George the Gambler

The Sweet 16 is set for the NCAA championship march to the Final Four in New Orleans.

It's an interesting field, but somewhat predictable. The number-one seeds are all intact. A couple of famous number-twos are not.

 Duke and Missouri fell hard.

Xavier is rising, but that really isn't a surprise. It's a basketball school. Four teams from Ohio are represented, which really isn't a surprise either if you've been paying attention.

The best two teams on the West Coast didn't make it into the tourney. They were relegated to the kissing-cousin NIT. Oregon polished off Iowa today in the NIT quarterfinals and faces Washington, the PAC regular-season champion, in Seattle Tuesday night. It will be an exciting game.

I expect Washington to take care of business at home and go to NYC for the NIT Final Four next week, but I will root for my Ducks.

I expect Kentucky to win it all in March Madness by-the-way, but I've been wrong before.

I can, however, tell you about a time when I wasn't wrong and picked all eight winners in the Sweet 16.

It happened back in the 1990s. My friend George, who is dead now but who lived with me at the time because he had a bad gambling habit and an inability to keep a steady job, walked into Seafood Mama's one night and pulled his Sweet 16 bracket out of his jacket.

He set it in front of me and said, "What do you think?"

I hadn't given it much thought, because although I like basketball and at that time was a huge fan of March Madness, I really never gambled on the games. Gambling was just something I never bothered to do, even though I knew the teams and their tendencies, and may have been viewed somewhat as an authority on the subject.

First, I'll confess I have a hard time keeping track of who is in the NCAA tourney in it's early stages every year. There are just too many teams to keep organized in my brain--64 back then, 68 now with the "play-in" round. But once the field narrows, I know my stuff.

For example, this year I did not realize Norfolk State was in the tourney until they were pulling off an upset; so I had to go back and research Norfolk State to see what was up.

The year George asked for my opinion, I knew everybody. It was the Sweet 16 after all, and there had been few surprises. I scanned George's bracket.

One through eight, I chose my winners.

"Are you sure?" George said, shooting me a serious rum-soaked gaze, the inveterate gambler's look.

"I'm here to help, George," I said.

It was pure bullshit. Do you even appreciate how hard it is to pick the eight winners of the Sweet 16? (If you think you can do it invest in a pool and make some money.)

George had paid pretty good money to somebody to play in his Sweet 16 pool, so he was in with my picks and his own gauzy thinking.

I forgot about it until George walked into Seafood Mama's with a wad of cash the next weekend after the field had been set for the Final Four.

He peeled a fifty from his wad and gave it to me.

"What's this?" I said.

"I won the pool," George said.

It was a nice tip, one I didn't expect. But that was George the gambler. He figured he could share the wealth because I offered my two-cents.

I never bothered to ask him how much he won in his Sweet 16 pool, but judging by the way we drank for the next several days it was considerable.

And he even chipped in on the rent for my pad the next month.


TS