Blog Archives
Capital traffic and sporting headaches
What is it about state capitals and traffic?
I lived for nine years in Baton Rouge, where the capitol and state offices are at the western edge of the city along the Mississippi River, but the majority of population lives to the east.
Today, I was stuck in a parking lot at an exit off of Interstate 80/35 in Des Moines. Lucky for me, I did not have to go any farther north, because the traffic was worse.
The Iowa capitol and state offices are at the southern edge of Des Moines along Interstate 235. Most of the population lives to the north and east, and that makes I-80/35 look like the end of a football game in Ames or Iowa City.
Topeka has the same problem: state capitol and offices on the east side, most of the population living to the south and west.
As for other capitals, I’ve been to or through Lincoln, Oklahoma City, Austin, Little Rock, Jackson, Montgomery, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Columbia and Nashville, but don’t have enough experience to say much.
Frankfort is way too small to have traffic. The Commonwealth of Kentucky plopped down the capital there because it’s halfway between Louisville and Lexington. Good move. If you’re driving on I-64 between the big cities, be sure to stop in Frankfort to visit the Kentucky capitol and its beautiful floral clock.
Considering what’s happened the last two weeks, traffic was a welcome distraction.
I had a bad case of tonsillitis the week of March 20. Kelsey Lahey Templeman, Dr. Custer’s physician assistant, prescribed me penicillin and dexamethasone, and that cleared it up quickly.
Then there’s the world of sports.
I’m still angry over the way LSU shamed itself in what should have been one of the university’s greatest moments. It’s embarrassing to think people representing the school you (barely) graduated from could act like that.
I did not watch one second of the game live. I slept through it. In fsact, I had a dream while napping that LSU won when Alexis Morris tapped the ball straight into the basket off of a throw-in with two-tenths of a second remaining. There was then a long delay as the officials determined whether or not Morris tapped the ball straight towards the basket, or she caught it first, which would have invalidated the basket.
Under basketball rules at all levels, if there is fewer than four-tenths of a second remaining on the clock, a player may not catch and shoot. This rule was brought about from a 1990 NBA game in which the Knicks’ Trent Tucker caught a inbounds pass with one-tenth of a second left, turned around and drained a 3-pointer to defeat the Bulls at Madison Square Garden. In fact, here’s a link to Tucker’s shot on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP0t-BXCi1c
I avoided looking for the result until approximately two hours after the game ended. I accidentally surfed to ESPN’s home page, and there was a big picture of Kim Mulkey smiling and wearing another ridiculous outfit.
Then I saw a headline about Caitlin Clark, Iowa’s superstar and the National Player of the Year, receiving a technical foul for supposed disrespect towards referee Lisa Jones.
Clark had to sit out much of the first half with three fouls, as Jones and her colleagues, Pualani Spurlock-Welch and Michol Murray, thought the game was about them, not the Tigers or the Hawkeyes. (Where was Dee Kantner, arguably the greatest woman to ever officiate the sport?)
Forty fouls in a Division I national championship game? FORTY? An average of a foul a minute is asinine. That’s what you expect out of a middle school game, not the highest level of collegiate basketball.
I hope LSU has extra money in the budget for rings for Jones, Spurlock-Welsh and Murray. I have heard enough bitching about MLB umpire Angel Hernandez, but I’ve never seen him call anything as egregious as what this trio of robbers did to Iowa.
Jones, Spurlock-Welsh and Murray remind me of another infamous trio of incompetent officials–Patrick Turner, Gary Cavaletto and Todd Prukop, the three NFL zebras who suddenly came down with cataracts when the Rams’ Nickell Robey-Coleman flagrantly interfered with the Saints’ Tommylee Lewis in the NFC championship game in January 2019.
I thought about going to Baton Rouge for an LSU baseball series. Not happening now. I’m still angry about LSU’s disgraceful display in Dallas.
Why should I be surprised? LSU has embarrassed itself so many times over the years it’s now commonplace.
This was far from the worst. Covering up rape by football players takes the cake. Add in the former football coach–married with four children–acting like a frat boy towards female students working in the office, women’s tennis coaches ignoring a rape complaint by one of their players (committed by a football player) and former men’s basketball coach Will Wade breaking every rule in the NCAA manual before he was finally shown the door, and I wonder why I bother supporting that school anymore.
The Masters started today.
I will not watch.
I hate everything about The Masters, especially the haughty attitude of Augusta National members and golf fans who think The Masters is the only tournament that matters.
Memo to those who dismiss the other majors: The Open Championship started SIXTY-TWO YEARS before The Masters. Golf started in SCOTLAND, not the United States.
I’ll look at the leaderboard. But I will not watch a single drive, chip or putt.
The Masters was a great reason to escape Russell. My parents will be glued to it.
Worse, Brooks Koepka, one of the assholes who took the Saudi blood money to join LIV Golf, is tied for the first-round lead.
The West Des Moines Sheraton. A happy place. Reminds me of good times. I have work to do, but there will also be enough time to slip away to Omaha for Pibb Zero, and maybe to the Quad Cities for some hard-to-find sausage.
Time to stop for now. I don’t need to raise my blood pressure.
Sour on the Irish
I was very distressed to see Notre Dame defeat Baylor last night to advance to the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four.
First, I am a HUGE fan of Baylor coach Kim Mulkey. She not only has coached the Bears to two national championships (2005, 2012; the latter saw Baylor go 40-0, led by four-time All-American Britney Griner), she was one of the best to play the game.
Mulkey was a high school All-American in Hammond, La., a college town 45 miles east of Baton Rouge and 50 miles northwest of New Orleans. She went on to enjoy an All-America career at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, helping the Lady Techesters win the first national championship sanctioned by the NCAA in 1982. She capped her playing career by helping the United States win the gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
If the WNBA existed in the mid-1980s, there’s no doubt Mulkey would have gone on to earn numerous All-Pro accolades. But instead, she returned to Ruston and became an assistant to Leon Barmore with the Lady Techsters. Tech won another national championship in 1988, and lost the champioship game in 1994 and 1998. It was assumed Mulkey would succeed Barmore once he opted to retire.
Barmore stubbornly stayed on the bench, and Mulkey became impatient, wanting to become a head coach at a Division I school.
Turns out she had another route.
The lady who began the Louisiana Tech program in the 1970s, Sonja Hogg, was about to retire at Baylor. Hogg, who was co-coach with Barmore when the Techsters won the 1982 championship, recommended Mulkey as her successor.
And the rest is history.
Tech has not been able to sustain its level of success since Mulkey’s departure. It has not advanded past the second round since 2003, and it is currently on its fourth coach since Barmore, Tyler Summitt, the only child of the one and only Pat Summitt, the winningest women’s basketball coach of all time.
Mulkey has moved Baylor to the top of the Big 12, and it should stay there as long as she’s in Waco, but there will always be problems recruiting there, since Baylor is the smallest school in the Big 12 and doesn’t have the deep pocketed donors Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M have, although the Aggies are now in the SEC.
I wish Mulkey were coaching at LSU. There’s no reason she should not be.
First and foremost, Mulkey is from Louisiana. In fact, less than an hour from the LSU campus. LSU is the flagship university of the Bayou State, and it plays in the nation’s elite college athletic conference.
Second, LSU has whiffed big time on its coaching hires since the tragic passing of Sue Gunter.
Gunter was diagnosed with cancer in January 2004 and forced to leave the bench. She would never return, and died in August 2005.
When Gunter took ill, her longtime assistant, Pokey Chatman, took the reigns. Chatman was an All-America point guard at LSU in 1991, and she proved just as adept at coaching, guiding the Bayou Bengals to their first Final Four in 2004, where they suffered a heartbreaking 52-50 loss to Tennessee in the semifinals at New Orleans.
I wish LSU would have considered Mulkey for the permanent job, but I can understand the desire not to change captains of the ship when it’s full steam ahead. Pokey was deserving of calling the shots after the run to the Final Four.
LSU got back to the Final Four the next two seasons, losing to Mulkey’s Baylor Bears in 2005 and Duke in 2006.
Allegations of an improper relationship with a player came up during the 2006-07 season, leading to Pokey’s firing prior to the NCAA tournament.
Bob Starkey, a longtime assistant for both the LSU men’s and women’s programs, coached the team in the NCAA tournmaent. The Bayou Bengals got back to the Final Four, crushing Connecticut 73-51 in the West Region final at Fresno. However, LSU found no more success on the big stage, scoring a meager 35 points in losing to Rutgers.
Starkey wanted the head coaching job. He would have been a better hire than the man who got the job.
Van Chancellor enjoyed tremendous success at Ole Miss for two decades before leading the Houston Comets to the first three WNBA championships in 1997, 1998 and 1999. He then coached the USA Olympic team to gold in Syndey in 2000.
But WHY? WHY in 2007 was he the right fit for LSU?
Mulkey would have been the perfect hire. No reason why LSU could not have offered her the moon. If LSU had the financial wherewithal to make Les Miles and Paul Mainieri the highest paid coaches, or among the highest paid, in their respecitve sports, why couldn’t it do the same for Mulkey?
Chancellor got LSU to the Final Four in 2008, where it lost by one to Tennessee. Combined with the men’s program, LSU has the WORST combined winning percentage of any major school in the Final Four. Zero and Eleven. At least there’s baseball and football.
In the following seasons, LSU backtracked. It didn’t relapse into the pitifulness it experienced in the mid-19909s, when the team won 27 games in three seasons and played before crowds of under 500 at the PMAC, but it wasn’t anywhere near the elite level, either.
Chancellor was fired in 2011, and LSU athletic director Joe Alleva had another chance to hire Mulkey.
Instead, he made another bad hire, picking Nikki Caldwell, a former Tennessee All-American who enjoyed moderate success at UCLA. Caldwell appears in over her head, and I don’t expect LSU to be back in the Final Four any time soon.
Now, why I dislike Notre Dame’s women.
It all stems from its coach, Muffett McGraw.
There was a time I liked the Fighting Irish ladies. Espeically the 200-01 national championship teasm, which featured 6-foot-5 All-Amiercan Ruth Riley and 6-foot-3 Kelley Siemon, the daughter of former Minnesota Vikings All-Pro linebacker Jeff Siemon, who also was an All-American on two Stanford teams which won the Rose Bowl in 1970 and ’71.
Now, I cannot stand the Irish, and I especially cannot stand McGraw, who encouraged her team to wear “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” t-shirts before a couple of December games in support of Michael Brown, the black youth in Ferguson, Mo., who was shot and killed by a police officer in August during an attempted robbery.
I don’t know this for sure, but I would bet McGraw is an unabashed supporter of abortion rights. If she is, she has no business whatsoever coaching at Notre Dame or any other Catholic institution. Again, I hope I’m wrong, but I’m willing to bet she is.
Notre Dame is Catholic in name only now. By allowing Barack Hussein Obama, the most anti-life, pro-abortion leader in the history of the free world, to speak at commenecemtn is a slap in the face to the majority of Catholics, msyelf included, who believe life is sacred and it begins at the moment of conception.
I believe Pope Benedict XVI should have excommunicaterd Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins for extending the invitation for the anthesis of Catholic values to speak at a Catholic university’s commencement.
I am not a fan of Geno Auriemma and Connecticut. But I will glady root for the Huskies over Notre Dame any day now.
Foots Prints 