1998 PRE-NCAA CONTEST UPDATE - ROUND 5
Kate Sullivan probably thought she had it made. If either UNC or Stanford were to win the Final 4, then Kate would win the pool. No problem. She even sent her husband, D’Zuro, along with one of the commissioners to San Antonio, presumably to ensure that the commissioner did not abscond with her winnings. Rumor was that she had her chalet on the French Riviera all picked out.
But as we all know, fate can be cruel. On this occasion, the down payment on K Sullivan’s chalet would have to wait. After Kentucky and Utah won their games, the winner of the pool will either be Matt Josephs (Kentucky) or Glowacki (Utah). K Sullivan will finish second, and Mastro will finish third.
Since one of the commissioners is here in Texas, (actually in Austin, which is less than an hour and a half from San Antonio by car) with D’Zuro, we thought we’d give a quick firsthand report. We assumed that, as a commissioner of a famous contest, we’d get press seats, but there was some sort of mix up, so we had to use our tickets. Our seat location was closer to Houston than San Antonio, but at least we were in the building. This commissioner has been coming to Final Fours for ten years now, and although individual games stand out as most exciting (e.g., Duke vs. UNLV in 1991), this was the first time that we saw two exciting games on Saturday. It was great.
As far as mascots go, the Stanford Tree is clearly the goofiest mascot in sports. You just can’t get the full impact on TV. But we couldn’t figure out why the Utah Runnin’ Utes’ mascot was some sort of bird.
The commissioners would like to make a coaching change on the All-Location Team. The new coach is Orlando "Tubby" Smith. This important piece of information (Mr. Smith’s real first name) was obtained from the Final Four program, and so the fact that we had to take out a second mortgage in order to afford the program doesn’t bother us as much.
And speaking of locations, while we were trekking from Austin to San Antonio, we had occasion to look at a map of Texas. We discovered that all of the following are towns located in Texas: Atlanta; San Diego; Portland; Denver City; Albany; Iowa Park; Wichita Falls; Huntsville; Paris; Italy; Turkey; Bogata; Odessa; Carthage; Marathon; Richmond; Pasadena; Dayton; Cleveland; Bloomington; Colorado City; Mineola; Jacksonville; Georgetown; Temple; Marshall; Liberty; Dickinson; Morton; Lancaster; and Wharton. Can’t they think up their own names?