Cassettes of selected commentaries are now available. Click here for more information. Click here for more information. So when I discovered that the guy sitting next to me was an assistant NBA coach, I was excited to share my news. He was polite but pessimistic.
College basketball is big business.
Coaches might give lip service to efforts to uplift the sport but basketball is about winning, not ethics or character building. Besides, honor is no more relevant in sports than it is in politics and neither sports fans nor media would tolerate anything but the all-out pursuit of victory. And then I read a wonderful article by Bill Plaschke in the LA Times about how Shaquille O'Neal insisted that the Lakers give a job to a deaf man. For a while he even paid the fellow's salary himself. It was an eloquent reminder that not every star is a jerk.