T1B

Papa Willie wrote:FGC. You've just got to love 'em... :wink:

Mace wrote:

Papa Willie wrote:FGC. You've just got to love 'em... :wink:

Yep, they make a great story and they're fun to watch.

Truman wrote:Fuck Rooty-Tooty. Marshall Henderson is a punk. Nice to see LaSalle take his hotdog ass down a peg-or-three.

Mace wrote:

Truman wrote:Fuck Rooty-Tooty. Marshall Henderson is a punk. Nice to see LaSalle take his hotdog ass down a peg-or-three.

Totally agree with that.

Screw_Michigan wrote:Good to see Jamie Dixon getting the studio work. He's gonna need it in a few years.

MgoBlue-LightSpecial wrote:Specifics were never leaked; he was booted off for not "following team rules." Basically, he was a cancer. I think it was just a lot of little shit that added up over time and Izzo had enough. Chris Allen, who was a class ahead of Lucious, transferred to Iowa State too. ISU = MSU West.

Having a pretty damn nice game/tournament so far.

jiminphilly wrote:

Mace wrote:

Truman wrote:Fuck Rooty-Tooty. Marshall Henderson is a punk. Nice to see LaSalle take his hotdog ass down a peg-or-three.

Totally agree with that.

just got home from the bar.. everyone was against slim shaddy. Fuck that white trash piece of shit.

Rack La Salle.

Screw_Michigan wrote:Good to see Jamie Dixon getting the studio work. He's gonna need it in a few years.

Mace wrote:In other news, it doesn't look right now as if Iowa State was such a "good draw" for the Irish despite the fact that ND is trying to scare the Cyclones with some Oregon-ugly fucking uniforms.

Terry in Crapchester wrote:He just signed an extension through 2023.

Terry in Crapchester wrote:

Mace wrote:In other news, it doesn't look right now as if Iowa State was such a "good draw" for the Irish despite the fact that ND is trying to scare the Cyclones with some Oregon-ugly fucking uniforms.

And in other news, Iowa still didn't make the field. But that hasn't stopped its fanbase from going to the "B1G! B1G! B1G!" card. Props on that. I guess.

Screw_Michigan wrote:

Terry in Crapchester wrote:He just signed an extension through 2023.

Boy, that's great because we all know contracts are always honored until they expire. And we all know once-elite schools that join new conference always give their coaches tons of time to get acclimated even when they're losing in the first round of the tournament.

Idiot.

Mikey wrote:The #12 vs. #5 first round upset can be a good friend.

Mace wrote:Iowa . . . unlike Notre Dame, . . .did beat Iowa State.

Terry in Crapchester wrote:

Mace wrote:Iowa . . . unlike Notre Dame, . . .did beat Iowa State.

Oh, I see you working. Iowa beat Iowa State. Iowa State beat ND. Therefore, Iowa is better than ND.

The old transitive properties argument. m2oodles would be proud.

Everyone used to know who Tom Gola was. Everyone is learning again now. It has been impossible to watch any of La Salle University's three games in this NCAA tournament—three surprising victories that have taken the 13th-seeded Explorers from the first round to the West Region's semifinals—and miss the repeated references that network TV analysts have made to Gola.

If you graduated from La Salle (as I did) or if you grew up in a certain place at a certain time, you appreciate these references. Refreshed by La Salle's run through this tournament, the story of Tom Gola's impact on college basketball is old and rich and significant, and it begins here, in New York.

In 1951, college basketball was in crisis, particularly in the city that was then its capital. Point-shaving scandals at CCNY, Manhattan College, NYU and Long Island University had left the sport in shambles. The public perceived that gamblers, thieves and thugs were overseeing every game, manipulating every final score, and nowhere did this perception threaten the sport's viability more than in New York.




At the time, the National Invitation Tournament, held annually at Madison Square Garden, was the St. Edward's Crown of the college-basketball season. Without the wall-to-wall TV coverage of today, the NCAA tournament hadn't yet emerged as the billion-dollar behemoth it has since become. No, Manhattan was where it was at, and here and around the country, college basketball was in a bad way.





Enter Gola, a 19-year-old freshman guard who had grown up just blocks from La Salle's north Philadelphia campus. Standing 6 feet 6, with a shorter man's ability to dribble and pass and a willingness to play with toughness and unselfishness, Gola was sui generis in that era of basketball. He was Magic Johnson, one sportswriter who covered him said, before Magic Johnson. The son of a police officer ("Poppa's all right," Gola's mother told her children one night, according to a magazine profile. "He hit the robber three times with five shots."), he was college basketball's pre-eminent player during his four years at La Salle, coated in honor, unstained by scandal, and the 1952 NIT was his introduction to the country. Given the circumstances and context, his timing could not have been better.

Gola scored 22 points in La Salle's win over Dayton in the NIT title game at the Garden, capping a season in which he averaged 17.4 points and 17.1 rebounds and helped expand people's thinking about how basketball could be played. He had the requisite background and humility to become the sort of Godded-up sports hero common to the age. After La Salle's victory, Gola even appeared on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" show on national TV. He had helped the sport reclaim some of its good name.

Two years after winning the NIT, La Salle won the NCAA title, and the Explorers reached the NCAA championship game again in 1955, Gola's senior season. But that year marked a stark line of demarcation in the sport's evolution, as Gola and the Explorers lost to the University of San Francisco and its star, Bill Russell.

USF's win and its 1956 repeat were groundbreaking. "The Dons were the forerunners for the modern game," Sports Illustrated's Kelli Anderson wrote in 2006. "In two short years they shifted college basketball's balance of power from white to black, from offense to defense and, thanks to the backboard-clearing, shot blocking, backward-dunking Russell, from horizontal to vertical."

Over his 12 NBA seasons, including four with the Knicks, Gola was a consistently excellent player, though his career never reached the same heights it did at La Salle. He remains the leading rebounder in NCAA history (2,201), and for those of us from the region, it was Gola's loyalty to his school and hometown that we most treasured about him.

While playing for the Knicks, he commuted to New York from Philadelphia. He returned to La Salle as head coach, guiding the Explorers to a 23-1 record in 1968-69 while the program was on NCAA probation. He was Philadelphia's city controller. He ran for mayor. Fathers would tell their sons about seeing him play.

Then La Salle went into a long fallow period beginning in the early 1990s—12 consecutive losing seasons, 21 years without an NCAA tournament berth—and though the university named its modest basketball arena after him in 1998, there wasn't much reason to talk about Tom Gola anymore.

I last visited with him in November 2004, 16 months after he had fallen outside a restaurant and cracked his skull and slipped into a coma, five months after a stroke had slurred his speech and forced him to walk with a cane. He is 80 now, living in a nursing home in Philadelphia, and just last week, as this La Salle team was knocking off Boise State and upsetting Kansas State and beating Ole Miss in the final seconds, Jim Nantz and Marv Albert kept mentioning Tom Gola again and again, talking about who he was and why he mattered. Some things are worth remembering.
Write to Mike Sielski at mike.sielski@wsj.com

Terry in Crapchester wrote:

Mikey wrote:The #12 vs. #5 first round upset can be a good friend.

Considering the frequency with which it seems to apply, one should take at least one 12 vs. 5 upset every year. This year I took two: the Fighting Dinsdales and the Fighting m2oodles. And I still came up short by one.

M2 wrote:

Sudden Sam wrote: picking Ole Miss

I do see them taking out Wisky. If they can't get past those pasty-assed, plodding white boys, something's bad wrong in Oxford.

You're an idiot.


You never fail to deliver.

Mace wrote:The Indiana-Syracuse game is extremely physical and, unfortunately for the Hoosiers, the Orange are bigger and more physical. Too many turnovers and Indiana has been out muscled and out played this entire game, and Zeller has been rendered a non factor. Props to Syracuse for playing a hell of a game.