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A-10 tourney...Why at first I didn't love Joe Lunardi
3/12/05
by Clay

Arrival at the hotel after a night of carousing brought forth some interesting dilemmas. First of all there are three of us for two double beds. This necessitated some rather complicated coin-flipping dynamics. Shekhar insisted that since he slept on the couch at my parents house he deserved a preliminary coin flip which if he won would entitle him to the bed alone and erase all necessity of a second flip. This was the equivalent of the 64-65 play-in NCAA tourney flip. He lost this flip and Jason was assigned heads while I was assigned tails for the second flip. Tails it was so Shekhar and I were supposed to sleep in the same bed. The problem was this bed was the same size double bed as the one the 27 and I had to share last year in Spain. I think both times the beds were actually spacious cradles. To make things worse the hotel has one of those long pillows that goes across the spartan length of the bed. When the pillow is longer than the bed, you're probably going to have an awkward nights sleep.

So anyway, rather than attempt to share the same pillow Shekhar and I devised a proverbial Maginot line utilizing the long pillow. The problem was this pillow was also wider than both of us so it was like sleeping in the bed with another person. So basically we ended up sleeping very little.

The second problem was that once again I forgot my toothbrush. Which means that in the morning I had to buy another of those little toothbrush travel kits for approximately the forty-sixth time in the past two years. At first the travel kits just had a small toothbrush, then they added on the toothbrush cover, then they added toothpaste, and in the Cincinnati Wallgreen's they have now added mouthwash. So the handy travel kit is now the size of a lunchable. Pretty soon they are going to add floss, a newspaper, and a porno dvd to cover all your needs when you're away from home. But that was in the morning and when we got back from the bar, Jason couldn't stomach the thought of me not being able to brush my teeth so he decided to call downstairs. Unfortunately the entire hotel staff was asleep excepting the valet, so when the front desk didn't answer Jason called the valet.

Pretty soon this conversation ensued,
"You're telling me there isn't a single toothbrush in the entire hotel?" Jason. Which in my experience is the result every time I forget my toothbrush. No hotel has ever had a toothbrush, not once.
Inaudible valet.
"Just mouthwash?" Jason asked.
"Ask him what kind of mouthwash," Shekhar said.
"I'm not asking him what kind," Jason said shaking his head.
Inaudible valet.
Then Jason forgot his protestations of exactly ten seconds ago. "What kind of mouthwash is it?"
"I like Listerine." Shekhar said to no one in particular.
Inaudible valet.
"It's not listerine," Jason said.
Inaudible valet.
"No, I don't need you to drive to Kentucky."
Inaudible valet.
Hangup. Ten minutes later the not-listerine arrived and Shekhar refused to use it.
...
In actual A-10 basketball news, George Washington beat Temple by 19 last night and we discovered that evidently my "reporting" of the fan threatening to decapitate people last night was actually not a fan malfunction, but a bird flying into a fan. The Cincinnati Enquirer had a good article http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050311/SPT0102/503110462/1065 detailing exactly how fine the remains of the bird became inside the fan. Evidently Jason, Shekhar and I were the only three people in the arena to not realize that the bird had met his end. Does this qualify as animal suicide? What could the bird possibly have been thinking? Regardless I feel as if my journalistic integrity has truly been breached. Will anyone ever trust my reporting again?

After GW had finished destroying Temple before approximately twenty-three fans in a 15k seat arena I made my way down to press row and actually conducted an interview of ESPN's NCAA tourney expert Joe Lunardi. The ostensible reason for our going down to right beside the court was to congratulate the GW players as they exited the court. I think Jason referred to it as shaking the team's hands and then Shekhar said, "We're too old to shake anyone's hands anymore." Which was such a bold comment I was still unraveling it when I reached press row too late to congratulate GW's players so instead I focused my attention on Lunardi.

Interestingly, Lunardi's laptop had a picture of former St. Joseph's star point-guard Jameer Nelson wearing his jersey on the beach as a screen-saver. (I swear I'm not making this up, but Jason is equally insistent that he had a picture of his family on the beach and one of Jameer Nelson that was entirely separate and non-beach related and that somehow I fused the two.) Regardless since I refresh Joe Lunardi's bracket projections with a maddening precision each day, I felt compelled to inquire into GW's at-large NCAA tourney aspirations from the man himself.

"Hey Joe," I said. (At the time I had toyed with calling him Mr. Lunardi but he does not appear to be much older than me and I was operating under the assumption that he had a picture of Jameer Nelson on a beach as his screensaver).
"Yes."
"Are we in the tourney as an at-large now?"
"If you win tomorrow you will be." (This qualified as a pseudo-snide remark since each of the twenty-three people who had just watched GW dispatch Temple was presumably aware of the fact that the winner of the A-10 tourney received an automatic bid.)
"This gets us to twenty-one." I said. (Wins not the legal drinking age.)
"Did you beat an NCAA tourney team?" Now Joe was asking me questions and this was definitely a snide remark since everyone also knew Temple wasn't going to the NCAA tourney.
"We can only beat who we play. So are we in?"
Smug face directed at me followed by a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive turn back to his computer with Jameer Nelson on the beach to comfort him.

Jason witnessed this entire sequence and immediately agreed that Lunardi had "big-timed" me. This was the second big-timing of the tourney. The previous night some Temple honchos had refused to talk to me at the bar when I complimented their team's defense against Dayton. This constant snubbing is beginning to grate on me. But that's ok, I always liked Ken Pomeroy(www.kenpom.com) much better than Joe Lunardi anyway.
...
Check back tomorrow to find out why I now love Joe Lunardi.