Male Cheerleader Almost Ruins U of L Game

Today's UofL game versus Pittsburgh seemed like a done deal as the final seconds approached. The Cards' Kyle Kuric scored a three-point shot putting them 62-57. But as for what happened next, I'll let uoflsports.com explain:

That's when things got a little bizarre.

The clock didn't stop after the basket, which put the Cardinals up 62-57, and the horn sounded. Some Louisville cheerleaders on the baseline raced onto the floor, with one male cheerleader grabbing the ball and tossing it in the air.

Officials called Louisville for a delay of game technical foul and put .5 seconds back on the clock. Pitt's Ashton Gibbs knocked down two free throws and the Panthers had one last chance to tie, but Gibbs couldn't get off a desperation heave in time.

"All good things have to come to an end, and the male cheerleader (at Louisville) comes to an end," joked Louisville coach Rick Pitino. "Hopefully he'll learn the rules."

You can see it on YouTube here, but it happens so fast that some viewers are missing it. It's towards the very end of the clip - watch the goofball dressed all in white come walking onto the court and grab the ball, then flip it recklessly high in the air, not even caring where it might land.

The technical foul called because of cheer-dude's unexpected intervention meant that Pitt had a chance for two free-throws and control of the ball, giving them a narrow but real chance to turn it around.

15 Second Man

Okay, everyone's already talking it to death and it is sort of funny - 'cept it ain't - so let's address it here and then quickly move on.

As everyone's nattering about around the water cooler lately, Rick Pitino was forced to make some weird and embarrassing statements in the course of his court testimony - namely, that his lovemaking to Karen Sypher lasted all of fifteen seconds.

Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, folks. Have a good laugh at someone else's expense, because that someone has achieved more in his lifetime than you ever could - even if you devoted the entirety of your short remaining years on this planet to it.

As Joe Kennedy once said to Frank Sinatra, "the bigger the man, the bigger the mistake." That's life.

Now that Pitino has been vindicated and the psycho-stalker who tried and failed to ruin his life has been found guilty of extortion, how about we in the media grow up a notch or nine and minimize our coverage of reckless gossip about the personal lives of celebrities - even when it's newsworthy? I double dog dare you.

(Of course, I know it'll never happen; that's not the direction society is moving in nowadays. Ask Tiger Woods about that.)

The Center of Yum!

There's been much speculation about what the new Louisville downtown arena would be named, and now the wondering is over: Louisville-based Yum! Brands has become the naming sponsor for the building, which is now called - wait for it - the KFC Yum! Center.

Kind of a kooky name - rather unwieldy - but I'm sure we'll all get used to it. I predict people's habits will devolve into simply calling it either the "KFC Center" or the "Yum Center" in the end. We'll see which. (I prefer "Yum Center" myself, and without that pesky exclamation point.)

I haven't heard PETA's reaction to this turn of events yet, but something tells me there'll be no joy at vegan central tonight. I did notice some waggish Cards fan on a message board note, "When PETA throws red paint on us as we enter the KFC Yum! Center it won't matter because we'll already be wearing red!" A-hyuk.


But what I want to know is, will they be giving away free KFC on opening day in November? (Hint, hint, hint.)

Derek Smith and Bermuda Triangle Curse?

And hey, speaking of the so-called Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio (which we were yesterday) were you aware that University of Louisville basketball star Derek Smith was in the Bermuda Triangle shortly before his unexpected death in 1996?

Smith was aboard a luxury cruise liner called the Dreamward (since renamed the Norwegian Dream) on a trip to Bermuda - which in itself comprises one of the points of the triangle - and he began feeling anxious and ill on the journey. He wore a scopolamine patch behind each ear to help ward off seasickness and nausea. It was on the return trip that he abruptly died without warning.

According to the New York Daily News:

The night of Aug. 9, during a cocktail party aboard the Dreamward, Smith was his normal self. Smiling. Laughing. Animated in conversation as he autographed basketballs for about 100 vacationers. As always, he was eager to join his wife, Monica, their 9-year-old daughter, Sydney, and 5-year-old son, Nolan. At 8:30 Monica Smith left the observatory lounge with her children and went downstairs to take their seats for the farewell dinner.

Five minutes later, Smith was seated upstairs in the lounge, chatting with several people. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed, opened and then closed. His head moved back. "C'mon Derek, quit messin' around," someone said. Smith's body slumped to the right. Another passenger ran over, found a very faint pulse and started administering CPR. Ship medical personnel rushed in and spent the better part of a half hour trying to resuscitate him.

"That's it", said one of the medics. It was 9:10. "There's nothing more we can do."

Despite their efforts to jump-start Smith's heart, it never produced more than five beats in succession.

Interestingly, another death cited as a possible Bermuda Triangle case is that of a man named Derrick Smith, who vanished off the coast of Savannah in 2001.

High Five!

Nowadays, when someone says "High Five!", there's a very good chance they're making a Borat reference. But it wasn't always so. According to louisville.com:

"It will forever be recorded in etymology books that the late University of Louisville basketball player Derek Smith popularized, if not coined, the term "high five" during the Cards 1979-80 championship season. Whereas the gesture itself started decades before, the origin of the phrase — says none other than the Oxford English Dictionary — took hold in 1980 and found its first print use in an October 1980 issue of Maclean’s Magazine. Smith, it should be noted, did take credit for inventing the language."

Sure enough, a glance at Smith's findagrave page declares him the creator and the originator of the term "high five" not once but twice in the same short paragraph. (Turn to page 209 in your copy of Weird Kentucky for a closer look at Smith's larger-than-life full-body-pictorial gravestone.)

Problem is, there are many sites online, like Outsports, that name baseball star Glenn Burke as the creator of the High Five.

And then there's a site called National High Five Day which says:

"I received an email two weeks ago. It came from Victor Sleets, a resident of Eminence, Kentucky. Mr. Sleets had been introduced to National High Five Day by a friend who thought that based on his unique family history, he might be interested in the holiday. I spoke in detail to Mr. Sleets and his father Lamont on the phone, and based on what they told me about their family’s history, I have no doubt that the true history of the High Five can finally be revealed.

Victor’s father, Lamont Sleets Jr, known to his friends as Mont, is one of the greatest basketball players in Murray State University’s history. Twice named to the Ohio Valley All-Conference team, Mont’s true legacy has not been recognized until now: Mont Sleets invented the High Five as we know it today."

Wow, so maybe the High Five was invented in Kentucky after all? As Borat would also say: "Not!"

The National High Five Day page gives an explanation for Sleets' creation of the term and I have to say it has the same convoluted, reverse-engineered ring to it as when people of today, lacking an explanation for how a Kentucky town got its weird name, simply make something up. Sleets' explanation for how he supposedly invented the High Five is so ludicrous and unlikely-sounding in so many ways and on so many levels, I'm not even going to bother recounting it here.

How do all these wacky rumors begin, anyway? I can personally tell you that as a child growing up in the early 1970s, we were already doing the High Five gesture amongst ourselves, as a distinct separate gesture from the hand-slapping "gimme five" kind of hipster affectation. And it was known as the High Five, by that name, even then.

Wikipedia points out that examples of the High Five can be seen in 1966 footage of Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong, and in a 1941 Abbott & Costello movie during a song-and-dance routine called "Gimme Some Skin, My Friend", just to cite two way-prior examples.

I'm not certain why anyone even cares who created the High Five, or why Kentuckians seem to be so eager to lay claim to it. But that's just another instance of what makes our Kentucky so unusual.

Perhaps I'll start insisting that I'm the guy who started everyone saying, "I feel you, man". (It's on the internet so it must be true!)

Kentucky Valkyries

Kentucky's about to have a new national women's football team: the Kentucky Valkyries are due to spring into action in 2010, playing full-contact no-compromise football.

Although their owner is apparently based in Tennessee, the Kentucky Valkyries are headquartered in Bowling Green, KY. They'll be part of the Mid-Atlantic Division of the Women's Football Alliance, alongside the Kentucky Karma, the Columbus Comets, the Cleveland Fusion, the Pittsburgh Force, the Cincinnati Sizzle, and a bunch of other teams I've never ever heard of.