I’d say after the week that was that I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a St John’s fan but I can, because I used to be one. First the team goes up to Storrs and despite Uconn’s nonchalance plays like absolute garbage, somehow claws its way back into the game, hits a miracle three for the lead with 4 seconds left, gets called for a phantom foul at the buzzer leading to a tie and then falls completely apart in overtime. What a kick in the balls. And then they play arguably their best game of the year, except it’s against worst team in the Big East Georgetown – they’re just atrocious – and besides which it’s up against the Cowboys playoff game, so to the extent that anyone watched SJ play its best game of the year, no one did. Even I was flipping back and forth. On the bright side the win has resulted in many Johnny fans crawling off the ledge, meaning their disappointment will be that much more acute when the inevitable happens and another Anderson team proves itself almost good enough but not quite.
During Sunday’s interminable display of atrocious basketball the once competent Tim Brando – who should retire, it’s over – mentioned that the highlight of Mike Anderson’s playing career was starting as point guard on Nolan Richardson’s 1981 NIT champion Tulsa Golden Hurricanes. (In another of a string of Louie’s masterful post season showings a St John’s team featuring David Russell, Wayne McKoy, Billy Goodwin and Kevin Williams was bounced from the NIT that year in the first round by Alabama, in a home game at Alumni Hall. I might even have been there.) Considering which maybe Iron Mike’s plan is to recreate his 1981 triumph by building an NIT champion right here in Queens. Because if he’s doing something other than building a middle of the bottom tier Big East team, he’s doing it wrong.
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A read writes:
Fun
I love it when you take the piss out of the dopes at redman dot com. You should make a regular feature of it.
Your pal
Marco Baldi
Well Marco – if that is your real name, it sounds made up – believe it or not I’ve kicked around the idea of doing a weekly or so retrospective of the opinions of the worst most ignorant sports fans on the internet. I enjoy making fun of stupid people and finding creative ways to call them cunts and there’s certainly no dearth of fodder on that site. The drawback is that I’d have to read their drivel on a regular basis and think about it and then deliver 500 words on how dumb they are. Because searching for a cogent opinion compellingly expressed at redman dot com is like searching your toilet for an intact kernel after a hearty meal of corn on the cob. Even I have better things to do with my time. I’d be remiss though if I didn’t point out that delusional posters there have identified Ron Linfonte as a frequent contributor, evidently he’s spending his golden years anonymously imparting inside scoops to the 14 regular RDC posters. (Ron Linfonte – who I only went to follow on Twitter because he owns horses – has for some reason blocked. Jarvis has me blocked, I get that. Lavin too, for obvious reasons. But Ron Linfonte? What could I have done, mocked his unguents?)
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Today is Martin Luther King Day, which strikes me as something of an odd holiday. Not because I’m a right wing troglodyte – although I am – and not because I think civil rights and MLK’s contribution to their advancement unworthy of celebration.
But he’s the only individual with his own US holiday – the presidents share one, which was created as part of 1971’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act, part of an ambitious effort by to generate more three-day weekends for government workers. What MLK Day does is resign to the back of the bus the sacrifices so many others made in the cause of freedom: ten million Africans slaves; half a million woke white men who died in the civil war; and various individuals who dedicated their lives to the same cause MLK did: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Justin Smolleee, Tawanna Brawley. Nobody asked but I’d be much happier with civil rights day that celebrates the struggle for everybody’s freedom – negroes, broads, orientals, queers, everyone – and the blessings of liberty, with which we would have been endowed by our creator if we had one, which probably we don’t.
I don’t see that celebration of our collective rights and liberties coming to pass. Today we live in an Orwellian dystopia under a rapacious government that works relentlessly to diminish freedom and personal autonomy, based upon a myopic vision of what comprises the public good, which fuck the public good even if it could be defined it, which it can’t. We’re halfway down a very slippery slope, at the bottom of which are the rice paddies that your grandchildren will be toiling in. They’re going to be slaves and to the extent that any of them realize it a great many will embrace the yoke.
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Finally, a bit of fluff about the diaspora.
The European slave trade started more or less with Henry the Navigator in the 15th century and was run for 400 years in approximate order by the Portuguese, Spanish, Germans, Dutch and then finally the English, all under papal aegis. For hundreds of years various eurotrash sailed down the west African coast, traded trinkets and rum to African slaveholders and transported those slaves to South America to work in sugar cane fields; white indentured servants, while ubiquitous, died too quickly, not being accustomed to the heat.
Of the 10 million or so Africans transported, 7 million were delivered to Brazil and 2 million to Cuba; a scant 500,000 to the United States: most US slaves were, as civil rights activist Jimmy the Greek astutely noted, domestically bred. So to recap: the slave trade comprised mainly Hispanics purchasing blacks from blacks and selling them to Latino landowners who worked them to death. Which means that when the US gets around to finally paying reparations Gisele Bündchen is going to owe Pele a lot of Tom Brady’s money. Happy civil rights day.