I GUESS it’s always a matter of taste and sensibilities.
Thursday night on CBS I thought I had watched the most special basketball I’d seen all season. For two hours Villanova’s defense made Duke look like a pick-up team, forcing a desperate shot in almost every possession. Villanova’s defense was impossibly good. It looked like a seven-on-five game.
Though I’d rather not put it in gambling terms, the lines often tell a postgame story. The total points, the over/under, for that game was 148. Just 131 were scored. And Duke, the favorite, scored just 54 of them.
Villanova’s defense, Thursday night, was that good, that extraordinary. Blowouts, even those won by the underdog, are rarely so special.
And Friday morning I tuned to 1050 ESPN Radio just as host Brandon Tierney, a fellow who spends a lot of time on basketball, was characterizing the game as a stinker, hardly worth his or anyone’s time. “A disappointment,” he said, adding that he “expected more from Duke.”
Exactly! Everyone did! That’s what made the game so special. For two consecutive hours Villanova prevented an accomplished offense from playing any offense. That made for the incredible and unforgettable, no?
Were we watching different games? Is one of us completely right and one completely wrong? Or is it just a matter of taste and sensibilities?
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As the PSL and other ticket stories roll in, we’ll roll some out.
Here’s one from a longtime holder of good Giants season tickets, lower deck near the 40:
The Giants want $20,000 per seat for the PSLs. So the fellow calls the Giants and tells the sales rep he has decided he will cough up the $80,000 for the PSLs plus the $5,000 or so per season for the tickets, but the club must meet one, small request.
“What’s that?” the rep asks.
“Just stop charging me for those two home exhibition games every year.”
The patron goes on to explain that among all the ripoffs he has endured — all the night games and hikes in parking fees — being forced to pay for games that don’t count and are played by players who aren’t likely to make the team is the one he can’t stomach.
“I can’t even give those tickets away. Eliminate those tickets or waive their cost, and I’ll send a check for the balance, the $84,000 and something.”
“But I can’t do that,” says the ticket rep. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” said the ticket-holder, now an ex-ticket holder, though the Giants have called back to see if he changed his mind.
And speaking of tickets and call-backs, the Garden is so desperate that Knicks’ telemarketers have been calling former ticket subscribers — folks who left more than five years ago, hoping to reel them back in at temporarily reduced rates.
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Everyone who knew Arthur Richman, that man about New York baseball who died last week at 83, had at least 10 stories about him. This one comes from Mike McCarthy, former executive producer of MSG Network when MSG had Yankee rights and Richman traveled with the team:
“This was 1990, the Yanks were horrible, the Andy Hawkins and Dave LaPoint Yankees, the Alvaro Espinoza-at-short Yankees. We’re on the road and Arthur, who naturally was pessimistic — perhaps because he’d seen it all — sees me in the hotel. He walks over, grabs me by the arm and takes me to the side, as if he’s got something important to tell me.
“‘Have your crew ready for a noon press conference,’ he says.
” ‘Why? What’s up?’ ”
” ‘We’re dropping out of the American League.’ “
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The Price Is Right: It’s not enough to identify Tiger Woods as golf’s greatest, the media have to take it to some fantastic extreme. They also portray him as the world’s greatest human being — greatest dad, greatest son, greatest father, greatest giver to the game — even if they know a lot better.
To that end, it made almost no news or noise, last week, that Woods made a last-moment decision to play in Arnold Palmer‘s PGA Tour event in Florida (where Woods lives), while months ago he committed to play in the Australian Open, which offered him a $3 million appearance fee.
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With the end of UConn-Missouri, last night on CBS, so ends The Jay Bilas Lecture Series. . . . That the NFL and its teams have laid off scores of employees didn’t stop them from holding their annual owners’ meetings at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point, Ca., known for its unaffordability.
Lookalikes: Chris Micale of Melville submits Rangers’ coach John Tortorella and comedian Rich Vos. .
YES and MSG, Wednesday, ran the same infomercial at the same time. . . . It has reached the point where we’ve become so TV habit-formed that we reach for the play-back button on the car radio, to hear again what was just said — even if the car radio has no such device.