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.

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.

MMX

Ten percent of the 21st century is already over. Think on that.

The arrival of a new decade, drifting out of the oughts and coming into the teens, has me thinking long and hard about - what else? - extraterrestrial contact.

Never mind that we're already swimming in a sea of invisible Lovecraftian beasties brushing up against our reality (you probably think I'm joking, don't you?) and never mind that certain microscopic critters most likely actually came here from interstellar space. I'm speaking here of more tangible, wrap-their-lunchhooks-around-you kind of aliens, which may or may not be little green men or Autogyro-piloting entities or what have you. (Some might even tell you to "Drop the Tunug" if you don't block their voices out with your Thought Screen Helmet.)

The tagline for the film version of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 is "The Year We Make Contact". Given that all my high-weirdness detector readings are off the scale these days, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't indeed the year that all humans finally realize (as John Titor once predicted) that we have not been living in the kind of world we've grown up thinking we're in.

With the upcoming full-throttle-firing of the Large Hadron Collider this year, some paranoid nuts - in other words, my dearest friends and associates - believe an interdimensional portal is going to be opened as a result. And something from somewhere else could end up here.

Perhaps it already has.




Our ally JLK's Ending Sentences With Ellipses blog has a great feature about the conversation between Helen Mirren and Roy Scheider about Kentucky in the 2010 film.

But when Roy says we play very good basketball, does he mean the Cats or the Cards? Most likely the Cats. But you never know. He may also have meant both, in a general, all-encompassing, Neutral Zone kinda sense.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that they still drink Kentucky bourbon in the future. Or I would be, that is, if the future were not right now.

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!)

Slick Rick's Fatal Attraction

Words truly can't express just how little interest I have in modern commercial sports. And when it comes to basketball in particular, I not only don't care about it, I actively harbor some antipathy towards it.

So it would take something pretty wacky to get me to write about Kentucky basketball on here - maybe like if Kyle Macy got a sex change operation, John Calipari was abducted by aliens (if only!), or if Rajan Rondo was proclaimed to be the 974th Living Eck Master.

Well, something almost that weird happened. For those of you who haven't already heard the details too many times to count:

Rick Pitino had sex with a woman in a restaurant - in a restaurant - subsequently gave her three grand for an abortion (even though no proof was offered that the baby was his), then had a secret meeting with her at the apartment of the team’s equipment manager, who would subsequently marry the woman and then divorce her.

Got that so far? Okay. Then:

The woman attempts to shake Pitino down for her silence on the matter for ten million dollars, new cars, and a house. Pitino decides being blackmailed is not such a good idea, and calls the cops on the extortionist instead. (I can imagine her stunned and stammering "w-w-what?? that wasn't supposed to happen!") Flailing in desperation, she tells police that Pitino had actually raped her on not one, but two occasions. Pitino maintains the sex was consensual.

In other words, it's your typical southern trailer-park feud drama, just played out in Brooks Brothers suits and bad Derby hats instead of NASCAR sleeveless t-shirts and Daisy Dukes.


Strangely, some members of the public are holding Pitino up to greater scorn than Sypher, which is puzzling to me. Pitino has led a very successful and productive life in many, many fields besides sports, and to turn on him over a dalliance that occurred years ago and isn't anyone's business anyway, well, that's just petty. Rick Pitino is still a role model and a hero.

Donkey Basketball

According to an article in the Lebanon, KY Enterprise, a "Donkey Basketball" event planned for Marion County's Lady Knights basketball team, has been cancelled. Council members expressed second thoughts about the event, based on new concerns that the sport is allegedly cruel to animals.

I'm betting these council members got their information from Wikipedia's page on the subject, which comes up first in a Google search. The page reads from start to finish like a total advertisement for the kooks at PETA and their skewed position, rather than a meaningful and informational article about Donkey Basketball itself.

I can certainly see an incompetently-managed donkeyball game being hard on the animals, but I don't necessarily think we can say all instances of children riding donkeys while attempting to shoot basketballs into hoops is an evil and abusive crime.

Personally, I could care less about basketball; I just think it's a shame the kids didn't get to ride donkeys.