This is the year that for some crazy reason, NASCAR Weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, USA Sevens rugby at Sam Boyd Stadium, UFC 196 at the MGM Grand Garden and the West Coast Conference men’s and women’s basketball tournaments at the Orleans Arena will be held in Las Vegas, concurrently, or at least within the same 72 hours or thereabouts.
After four months of changes at the top, the votes are in and the Oscar for the best college basketball team goes to Kansas. The acceptance speech will be made by coach Bill Self.
You can almost smell the high octane, the burning rubber, the barbecue on the grill, the suntan lotion. You can almost see the questionable yellow flag that bunches up the field toward the end of the race.
On the January evening Dave Rice was fired just three games into the Mountain West schedule, as unprecedented a move as you will find in college basketball, he looked UNLV’s seniors in the eyes and promised they would see him again.
There’s a special bond that develops over time between a kid and his baseball glove. Even if the kid is from Canada. So when 17-year-old Jake Polancic of British Columbia lost his glove in Henderson, he was distraught. That glove meant a lot to him. It had sentimental value.
First things first: There is no perfect way to ensure that everyone will be kept safe. Not the losing team and its coaches. Not even the winning team and its coaches.
A big story this spring has been if Songbird, the Eclipse champion 2-year-old filly, would consider a start in the Kentucky Derby against males.
We again have foolishly mixed athletic gifts with moral compass, shocked those we admire most for their physical skills in sports aren’t also shining examples of virtue and acceptance.
It is amazing how fast and how drastically things can change in a decade or two. Technology has turned our world upside down on many fronts and in equally many ways. Not only in regards to home or work but also things outdoors.
We might be witnessing the worst college season for officiating in history, and that’s saying more than a mouthful about those blowing whistles. But rare is the night in which games don’t include questionable calls, no calls, clock errors, interpretation errors, miscues of all types.
