The world is in serious trouble. Budgets for education and health care are being cut dramatically. (What’s wrong with this picture?) Nuclear water 100,000 times more radioactive than normal ambient readings, is leaking into the Pacific Ocean. The Middle East is in turmoil, caught in a revolutionary wild fire.
And Kansas lost to VCU in the Elite Eight.
As I said, the world is in serious trouble.
OK, I knew Kansas was in trouble about two minutes into the game when, with a 6-0 lead, the camera caught one of The Twins exhorting the crowd to cheer. Six-zero does not indicate a significant moment in the game. The job ain’t done… the job has barely begun. Had a sense of entitlement set in?
Somebody needed to explain to the players the difference between entitle-ment and title win.
What followed was a disappointing evening for the faithful. Have you ever tried to strike wet matches to light a campfire? You just keep thinking the next one will spark up and you’ll get that tinder going and any minute now the flames will spread.
For a minute it looked like the sparks might catch on, but then a couple of defensive assignments were forgotten and the team with no entitlement came raging back.
Here’s the stunning part. The eight-graph Kansas City Star article – I’m still confused about why a sports writer at such an event could only squeeze out eight graphs before morning – garnered 94 pages of comments within two hours. Today it stands at 1,300 comments despite being retired from the front page of the Web site. Another Elite Eight story garnered more than 900 comments.
Which adds up to more than 2,200 instances of the most vacuous drool the human mind has ever produced.
Yes, the world is in serious trouble. Kansas lost in the Elite Eight. Fifty-six teams, including Ohio and Duke, went home first. And, by the way, pink slips went out in the Kansas City, Kansas school district -- 57 comments --, the Shawnee Mission School District is set to slash million from its budget, six nuclear reactors are in serious trouble in Japan, the United States is participating in a third simultaneous war, the Middle East has come unhinged…
Stay tuned for further developments ... on KU basketball.
--Lofflin -- and if you want to think more about "irony and outrage" read this fine story from today's New York Times (while it's still free...)
PPS: If I were a basketball coach I would put an immediate stop to this habit of raising the arms above the head begging fans to cheer. Everything about this all-too-common WWE-style practice is wrong. It absolutely shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening in the game. Are you actually saying, "Hey, we did something great here but you people in the stands didn't recognize it because you're too stupid?" If I were a coach, I'd tell my players -- let your actions tell the story. If you play well enough, the fans will cheer. If you don't (or if it is only two minutes into the game...) they won't cheer. Your focus is on the game -- or it should be. Let the cheerleaders do their jobs and you do yours.
Reed photo courtesy: http://www.stsnews.com/news-morris-twins-lead-kansas-past-texas-a/
Morris photo courtesy: http://www.kansan.com/staff/mike_lavieri/
No comments:
Post a Comment