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March Madness in Montreal |
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From the NHL's cancellation to the U.S. Congress's discovery that baseball players took steroids (who would have imagined?) to Boston College's Jermaine Watson jumping from a second storey window to escape from masked gunmen, 2005 has started in the same fashion that 2004 ended - bizarre. Maybe Henry V. Porter knew more than he let on when he coined the phrase "March Madness" for a high school basketball tournament in Illinois in 1939. Never has one of sports' most famous phrases been so true. Hoop Dreams Let the "Madness" begin! College basketball takes centre stage for the next two-and-a-half weeks as the NCAA tournament tips off today, Thursday, March 17, with 64 teams (forget the play-in game!) vying for the opportunity to cut down the laces April 4 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Mendez grew up one of 12 children in Little Burgundy, and played his way out of the projects by shooting hoops on a rim that he drilled 13 feet high (regulation is 10 feet) on the side of his building. He has since drilled enough jumpers that he has scored more points than any other Canadian in NCAA history, and was named the 2004-05 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Player of the Year, and will graduate with a degree in sociology. Which, if you ask Sun Youth's Earl De La Perralle, is more important than scoring titles and Player of the Year awards. If you want to get on his athletic Wall of Fame, tournament appearances won't do it. Getting a diploma will. For over 50 years now, De La Perralle has not only been helping Montrealers in need, but has been instrumental in giving the city's youth the opportunity to pursue their athletic dreams by emphasizing academic performance, helping hundreds earn their degrees with college scholarships - players like Thomas, Gonzaga's Pierre-Marie Altidor-Cespedes and Mendez's Niagara teammate Greg Noel, all of whom played their youth basketball at Sun Youth. Whether any of these players gets to cut the nets down on the first Monday in April is as insignificant as the game's box score. Just ask the Wall of Fame. 'Roid Rage Congress's three-ring circus starts today, March 17, as Jose Canseco, Curt Shilling, Frank Thomas, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire have all been subpoenaed to testify as to how and why steroid use spread through Major League Baseball like acne on Tony Mandarich's back. Predicting what is going to happen over the coming days is like trying to guess where a Rick Ankiel fastball is going to end up. Expect one or more of the players to plead the Fifth, including Mark McGwire, who allegedly has spiked his veins more times than Courtney Love. This probably wasn't the "return to Washington" that MLB had envisioned. Bracket Buster Thursday, March 17 Comments? sportsrage@team990.com |
First off, let me just say that it's great to be back after six weeks of being on hiatus. After dozens of calls and 300 or so angry e-mails to the Mirror's editors demanding my return, the suits on the top floor have found some space for us to once again "vent our rage." That is, if we stop calling and sending all of those aforementioned angry e-mails! Otherwise all future columns will be printed without edit, thereby exposing us for the undereducated, overpaid frauds that we are. Now, if only someone would do the same for the National Hockey League Players' Association. 
Montreal could not be better represented, as LaSalle's Sheray Thomas comes into the tourney with the perennial powerhouse Kentucky Wildcats, while Little Burgundy's Juan Mendez leads the Niagara Purple Eagles to the dance for the first time in 35 years. Both Thomas and Mendez have inspirational stories to tell, as Thomas had a benign tumour removed from his abdomen this past October, only to come back and help his team finish with a 25-5 record, all the while continuing to attend classes - despite the fact that post-surgery nausea caused him to lose 30 pounds. |
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