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A-10 tourney... We Are the Champions
3/16/05
by Clay

Whenever birds are involved, GW wins. Before our first game of the tourney against Fordham, a bird flew into the fan. In our second and third games, we played the Temple Owls and the St. Joseph Hawks. All three times we emerged victorious (although to emerge victorious in the first game GW has to be defined expansively to include the overhanging fan that mauled the bird). And now we're headed to the A-10 tourney. Here's my analysis of the championship game.

1. John Bryant is without a doubt the ugliest basketball player in the A-10 tourney. He makes Tyrone Hill look like Tyson Beckford.

Bryant	Hill	Beckford

2. There were approximately twenty-three fans at this championship game. I watch a lot of basketball and the A-10 had the smallest crowd of any championship game I have ever seen.
3. Phil Martelli was shown up at the end of the game when GW's J.R. Pinnock fake yawned in his face to repay Martelli for fake yawning after a win over GW in early March. This is the most fake yawning I have ever seen, and perhaps the first time a yawn has ever been properly classified as a "trash yawn." Of course I loved it.
4. Shekhar, Jason, and I almost became the oldest people to ever rush the court after our school won. The people from ESPN wanted a shot of fans storming the court and began motioning for us to come down to the court with about 3 minutes left in the game. We refused to move because GW has lost more games than we care to remember leading with 3 minutes left. Now I wish I had stormed the court if only to be mocked by my friend "Double Hoya" Demko who insists that once you graduate from college you can no longer buy any new school-related apparel.
5. If I were a woman, I would stalk St. Joseph's guard Pat Carroll until I won the baby lottery. His jumpshot is that pure. Since he's Catholic presumably contraception would not be an issue.
6. Yes, I am aware that pure is almost a slang word that I should not be allowed to use. In my defense, pure is just a phat word.
7. GW won 76-67 (somewhere our readership of ten just crossed their heart in thanks that they would be subjected to no more columns about the A-10 tourney)
8. We all bought matching A-10 championship t-shirts (Demko would not approve) and then contemplated wearing them to the cleavage bar. Our purchase of three A-10 championship t-shirts will probably represent 33% of the sales for said t-shirts.
9. As my friend VBs put it so eloquently on our message board, "Holy ******* ****...I haven't had a grin glued on my face like this since the night I lost my virginity. GW ******* rules..." While some might quibble with his use of curse words so difficult to reconstruct with only representative stars, I think it sums up everyone's feeling quite succinctly.

Fresh off of our victory we headed over to the Marriott to pound back more pitchers with our friends TGT and DT (initialized to protect their scandalized daughter from their parents prodigious drinking capabilities) and a host of other GW fans. Host being liberally defined as approximately nine. While there we had the good fortune to see almost the entire team, our coach Karl Hobbs, the commissioner of the A-10 Linda Bruno, but no Joe Lunardi. While there we determined the following things.

Linda Bruno wore the shortest skirt that has ever been worn by a conference commissioner. I almost expected to see an A-10 thong. If I had my eyes would have turned to stone.
	Linda Bruno, A-10 Commissioner

GW coach Karl Hobbs used to be Shekhar's neighbor and came to talk to us. Of course he did not rememeber Shekhar's name. Instead he greeted him with, "Hey, my neighbor." Shekhar then offered him an inappropriate and extremely tall high 5. My conversation with Karl Hobbs consisted of my encouraging him to come down to the Virgin Islands Paradise Jam preseason tournament. Amazingly, he said they were considering this. During this entire time, he was drinking either: a. wine with ice b. cranberry juice from a wine glass c. according to Jason it "could have been that pink wine" Regardless you can see our friend DT in the photo of the three of us with Karl Hobbs. TGT took the photo and the mysterious liquid is visible in the photo as well.

Hobbs and co.

• Shekhar drank so much from the pitchers that he told our table of GW fans his entire life history from the time when he was short in freshman year through his college selection process to his amazing senior year growth spurt. Included was the story about the time he lent GW coach Karl Hobbs the snowblower. It was almost as long as my A-10 chronicle.

As soon as we left the bar, we began making telephone calls on our way to the cleavage club. The next day I learned that not only did we leave one late night phone message with several people, we often left three. Tardio and Shaw summed up these phone calls with these quotes,

Tardio: "You had to set an expletive per second of message record."
Shaw: "I thought it was never going to end." (In our defense for Shaw's message we actually began to wonder if there was any message time limit or if we could talk forever. Then we discovered that forever is a time-consuming thing to prove.)

The cleavage bar was once again packed. The Underground Railroad must have just unloaded because once again there was no one in the streets. Once inside I discovered there was a downstairs so my hypothesis remains sound. Unforunately I did not see Harriet Tubman.
	Harriet Tubman was not in attendance at the cleavage bar on Saturday night, but if she were, this is what she might have looked like.

Arrival at the cleavage bar (sans matching A-10 t-shirts) brought forward an immediate near fight, an angry midwestern man said to Shekhar, "Tell your friend to watch how he passes that beer bottle to you." I mean this guy was really stretching for something to fight about.

Then we assumed our awkward stance on the outskirts of the dance floor. At one point, Shekhar and Jason were in the bathroom and I found myself in between a girl dressed like a pirate and a guy wearing sunglasses and a white fur coat. I had no idea what to do, but I knew it was time to leave. Before we could leave, the guy in the white fur coat inclined his beer in my direction and we tapped bottles. Then he said, "Girl" followed by a prolonged space "dance." I didn't respond with words, instead I just nodded. I was a bit surprised he could see anything at all with his sunglasses on. This might be classified as the most awkward conversation I have ever been a part of.

In the cab on the way home, Shekar insisted that we be taken to White Castle again for hamburgers leading to this entirely honest exchange.

"Take us to White Castle," Shekhar said.
"Do you want to to go Kentucky?"
"No."
Pause to allow us to continue driving in the midst of the falling snow.
"Take us to White Castle," Shekar said again,
"Do you want to go to Kentucky?"
"No."
This sequence repeated itself at least two more times until I was almost convinced we had discovered how long forever was. It also solidified what Cincinnati's marketing slogan should be,
Cincinnati: "Do you want to go to Kentucky" (Harriet Tubman will lead you)
...
So this was it, finally after all this, GW won the A-10 tourney and was heading to the NCAA's. I think I've sort of slacked off on what being a GW basketball fan is really like. So here it is with metaphorical precision, being a George Washington basketball fan is like waking up every morning and rooting fervently for an eclipse. I've only been a GW fan since 1997 but in that time we have never won an A-10 tournament, have been to only two NCAA tourney games (my freshman and sophomore year which we lost by a combined score of almost 35 points), and have specialized in heartbreaking losses to teams like Richmond and Siena. During one of the many disappointing walks out of the Smith Center during our senior year, my buddy Japes turned to me and said with a pained look in his eyes,
"I just don't think I can take it anymore."
Since then Japes has done his best to avoid watching GW in big games because he is convinced that the two of us combined represent one-half of the four horsemen of the GW basketball apocalypse. (I only saw one game in person last year and it was GW's only home loss of the season. Earlier this year the power went off in the islands during our overtime game against UMASS and I called Japes at the exact millisecond that UMASS hit a shot to win the game.)

So it was with a great degree of surprise that come Sunday morning I looked outside and the sun was shining like normal but GW had become the A-10 champs with a 76-67 win over St. Joe's. We're already planning next year's trip to Cincinnati to defend our A-10 title.
...
Also an astute reader provided this link along with the following message: "Your friend Shekhar is an idiot." He then signed his name as GW will lose in the first round. That remains to be seen, what doesn't remain to be seen is this, birds do in fact have blood and Shekhar is in fact an idiot. Here's the great link provided by our reader. My first coverage of the A-10 tourney is officially complete.

Pops with the trophy