Creighton picked Saturday night in Philly to play their best game of the year. Half way across the country, in a game that wasn't televised on a night of the week when no one wants to listen to a game on the radio. Well, not no one. That's an exaggeration, because there was at least one person listening on the radio. Namely, me.
Yes, I sat at the peninsula in my kitchen, with the TV on the USC-UCLA football game (on mute, of course) and the Jays on the radio. Yeah, USC-UCLA. I'm sorry, I'm just not a big SEC guy. Never have been. Great teams, passionate fans, but if I sit down to watch a game, the SEC isn't usually my first choice...or even my fifth choice. I'd rather watch a bad Big Ten game between Northwestern and Minnesota than a so-called good game between Alabama and anyone. I'm weird. This is not a news flash.
Anyway, I got off track there. After finishing the first bowl of Spaghetii-Os I'd eaten in a decade (don't judge me!), I had a memory. Supposedly, the St. Joseph's webcast was going to be available semi-illegally for free on a certain website that shows web feeds of televised games. ChannelSurfing, its called. Their feed reliability is dubious at best, but so is my cash flow and employment opportunities at the moment, so who am I to question it?
So I clicked it, and honest to Spaghetti-Os, the game appeared. In glorious clarity, I might add. Plus, and this is reason #9796 why I love Macs, the stream opened in QuickTime, which allowed me to go full-screen and watch it from the comforts of my couch via a laptop TV output cable. Sweet.
This meant sacrificing the hometown radio broadcast for the St. Joe's announcers, but when the color analyst is ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi, that's a fair trade. Incidentally, "bracketologist" is not in Safari's spell check library, so every time I type it the word shows up with a dotted red line underneath it. See, Lunardi, I knew your title was made up! Not so cool now, are you? Ha!
The webcast was a fairly standard one-camera production, but because of the intimacy of the Palestra, that actually worked out better than it usually does. And, although it was the radio broadcast for the audio, for some reason they didn't cut the announcers mics during commercial breaks. It took me a few breaks to pick up on it, and you had to REALLY listen close, but if you were intense about it you could listen to their off-air conversations. Seriously, it was the audio equivalent of one of those damn bastard illustrations with the hidden imagery disguised as swirly lines.
Oddly enough, the craziest thing the crew said came during the actual on-air broadcast. The play-by-play guy asks Lunardi who would be Creighton's top challengers in the Valley this year, and honest to Spaghetti-Os this was his response. "Illinois State and Wichita State, in that order."
First off, yes I am quite aware that I've used the Spaghetti-Os line twice in this post. Don't look to me for sympathy, I can't solve all of your problems. Second, Wichita State? Obviously, he doesn't read my website or he would know that I picked them to finish 10th in a 10 team league. This is really a shame, although with my millions of readers that I get weekly...no, daily...no, hourly...um, no, every damn second of every day!...I can't expect national pundits to follow along.
Ahem.
So, Booker Woodfox, huh? Turns out he can shoot it a little bit. 7-9 from behind the arc, 2-4 in other shots, 4-4 from the line, and 7 rebounds. 29 points. So, you know, he really should have bothered showing up. Terrible game. Incidentally, this is called being facetious if you're reading this in Carbondale and are confused as to my tone.
His performance was legendary, but the St. Joe's fan response was even moreso. There's an entire thread on their message board dedicated to talking about how they can't believe they got dominated by a "midget" (their word, not mine, quotes added by me for emphasis). Its supposed to funny, and unlike Two and a Half Men, it actually is.
"Booker Woodfox is 6-1. His hobbies include eating candy, draining wide open threes in Philadelphia, and going to Candy World in Lewisville, Texas ...Nicknames include Boogie, B-wood, TJ Hooker, Bubba and Bubby, Favorite sports team is the Dallas Cowboys, (Icing on the cake). A communications major ...Career ambition is to be a middle school basketball coach."
"We got hammered by a kid who wants to be a middle school coach, he does not even have aspirations be a high school jv coach, just plain ol middle school. Ouch."
"I had nightmares of little Booker laughing and giggling during Creighton timeouts, at one point he said, 'they don't want to guard me.' AWESOME."
"I really like saying 'Booker Woodfox'..the problem is that I said it about 50 times last night, I am still saying it, and the PA announcer said it at least 14 times last night. BOOKER WOODFOX."
Hilarious.
*****
Today's Polyfro Player of the Game is brought to you by the Detroit Lions. That's right, the Lions of Detroit...we make that decision to take a third shot of Tequila look GOOD by comparison!
Well, its got to be Booker Woodfox, doesn't it? Yep, it does.
You bet.
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