Hats off to the men's and women's college basketball champs.
Duke won the men's title by beating a game Arizona team, 82-72, in a contest that was less than stellar. We saw a lot of bad shooting by both teams, even from the free-throw line. But the Dookies well deserve their third title under Coach K, who continues to run the model program.
Notre Dame won the women's title by defeating cross-state rival Purdue, 68-66. The Irish really shined, though, in the semifinal, staging a 20-point comeback to beat Connecticut..
BOTTOM OF THE WEEK
PETTY THEFT
Could there be any more drama surrounding the Philadelphia 76ers? It was announced that conditioning coach Jon Croce, brother of owner Pat Croce, was dismissed in January for stealing from Allen Iverson's pants in a locker room. A surveillance camera had caught him in the act. You would have thought his brother could have loaned him the money.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK
TALES FROM A MAJOR
LEAGUE LOCKER ROOM
There's nothing overtly gay about it, but sports fans may want to check out "Jocks and Socks: Inside Stories from a Major League Locker Room.'' It was well-received in a Bob Wolfley column in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Written by Jim Ksicinski and Tom Flaherty, the books details Ksicinski's 31-year experiences as a clubhouse manager at Milwaukee County Stadium from 1966 to 1997.
Here are some of the choicer anecdotes, as reported by Wolfley:
--Former Brewer Rob Deer of the Tigers paying "a lot of attention to the way he looked in his uniform and always check(ing) himself out in the clubhouse mirror before heading out to the dugout."
--Ksicinski's experience in April 1963: "Casey (Stengel) walked into the clubhouse, stripped off all of his clothes, slapped on his baseball cap, and pranced around in the nude. He looked like a shriveled white raisin. It was a disgusting sight." At the time Stengel was about 300 years old.
--Ksicinski's observations of the banter in locker rooms: "Major-league locker room humor is a lot like high school locker room humor except it's less sophisticated."
--Jamie Quirk, a utility player for the Kansas City Royals who later played for the Brewers, crying because he missed his
daughter's first day at school.
--Steve Lyons being traded by Boston manager John McNamara after a game at County Stadium in which Lyons tried and failed to steal third base in the ninth inning with his team down by two runs with two outs and two runners on. Wade Boggs was batting.
--Pitcher Roger Clemens blasting his young son on the phone after learning he had played in and lost his first football
game. "Well, you play the game to win," Clemens told his son. "You play the game to knock the guy on his butt."
NOMO'S NO-NO Hideo Nomo is apparently taking well to his shift to the East Coast. In his first start in a Boston Red Sox uniform, the pitcher from Japan threw a no-hitter against Baltimore, 3-0, on April 4. He joins only Cy Young, Nolan Ryan and Jim Bunning to have thrown a no-hitter in both leagues. Nomo owes a big thanks to second baseman Mike Lansing, who saved the
no-hitter with a tumbling catch of Mike Bordick's looper for the second out of the ninth inning.