Face the Nation

The NCAA college basketball season is finally over, and the next hoopla comes with the NBA playoffs.

Then the sports scene will be dominated by major league baseball, and I will then no longer rush to the daily sports pages, nor anxiously await my weekly Sports Illustrated.

The NCAA tournament had one of the truly class-less team in the University of Kentucky Wildcats, made up of young men with basketball maturity, but some possessed limited social maturity or grace.

Kill the Messenger

Once the misguided media anointed them as the best basketball team ever, they became invincible royalty in their own minds. Their fairly classy coach John Calipari tried to tell his team, and the rest of the world, that they hadn’t accomplished anything yet with their 38 straight wins without a loss.

Wasted on the Young

However, their leading players were very young and of their sixteen players on their roster, four were freshman and seven were sophomores. Of the sixty-eight teams in the NCAA tournament, Kentucky was 24^th on the list of graduation rates.

The Kentucky team’s social immaturity was on display after they lost their first game in the semi-finals against the University of Wisconsin. It has been a custom in these games, that the two teams and their coaches line up, and shake the hand of the opposing team’s players. The only UK person doing so on national television was Coach Calipari, as his dejected, immature players sulked as they dejectedly walked off the court with nary a handshake.

Of course, they are young, and understandably feeling down after they had become the designated champions, before they won the title.

What He Said

The most class-less of them all was one of the African-American Harrison twins, sophomore Andrew. He and the team couldn’t avoid the post game media gathering, where players sit at a table and answer questions. When their outstanding 6’11” African-American freshman center Karl-Anthony Towns was asked about defending against Wisconsin’s 7’0” White senior Frank Kaminsky, Andrew, who was sitting a few feet away, didn’t know that has microphone was open, and muttered into his own mature remarks about Frank.

The straight, Puritanical media couldn’t put Andrews actual words down, so they printed, “F - - - the N - - - - - A media uproar ensued about what Andrew had said, and afterwards, Andrew first tweeted that he wanted to apologize to Frank, and then he called him.

Frank, the mature senior, said, “He apologized to me, we talked about it, we’re over it. Nothing more needs to be made of it.”

What He Meant

Can’t understand what the fuss is all about, and why didn’t Andrew just tell Frank to appear on “Face the Nation?” Isn’t that what Andrew meant before the media inserted all of those dashes, instead of letters, into his quote?