Basketball or beer? My friend Bill Porter and I think alike: “I love March Madness but filling out the brackets takes precious brain cells that I need to save for their destruction by beer.”
This came up because we were discussing ESPN’s NCAA Men’s Tournament Challenge, which, no joke, attracted 3.3 million players. Stats:
1.1 million chose George Washington to beat Vanderbilt.
71,764 picked Wisconsin to win the national championship.
Twenty-eight brackets predicted a Final Four of USC, Oregon, Southern Illinois and Texas A&M.
And nobody picked correctly all the games played so far.
Compare your results with those at ncaatourney07/index.
The tournament resumes tonight (5 p.m., KCNC-Channel 4).
Crash, bang
Former stock-car driver, now ESPN analyst, Rusty Wallace expects lots of banging and bashing when NASCAR moves to the fast and tiny track at Bristol, Tenn.
“This is a 16-second track with 43 competitors and bumper-to-bumper action. Andy (Petree) is going to have to look at one end, I’m going to have look at the other end, and (anchor Jerry Punch) is going to have look right down the middle.”
KMGH-Channel 7 carries the Busch race at 1 p.m. Saturday and the Nextel Cup at 11:30 a.m. Sunday.
Unbeatable “Dynasty”
A record unlikely to be broken: UCLA won 10 national basketball championships in 12 years between 1964 and 1975. That streak and Coach John Wooden, whose teams won 88 games in a row, are the centerpiece of “The UCLA Dynasty” (8 p.m. Monday, HBO).
Wooden, 96, was a strict disciplinarian whose Midwestern values never changed. When his team won its first title in 1964, he recalls: “The next morning was Easter Sunday, and we’re waiting in front of the Muehlebach Hotel, my wife and I, and a pigeon flew over and dumped right on top of my head. I thought, ‘Gee, the good Lord is telling me something there. Feeling too good, must not let this go to my head.”‘
Around the dial
Can they make it? The Avalanche’s miracle run for the playoffs continues from Edmonton (7 p.m. Friday, Altitude) … KEPN 1600-AM broadcasts both games of the NCAA Western Regional hockey playoffs from Pepsi Center on Saturday (Minnesota-Air Force, 1:30 p.m., and Michigan-North Dakota, 5:30 p.m.) … CBS Sports golf commentator David Feherty is keynote speaker for the Jewish Family Service of Colorado luncheon on May 16 … Quotable: “When you’re part of something like that, it changes your life forever. It was the fans. It was the players that we had. It was the times. What it really was, was John Wooden.” Bill Walton
Dick Kreck’s column appears Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. He may be reached at 303-954-1456 or dkreck@denverpost.com.
