RON MALY HAS BEEN WATCHING THE PARADE GO BY FOR A LONG TIME. THIS IS ONE OF HIS WEBSITES.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Stunned


By RON MALY

I wonder what John Wooden would be saying about this. 

Or Maury John. 

Actually, I began doing a lot of wondering
while fumbling through the DirecTV directory on my Sony this evening. 

I knew it was Saturday [or at least I was fairly certain it was Saturday] and I knew the NCAA Final Four basketball games were supposed to be starting. 

But I couldn't find the opening game between Florida and Connecticut anywhere on the TV screen. 

I thought it was a bit strange that, at 5:30 p.m., channel 8 was running a CBS national news show, and I thought it was even stranger that, at 6 p.m., KCCI was doing its local news.

 "Where the heck is the NCAA tournament?" I asked myself. One of the many good things about being at my stage in life is that I don't have to pay a lot of attention to things  things I cannot control, or don't want to control. 

So I certainly didn't check my iPad, my desktop and my laptop to make sure today's games would be on CBS-TV. 

After all, for the past 33 seasons, the entire Final Four had been on CBS.

Finally, I turned on my iPad when I couldn't find the Final Four, googled  "2014 NCAA tournament" and found out tonight's games were not on CBS.  

When my answer came that the games were on something called truTV and TNT, I was stunned.  

So, finally, at halftime of the first game--with Connecticut ahead of Florida, 25-22--I located the game on truTV, which happens to be channel 246 on DirecTV. 

I certainly  had watched games on truTV earlier in the tournament, and on TNT and CBS, too. 

But I had no idea the Final Four semifinal round games would be farmed out to truTV and TNT, and  that CBS wouldn't get into the act until Monday night's championship game.  

Like I said, I wonder what John Wooden, who all but owned the NCAA tournament when he coached at UCLA, and Maury John, whose 1969 Drake team lost to UCLA, 85-82, in the semifinal round and eventually wound up third in the Final Four, would think if they were told they'd be playing on truTV. 

I, of course, wasn't the only one who was stunned tonight.

So was Florida, which had its 30-game winning streak halted by Connecticut, 63-53.  So it'll be the Huskies who play Kentucky for the national championship Monday night.

Kentucky rallied to beat Wisconsin, 74-73, in tonight's second game.  

That, of course, was a result that broke the hearts of every Badgers fan, every Big Ten Conference fan and everyone [and there are plenty of us] who can't stand it whenever Kentucky coach John Calipari  wins any game.