My hypocrisy knows no bounds
Spring sports and some philosophy
In 1993, the first ESPY Awards were held. Probably the most famous one of those awards shows.
Jim Valvano, who 10 years earlier had guided his North Carolina State Wolfpack to the NCAA Championship, gave the most memorable ESPY speech of all-time. Jimmy V would die of metastatic adenocarcinoma (cancer) less than two months later.
The NCAA basketball tournament used to be the best roughly 3-week stretch in sports. Sprinkle in anticipation of the baseball season with the NBA and NHL regular seasons drawing to a close, there was not much time for anything else as far as I was concerned.
And I loved it. Really loved it. Every part of it save Duke.
I don't watch much anymore. I watched a combined less than a half of college basketball this season and it was all during this tournament season. Haven't watched a single second of live NBA basketball … and don't miss it either.
I wish I did miss it more. It feels to me now that I misspent over four and a half decades of my life concerning myself with the "bread and circuses " these sports provide.
The NCAA and the NBA were among the worst offenders during the corona panic. The NCAA cancelled the tournament, of course. The NBA suspended the season for months and ended up in a foolish "bubble" for the end of the season and playoffs.
I tried making some sense of it all, as most of us probably did. Heck, I even started a sports podcast when there were zero sports being played (sans a couple live Cornhole tournaments on ESPN).
The shutdowns begat the mask-mania and cardboard fanbases all over the sporting world. Truly comical how stupid we all were to believe a lick of any of it.
History has proven the illegitimacy of the Corona Regime quite easily, yet our culture still has one foot in and one foot out of the corona doom. Hokey pokey.
People should be more afraid of a legitimate disease like cancer, a message that Coach Valvano was able to deliver.
Coronavirus on the other hand? There's no “foundation” to combat it, precisely because it is nonsensical.
It's truly amazing how many people "had covid" when they were sick from 2020 to 2023, but before that and since then it's been "the flu" or something even milder. Rarely called covid now, even though the same exact phenomena and symptoms surround the sickness.
The over-reaction and panic to corona fundamentally disrupted and ultimately changed this culture. We’re never getting it back.
The transformational Barack Obama wanted to "fundamentally transform" the country, something he was unable to accomplish in his two terms as president. The goal was achieved, however, in the years shortly after his reign.
The Summer of Love, with the martyrdom of St. George and the mostly peaceful destruction of cities by "antifa" and other lawless activity, was a wonderful catalyst to finally implement the vision of the first Hawaiian president.
Either way, 41 years after Valvano's Wolfpack defeated Clyde and Akeem's Houston Cougars, the Pack are back in the Final Four. This year's team was never ranked and was the lowly 10-seed in the ACC tournament—a "bubble team" if there ever was one.
Yet, the Pack won the ACC Tournament, and it garnered a 11-seed in the NCAA Tournament, where they held off several challenges and will be playing Purdue on Saturday night for a shot at the championship game.
Much like the Kennedy Assassination, I know a lot about this stuff, but I don't care.
I wish I did.
These organizations and leagues took way more from us than they can likely ever give back. I can't really blame the players too much, but the coaches, especially the high-powered ones belong in a volume of Profiles in Cowardice, a project that would be worth producing and would be the analogue to JFK’s (ghostwritten) Profiles in Courage.
Ironically, I love college hockey, pretty much because most people don't. It might be different if the sports fan public even knew "cawlidge hawkey" was a thing.
Alas, next weekend is the Frozen Four where, in the national semifinal, my alma mater looks to avenge the championship game loss of my classmates from 26 years ago. We shall be tuning in at the O'Leary Review headquarters. It has also turned into a bittersweet family battle by proxy as our oldest is a Wolverine athlete.
As the dying philosopher Doc Holliday said to Wyatt Earp, "my hypocrisy knows no bounds."
That being said, we're also looking for a few more good folks in our Inner Sphere, which will be officially launching later this spring.
To find out more information, and to get on the list to be part of the first cohort of good folks to do so, just follow the link:
We must stay vigilant, regardless. I like Jimmy V’s motto:
"Don't give up. Don't ever give up."
And these bastards who tried to ruin everything good in our lives, much like cancer, are never going to triumph over the human spirit if I have anything to do with it.
In the final words of Coach Valvano,
Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind. It cannot touch my heart. And it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever. I thank you and God bless y’all.
As always,
Brian
P.S. — the full ESPY speech by Coach Valvano:
P.P.S — I had the good fortune of attending the 2001 ESPYs, even though I have a natural repulsion to awards shows of all kinds, but this was a pretty awesome experience and a more innocent time in the culture. Pre-9/11, pre-coronamania, and so forth. Rubbing elbows & playing blackjack and knocking back cocktails after the show with celebrities of all stripes. We'll never get that back either.