Saturday, March 11, 2006

Kent State 72, Ohio 59

Oh well, you win some you lose some. The Ohio Univeristy Bobcats lost to the Kent State University Golden Flashes (yes, that really is their team name, but it's better than the Akron University "Zips") last night in the MAC semifinals. Last year OU won the MAC tournament and got an automatic bid to the NCAA. Don't laugh too hard: they almost won their first round game.

I can't feel too bad about this since Kent State University is where I did my undergraduate work and I sort of grew up in and around Kent and Stow, so my loyalties, such as they are when it comes to sports teams, are rather divided. Living so near Cleveland didn't stop me from rooting for the Steelers in the Super Bowl, as traitorous as that is for a Browns fan, so you can see what kind of a sports person I am. My wife is always particularly on me about my loyalties in the ACC (we both attended UNC, but only I attended Duke--she's a Michigan girl), because she accuses me of rooting indiscriminately either for Duke or for UNC depending on who looks to be most likely to come out on top. I'm thinking I'll go with Duke this year.

The only sport in which I am not so capricious in my loyalties is golf, where I root for Tiger Woods no matter what, and go into fits of rage and endless bouts of pouting when he loses. I'm not entirely fanatical, though, because I do enjoy it when Tiger is given a run for his money, and I was not the least bit disappointed when Phil Mickelson won the Masters because I think he really deserved it and I genuinely like the guy and wish he would win more often, but I have to confess that if Tiger is not at least two strokes ahead going into the weekend I get knots in my stomach that don't go away until Monday.

So much for the life of rational contemplation. I guess Aristotle never imagined a sport like golf, otherwise he never would have written that tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics.

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