Basketball

My only complaint with LeBron is how he did it, his rudeness toward Dan Gilbert and his megalomaniac TV announcement.

Other than that, who can criticize a 25-year-old kid for wanting to spend his winters on South Beach? Sixty-five-year-old retirees do the same thing and we wish them well. They save the state income tax bite and they save a lot of money on snow plowing their driveways.

Maybe I've been watching too much of Pau Gasol, but I've got to wonder, do the white guys try to look ugly? The scraggly beard, the dirty, unkempt hair make Gasol the poster boy for NBA ugly. The black guys are never that ugly.

At least it will keep a few thousand Irishmen out of the bars that night.

St. Eds and St. Ignatius will meet at 8 p.m. Wednesday night, March 17, at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University in the regional basketball semi-final. That happens to be St. Patrick's Day.

It's the second half of a doubleheader, with Mentor and Avon Lake meeting in the other game at 6:15. The regional final is Saturday night in the same arena.

Tiger Woods did what he had to do -- and one thing he did not have to do -- in his carefully staged and manipulated mea culpa on ESPN Friday afternoon.

He apologized all over himself about a dozen times for his sexual binge during which time he deposited his seed over all four time zones in North America and possibly all 24 time zones around the world. He turned planet Earth into his personal brothel. It must have been hard for Tiger, standing in front of a national TV camera and saying, for the first time in his life that he was wrong, shameful, selfish and an embarrassment to himself, his family, his friends, his sponsors and the game of golf. It was the most humbling 13 1/2 minutes of his life. In an emotional sense he had to crawl on his belly like a snake. He must have felt like a piece of dung. For a guy like Tiger, it must have been agonizingly difficult. I wonder what was his most compelling motivation to do that, his sponsors or his family. He was a businessman before he was a family man.

That's what I was telling my son, John, as we watched the St. Ed vs. St. Ignatius basketball game in Sullivan Gym last Friday. The St. Ed Eagles had a terrible first half. Missing about 10 of 15 free throws was only part of the problem. They also lost the ball with careless no-look passes in the chaos underneath the basket more than once.

"They watch too much television. They see LeBron do that and because he makes it look easy, they think it's easy," I said to John.