In a few hours, the Tennessee Wesleyan Bulldogs would give their honorary baseball teammate/mascot/little brother Neyland Pickel, who recently died of cancer at age 11, the kind of celebration of life he so richly deserved.
My favorite University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball story involving the Virginia Military Institute goes something like this:
The incident occurred Sunday afternoon.
As I write this column early Monday evening, my deadline is less than two hours away while the NCAA Tournament championship game between Kansas and North Carolina has yet to tip off.
If anything screams of all that's right and wrong with not only college basketball in general, but the NCAA tournament in particular, it's the men's national championship game between Kansas and North Carolina set for Monday night in New Orleans.
The first time Jim Suddath met then new Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in the spring of 1980, the rising senior was on crutches due to a left knee injury.
North Carolina basketball coach Hubert Davis had just guided the Tar Heels to the Final Four in his first season on the job.
It doesn't take long to appreciate the overwhelming historical strength of next weekend's Final Four in New Orleans.
Few men have more dramatically changed the expected direction of their own lives more than James L. "Bucky" Wolford.
By the time you read this, odds are that University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball coach Lamont Paris will be on his way to Columbia, South Carolina, to be introduced sometime Tuesday as the new basketball coach of the University of South Carolina Gamecocks.
