March has been a big month for hyphens, the envy of ellipses, deemed repugnant and even a punk of punctuation by the jealous typographical devices, which watch the hyphen on the back’s of basketball’s best and curse themselves in vain: “&%#@!”
Willie Cauley-Stein and Karl-Anthony Towns make Kentucky the Big Blue Hyphenation. Arizona is blessed by the hyphenated hype that is Rondae Hollis-Jefferson. North Carolina State has the cool Abdul-Malik Abu, so true, while tournament participants such as Georgetown’s vaunted D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera and Oregon’s Jalil Abdul-Bassit are now spectators of the spectacle that is the Sweet Sixteen.
Believe the hyphen. It’s like Samson’s hair. Kentucky is bolstered by two connected bigs — Towns couldn’t decide which first name he preferred, so he linked them both to create a creative one. And Willie is the prodigy progeny of Cauley and Stein, the latter with whom I went to Hebrew school.
This isn’t the first March we’ve seen cases of both madness and hyph-ochondria. In the past there’s been Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Pops Mensah-Bonsu and Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje.
And hyphens are staples in the WNBA, as explained by my idol Steve Rushin, the Sports Illustrated scribe who married Rebecca Lobo.
“We are the unsung Schuman in Stacey Dales-Schuman, the anonymous Taylor in Charlotte Smith-Taylor,” . “Except that I didn’t get my name on the back of a Connecticut Sun uniform. As my unhyphenated wife, who uses her maiden name for basketball, explained, ‘My teammate Taj McWilliams-Franklin took the only dash that the embroiderers allocated to the Sun.'”
The hyphen has an omnipresent presence in pop culture and politics, be it Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the resplendently named Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
And in the movie “Big,” featuring Tom Hanks, there’s the scene when Elizabeth Perkins crabs to her boss about her soon-to-be hyphenated personal assistant.
Perkins: “Excuse me. I’m not getting any of my mail, nothing has been filed. Ever since she got engaged, my life has been a disaster.”
Boss: “You know, she came so highly recommended.”
Perkins: “She spent the last three months writing down her married name. Mrs. Judy Hicks, Mrs. Donald Hicks, Mrs. Judy Mitchellson Hicks — sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes without. Sometimes, she spells the hyphen.”
One wonders when we’ll ever see sports’ first union of hyphenated names, such as if the daughter of Willie Cauley-Stein married the son of Pops Mensah-Bonsu, and then had a son named after dad’s favorite Kentucky teammate of all-time: Karl-Anthony Cauley-Stein-Mensah-Bonsu. This guy’s name would literally be a circle around his jersey number.
CHEW ON THIS
• In the spirit of March Madness, here’s a cool look at ” ,” Davidson’s Stephen Curry.
• A lot of people don’t remember this or know this, but John Calipari actually coached in the NBA before. .
• The Nuggets lost to a terrible Philadelphia team on Wednesday. But Denver moved up, of course, in the .
• Here’s a local commercial with our old friend Timofey Mozgov selling something while wearing a backward jersey:
• And finally, happy 26th birthday to Von Miller, who plays professional football.
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or
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