So he went out and hired the best crew in the world, which happened, back then, to be from New Zealand. Now they sail for Switzerland, a landlocked nation. That is only one of the distinct advantages of being a billionaire in this world. A billionaire can indulge any billionaire whim that pops into his mind, regardless of cost—and that is what happened in Auckland: a crew of hired mercenaries returned to New Zealand and wiped out the home team on their own turf without even breaking a sweat.
Whoops. I see I’m wandering off track here and becoming exhausted and unable to focus—probably because the Cup Races will almost certainly be over this weekend; no team has ever won the Cup after losing the first three races. The Kiwis are finished. They will lose five straight.
And so what, eh? I am into basketball now, keeping a keen eye on Louisville and Kentucky, both locks for the NCAA tourney in March. Hot damn. Yes Sir. That should be enough action to cure any junkie, and I already crave it. Football is dead, long live basketball.
—February 17, 2003
Fleeced by Ed Bradley
March is a dangerous month for basketball people, and this year will be no different—unless you happen to be one of the many, many thousands of American unfortunates who will be forced to watch the wild and woolly NCAA championship tournament on TV in some wind-whipped U.S. Army tent somewhere in the bleak Iraqi desert. That will be an awkward situation at best, and the only real winners will be a large handful of terminal gambling addicts and committed basketball junkies who have hovered and lurked and functioned in the ranks of every military unit attached to every U.S. Army since Washington crossed the Delaware.
Sports gambling is huge in the Army, and most people will tell you (in private) that it’s a good and even healthy distraction for thousands of otherwise stress-crazed soldiers forever teetering on the brink of some hideous outburst of preternatural violence that could leave them all dying painfully.
That is an adult dose of stress, folks, and I salute the poor bastards who are out there right now. I wish you people the very best of good luck, because you are going to need it.
Right. And so much for war, eh—or at least this one. I hate it and I know it will bring disastrous consequences.… But hey, what the hell? We are all basketball fans, not bone pickers, and March is our time of year. So let’s get into it. Having the Big Dance on worldwide TV for the next three weeks may be the best thing that could happen to this country right now. It might save us from ourselves for a moment, and maybe longer.… We are basketball people, and we are legion.
And now, back to the cruel realities. Indeed, I am stuck with Kentucky again, and this time around I feel pretty good about it. You bet, let us rumble. I have already bet heavily on Kentucky against the field—at odds I see no need to disclose, at this moment, except to say that if my Bluegrass people do win the national title this year, I will be flying into Las Vegas on my own jet plane for the next heavyweight fight, or maybe just for a spectacular orgy at the Palms. We will see.
Let me assure you, once again, that I am not a bookie, a cop, or a shill for anything except my own whims, wisdom, and sometimes even visions that I have never denied or repudiated. So it’s caveat emptor, around here, and always in flux. Salud.
I have not focused down on my precious Bracket selections, mainly because they are not available yet.… But soon come, eh? Yes sir, we will all be up to our necks in it soon enough. So don’t fret, there is plenty of action just around the corner.
All four No. 1 seeds for the regions—Kentucky, Texas, Kansas, and Arizona—will be around for the Final Eight, unless some eerie kink in the bracketing process somehow hurls Kentucky vs. Arizona at us in the Sweet Sixteen, or another high-stress Texas-Oklahoma clash pops up before its time.
Otherwise the early rounds look manageable for all of the seeded favorites except Arizona. I hate Arizona because they have caused me extreme grief in my gambling adventures over the years, particularly against Kentucky. Horrible, horrible.… I remember one monumentally rotten experience when Ed Bradley strolled into my parlor on a Saturday afternoon and beat me out of 4,000 green dollars right in front of my own eyes, in my own kitchen, with all the others watching like greedy barnyard animals. He flogged me on something like 22 straight side bets in the course of yet another painful loss to Arizona. It was one of the ugliest days of my life.
—March 11, 2003
Love Blooms in the Rockies
The Big Dance got lost in a fiery cloud of war dust last week: almost canceled, they said, but somehow the games survived—so far, at least—despite the bitching and whining of CBS resident peacock Dan Rather, who cursed his own network for letting the annual NCAA Championship Tournament interfere with a two-day-old illegal, unsanctioned outlaw-style invasion of a defenseless country full of oil.
Why is Dan Rather complaining? Ho ho ho. Here’s why: Danny is no Walter Cronkite, for one, and Two is that Dan Rather is currently on location in Kuwait City, strutting and posing and whooping it up with all the other “embedded” journalists going to war like birds in a gilded cage.
The war was ugly enough, but that was only the start. The Horrible blizzard that shut down most of Colorado for four days and nights was far worse news for me. It destroyed our annual high-risk orgy of gambling and raving that has become a tradition out here. Ed Bradley got jerked up by the roots and sent off to war. Curtis was back in Washington to infiltrate the JDL and the billionaire degenerate Ewing brothers from North Charleston, infamous in gambling circles for their extremely aggressive gambling tactics and quasi-depraved tastes, refused to fly into the blizzard and went to Las Vegas for whatever action they could find.
The blizzard almost drove me crazy. I have nothing against snow. I am totally prepared for it, after many years of practice, and snow has never prevented me from going anywhere I really wanted to go.…
But this blizzard was different. It closed everything—schools, highways, airports, newspaper deliveries, along with food, beer, gasoline, and all human traffic across the Continental Divide for almost a week—and stranded Anita, my beautiful fiancée and soon-to-be wife, on the other side of the mountain.
I also had an elegant diamond engagement ring somewhere out there in the whiteout between me and New Orleans, where I spend a lot of time on occasional sporting business.… So there was no Anita and no ring, and that was heavy on my mind as the tournament got under way. No gambling, no guests, no fiancée, no ring—all this finally caused me to flip out and start trying to charter some kind of bandit jet plane to fly Anita over the hump by any means necessary. I was obsessed with it, regardless of cost. It was madness. I was in the acute stage of a total nervous breakdown.
That was when the Sheriff had to step in and strongly suggest that I get a grip on myself, which I finally did, but not until he promised me that U.S. Interstate 70 was finally cleared of the monster avalanche and Anita was safely on the road. So I hunkered down and stared at the basketball games on TV until I passed out from desperate backed-up passion and 40 frantic hours with no sleep. It was a long and restless night, full of unacceptably rotten dreams and spastic muttering about point spreads.
Anita pulled into the garage just in time for the end of the Butler-Louisville game, which I lost badly, but it didn’t hurt too much, given my circumstances, because I didn’t expect them to go far. There would be no heavy rematch with Kentucky this year, but it wouldn’t have been worth watching anyway. The Cardinals would have been routed.
On Saturday I proposed and gave her the ring, and after that we both went a little crazy for a while, which was clearly the right thing to do.
—March 24, 2003
Love in a Time of War
The final mystery is oneself.… Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
—OSCAR WILDE
I smiled when Marquette trounced Pittsburgh in the Sweet 16 last week, but my smile soon turned to wax. My bracket selections were murdered in the Regional finals, and I was forced to abandon all hope of victory in the
office pool. It was the worst gambling disaster I’d suffered since the Super Bowl. Ho ho—but so what?
My prevailing mood has taken a drastic turn for the better since my engagement to Anita was first announced in this column only eight days ago. Saturday was our first anniversary, which enabled me to survive the rude shock of Kentucky’s shameful collapse against Marquette. Jesus, 14 points. My people should have stayed in bed that day. It was humiliating.
So I will have to go with Marquette in the Final Four, which may or may not be a curse on them. This tournament has turned into a Harvest Festival for underdogs—sort of like the War in Iraq—and a long, relentless beating for the bookmaking business. There is nothing like a sudden rash of underdog victories to raise serious hell among professional gamblers. You bet. Obscure teams like Butler, Marquette, Gonzaga, and Wisconsin are not supposed to win monster games in March, not at this level—and superpowers like Kentucky and Arizona are not supposed to Lose.
Gonzaga lost, in fact, and so did Wisconsin, but they might as well have won, considering the damage they did. The Zags took mighty Arizona to two overtimes and almost to three, finally losing by a whisker and one missed final shot—but not before draining all the zing out of the top-seeded hot rods from Tucson: they shot their wad against Gonzaga, then lost to Kansas, which should be favored to seize the national championship in New Orleans this weekend. That Collison boy is a tall walking bitch of a basketball player.
But so is that human wrecking ball, Dwyane Wade from Marquette, who almost single-handedly destroyed Kentucky, which was so weakened and brutalized by its narrow escape against Wisconsin that they didn’t have a chance two days later against that Jesuit gang from Milwaukee—despite being a bullish 11-point favorite, points which I nervously gave and almost immediately regretted when Kentucky’s team leader and court quarterback, Keith Bogans, went down with a high ankle sprain after 15 minutes and only five points. Bogans was finished after that, and so was Kentucky. The Great Wall of bluegrass collapsed like cheap plaster. Without Bogans, needless to say, I took a nasty beating. Mahalo.
On any other day, a tragedy like that would have plunged me into a coma for three or four weeks, or even years, but this time I was over it in less than 20 hours, and now I can barely remember the score.
Or maybe I’m just blocking it out of my memory, for obvious reasons, but in truth, the frenzy of Love and Romance and extremely high adventure that has gripped this place since Anita finally emerged from “The Great Blizzard of ’03” last week has made everything else seem small. On days like this I feel like Lord Byron and Shelley and Keats all rolled into one, as they like to say in New Orleans, and everything is possible.
Which is not true, alas. I am a Romantic by nature and a gambler by instinct—and I can tell you for sure, little Xania, that Losing goes with the territory in my business. All gamblers lose regularly, but they rarely discuss it in public. Losing is bad for the image, dude. Nobody buys Hot Tips from Losers. Remember that.
This has been a spectacular tournament, so far with a true abundance of wild and shocking games, right from the start: barn burners, many overtimes, and many desperately close games and staggering, ruinous defeats, most of them tragic in nature.
Failure in the Sweet 16 leaves a permanent scar on the hearts and minds of these innocent, once-magic athletes who suffer it this time of year. It will hurt forever. There is no forgiveness, never. It is a sin to lose in the Big Dance … and remember that 64 out of the original 65 teams are doomed to failure in the NCAA Tournament and that only one can succeed. There is only one winner of the National Championship. The rest will be Losers. That is how it works in the USA—especially in times of War, and this incredibly mismanaged War on Iraq will not be going away anytime soon. This one is a Tar baby, sports fans.
It has already shot damaging holes in our national confidence and made dangerous Fools of whoever is running the Pentagon—not to mention the stunning $1,000,000,000 we are squandering every 24 hours to bomb Iraq back to the Stone Age and starve millions of helpless, unarmed, terrorized civilians to death, in the name of some hateful, ill-advised, ill-fated military Crusade on the other side of the world. How long, O lord, how long? We used to be smarter than that.
Indeed, we are truly the squanderer of what was once the American Dream, and our own dreams, for that matter. In two disastrous years, this Waterhead son of Texas has taken this country from a prosperous nation at peace to a dead-broke nation at War, and that is a very long fall.
How could it happen? you ask—and I’m damned if I can give you a sane answer in anything close to the average nine-second time of the hard-hitting, high-tech marketing message of today’s average sound bite. Anything over nine seconds is wasted energy, they say in the White House these days.
That is pure chickenshit, of course. That gang of born-again geeks wouldn’t know a Message from a poison meat whistle, judging by the sum of all the ignorant, wrong-headed evidence seen thus far in this dismal conflict. It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this horrible mess for openers. This is not going to be like Daddy’s War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House about nine months later.
That is the dark silver lining in this blood-spattered cloud we have brought down on ourselves, and it leaves a lot to be desired. It is almost impossibly morbid to brood on how many young Americans will have to come home in body bags before the great American voter catches on to the fact that the same greed-crazed yo-yo who slit the throat of the U.S. economy in the name of Tax Cuts and feverish warmongering gone wrong. The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour. George W. Bush is doomed to the same cruel fate as his papa suffered only ten years ago.
Whoops! Dawn is up in the Rockies and I am late again for my deadline. The bell is ringing and I must end this thing now. My beautiful fiancée is wandering around in a champagne hangover, and I have to put her to bed. I am still hypnotized by the flash and glow of her elegant diamond ring. I have never paid much attention to diamonds, until now, but this one is very different. I am utterly fascinated by it.
Right. I am wildly high on everything I see or touch. We laugh a lot, and we fondle each other constantly, even in front of the Sheriff, who recently got married himself, so he should be familiar with this kind of madness. True Romance is always exhilarating for us addicts, and I like it.
Bang! And that’s it, for now. There is no more. Aloha.
—April 1, 2003
A Sad Week in America
Just about the time we were settling in for the Kansas-Syracuse game, my strange neighbor, Omar, appeared in my kitchen with a wild-looking Brazilian woman who spoke no English but seemed to understand everything we said. “Is it possible that we could watch the Big Dance with you?” he asked gently. “Today is very special for our family.”
Before I could answer, he grabbed my shoulders and kissed me on both ears, then he stepped around me and came face to face with the Sheriff, who immediately lifted him off the floor and slammed him against my black leather–covered refrigerator.
“I thought I told you never to come here again!” he shouted. “I have at least five warrants for your arrest.”
Omar screeched for a moment, then smiled and tried to adjust his clothes. “You know I am innocent,” he said. “Don’t you know who I am? I am your neighbor, Prince Omar of New York. I live just up the road. Why do you try to kill me?”
The game was about to start, so I quickly stepped between them and put my arm around the Brazilian woman, who took my arm and motioned for a cigarette.
“Of course, we have many cigarettes here,” I said suavely, escorting her into the lounge and putting her on a stool between the Sheriff and Anita, my elegant fiancée, where I knew she would be safe. “There is no room up here for you at the bar,” I told Omar. “You will have to find somewhere to stand.”
“Yeah,” the Sheriff chuckled. “You can stand over there wit
h the losers.” He pointed to a narrow spot in a nearby hallway, with no view at all of the game, which was spinning out of control for the favored Kansas Jayhawks. I was down by something like 14 points when Kansas finally made its first free throw.
The score at halftime was 53–42, and Kansas already looked beat. They were the popular choice as well as a four-and-a-halfpoint gambling choice over Syracuse, the Champion of the East, with its three freshman starters and its shaggy reputation for showboating. “A perennial Big East power with big potential,” they said in New York. But their three (those freshman) starters were too young and too jittery to hang on for long against supercoach Roy Williams and his two big guns, Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich, both seniors.
By halftime I was losing interest as well as money. Syracuse was simply too fast and tall and talented for the Jayhawks, who couldn’t score from outside or inside and missed 60 percent of their free throws. Their defense was like a helpless punchboard and their best shots were either crushed or swatted far into the crowd, as the huge crowd jeered and my bets sank out of sight.
Anita and Princess Omin had taken my new test Jeep into town for a box of Polish sausage and some orchids to dress up the War Room. They seemed to be getting along nicely, despite the language problem that had once plagued us in the past. They were quite beautiful together.
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