It’ll Be One Shining Moment for Somebody
March Madness is everywhere.
“Fill out your brackets, people,” said Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” “Robert Blake has been found innocent, so he advances out of that bracket and will now be facing the winner of the Michael Jackson trial.
“So we’re really hoping to crown a national embarrassment champion at the end of all this.”
Trivia time: Where did Bob Knight coach before going to Indiana in 1971? And where did Mike Krzyzewski coach before going to Duke in 1981? (The correct answer fits both questions.)
Computer overload: Now this is just nuts. ESPN.com, which is offering a $10,000 first prize, plus a high-definition television set, to a randomly selected winner, reports that more than 1.5 million people submitted more than 3 million bracket entries on its site alone.
And for a couple of hours before the first games on Thursday, the website was getting about 1,500 entries a minute.
Caught in a ram jam: It was bad enough that Ben Siegert, a defensive end for Oregon State, was pulled over by sheriff’s deputies in Corvallis and charged with driving under the influence. Making matters worse was that the junior from Glendale, Ariz., had a 200-pound ram in the bed of his pickup truck, and the ram had been stolen from the school’s Sheep Center.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Siegert told the Corvallis Gazette-Times. “I’m from a city. I don’t know anything about sheep.”
However, he wasn’t able to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. A sheriff’s department spokeswoman said he might have been “too intoxicated to remember.”
He’s not the first: Tom Nichols, the manager of Oregon State’s Sheep Center, said the ram found in the back of Siegert’s pickup was not the first sheep taken from the center.
“We have at least one prank a year, where we have to go to a dormitory or a sorority house and pick up a ram or a lamb or a ewe.”
Must not be much to do in Corvallis.
Looking back: This has been “lopsided day” in the NBA. The Minneapolis Lakers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 133-75, on March 19, 1955; the Los Angeles Lakers beat Golden State, 162-99, on March 19, 1972; and Golden State beat Indiana, 150-91, on March 19, 1977.
The most lopsided game in NBA history was a 148-80 Cleveland victory over Miami on Dec. 17, 1991. The Lakers’ 63-point victory in 1972 ranks third.
Trivia answer: Army.
And finally: Does Knight get the credit he deserves? Maybe not.
After Texas Tech’s 78-66 victory over UCLA, David Boyce of the Kansas City Star wrote, “The sarcastic one-liners that Texas Tech Coach Bob Knight utters in his postgame comments sometimes make it easy to forget the beautiful brand of basketball his team plays on the court.”
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Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.