ola amigo

Ola from old Mexico. Yes, as I sit down to write this, I find myself near Cancun enjoying a week’s vacation. It’s my first trip to the Yucatan Peninsula and it has been a very enjoyable week.

It has been a week without reading a single sports page. The hotel is one of those all inclusive resorts but that is a bit misleading. It does’t include ESPN. Oh, there is ESPN International but that just isn’t the same.

At any given time, I can turn on the boob tube and find soccer on three different channels. If you’ve read some of my past columns, you know how much soccer thrills me. Needless to say, I haven’t spent much time in front of the television.

So how does a sports guy survive the men’s and women’s Final Four without a television?

Well, the place does have a sports bar. That made for some interesting interactions. Several hundred folks from Tennessee were on this trip so we all took a special interest in the basketball games. There was a huge contingency from Memphis and as fate would have it just as large a group from Kansas.

The men’s championship game created so much excitement the hotel agreed to let fans view the game in the disco where they showed it on a large theater style screen.

You can only imagine the scene. Tiger fans were ready to erupt before one of the greatest coaching blunders of all time and disaster struck. The scene could have turned ugly as U of M fans didn’t take defeat well but Kansas fans won with class and there were no incidents.

A night earlier, we sat crammed into the sports bar watching the Lady Vols take on LSU in the women’s national semifinals.

I had called this the UCONN Invitational and had boldly predicted Lady Summitt would not beat LSU. It would be an LSU / Connecticut final. Okay, I was wrong on both accounts. The Lady Vols proved I didn’t know what I was talking about.

The scene was repeated Tuesday evening as the Ladies in Orange took on the Stanford Cardinal. Could the eighth national title be in the works? Although the game didn’t muster the same kind of excitement as the men’s finals, there was still a large and vocal group of Lady Vols fans on hand to cheer on their favorite team. There weren’t really any Cardinal fans in the crowd although a few pulled for them….or should I say pulled against the Lady Vols. When you are the best, it is only natural that some fans will pull for the underdog. The game was absent from any real drama but a title is a title and Pat now has eight of them.

With the exception of those basketball games, it has been a week void of sports. I don’t have a clue how the baseball season is going in the early days. Has anyone new been accused of using steroids?  Are my St. Louis Cardinals in last place as I predicted. What about NASCAR? I don’t even know who won on Sunday. They did have a race didn’t they? How are things shaping up down in Augusta? Is Tiger ready to win another major?

Well, it hasn’t really been a week totally without sports. I visited the Myan ruins today in Coba and saw the ball court. Yes, 2000 years ago the ball court was the center of the town. Their idea of sports was a little different from ours. They used the games to make predictions about things. If a ball bounced a certain number of times it meant this or that would happen. That’s not that much different from today.

The ball bounced the Lady Vols way so I predict Pat Summitt will be an even richer coach. The ball bounced the wrong way for the Memphis Tigers and I predict John Calipari will never be mentioned among the game’s coaching geniuses.

The real difference in the Myan games and ours today though are that the Myans practiced self sacrifices. A player might cut off his finger or his hand as an offering to the Gods. Calipari can probably relate after his experience Monday night.

Well, Amigo, I have a Margarito waiting by the pool. Adios!