU wasn’t number one for the same reason that in football this year, Hawaii wasn’t.
So Packer would go on TV and get asked by Dick Enberg if he thought Indiana State should be ranked No. 1. Packer said no, he didn’t, since it had played a clearly inferior schedule. In other words, Packer was saying he agreed with the voters in the AP and UPI polls.
Of course, Packer got ripped because he happened to be the guy saying it out loud on national TV, but the truth is his “criticism,” was only agreeing with the media consensus. The same media that’s been ripping him about it ever since.
Pretty weak.
Here’s one you may remember better, again from the link:
In 2004, Packer got into an argument with St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli when Packer questioned St. Joe’s #1 seeding in the tournament. St. Joe’s barely missed the Final Four on a buzzer shot.
This one is less clear-cut, because Packer has indeed held some opinions over the years that make him look like a shill for the TV-network conferences and therefore against the St. Joe’s of the world.
But recall that a few days before Selection Sunday St. Joe’s was blown out in the A-10 tournament. There were certainly more than four teams, heading into the Dance that year, that would have been favored head-to-head against St. Joe’s.
This doesn’t mean the Hawks didn’t deserve a body-of-work No. 1 seed, but it does mean the opinion that St. Joe’s was not one of the best four teams in the country - which is all Packer was saying - was at the very least defensible, not at all insane. Even now, in retrospect.
On “Daily News Live,” a few days later, Dick Jerardi - whom I like a lot as a writer - tore into Packer like Packer was Osama bin Laden. Jerardi’s main argument was that Packer hadn’t seen St. Joe’s live, in the gym, only on tape.
I did see that St. Joe’s team live, and while they were very good, it was not the hoop equivalent of catching Jimi Hendrix while eating psychedelic mushrooms in a small club in 1963 or something. It was not mystical. I was not changed forever.
More importantly, anyone who does what we do for a living makes judgments on teams and players they haven’t seen live virtually every day. How else could you, for example, vote for an All-American or all-state team? How else could you do anything approaching analysis of the NCAAs, for just one example?
I’m no Billy Packer fan either, but come on.
