by Andy Weddington
Monday, 28 March 2016
A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play. Mike Krzykewski (Head Coach, Duke University Men's Basketball)
The madness of March is over.
The Men's NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament Final Four set. A week from today - in April - the championship game. But one of the four #1 seeds remain - UNC Tarheels. It's why they play the games.
Raised in North Carolina (within spittin' distance of UNC, Duke, N. C. State, and Wake Forest), this was the first year since the mid-60s I did not have time to tune in during the season. Occasionally, a peruse of the sports page for box scores but in the big scheme had no idea how any team was doing on the season.
But a good bit of the tourney I've been able to watch. There's nothing like the spectacle - especially when David slays Goliath, and it happens more than once every year. A #10 seed made it to the Elite Eight. How great!
In the ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) I grew up watching there's now strange teams. Progress, I guess. That's another commentary.
And so it was yesterday, going to commercial break during the UNC game, the commentator made mention of the women's tournament.
There's a women's tournament?
Why?
In these days and times of political correctness and gender neutrality?
Are we Neanderthals?
Why not the best basketball team?
Why not one tourney, the best men's and women's teams, to sort out the champion?
Absurd?
Of course it is.
Why?
Because men are bigger, stronger, faster, quicker, more physical, tougher, jump higher, and have more endurance - to cite the obvious differences.
The most competitive women's team would have no chance against the least competitive men's team.
They'd be destroyed.
Aside, over the weekend there was some controversy (covered exhaustively) about a three point shot (taken and made) with mere seconds to play that upped the margin of Oregon's win over Duke.
The controversy being what Duke's head coach may or may not have said to the player after the game along the lines of a teaching point as to sportsmanship.
Who cares? It's a basketball game.
In contrast, this morning the first article that caught my attention in an online newspaper was not about basketball but how assigning women to ground combat specialties is going to work, going to happen. The bottom line: lower standards through establishment of a quota (derived from "leadership" proffered by General Martin Dempsey, U. S. Army, previous Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
The comparison startling.
In short, there's no ongoing effort whatsoever to gender neutralize sports - where money is involved.
Yet there's an aggressive agenda-driven effort to gender neutralize our armed forces - where lives are on the line?
Hmm.
Drawing from 'Coach K's' opening analogy, a Marine infantry fire team is but four (five, sometimes, if an attachment). But if you can get them all together you have a weapon more powerful than a five-fingered fist.
Add a woman to the man mix and not only do you have less horsepower and firepower, you've created a self-detonating bomb without timer.
Explosive! And deadly.
That, folks, plain and simple is truth and insanity.
In basketball parlance it'd be a technical foul that merits ejection - from the game. And ban for life.
Remember, men are bigger, stronger, faster, quicker, more physical, tougher, jump higher, and have more endurance - to cite the obvious differences.
In closing...
Fighting, not scoring, is the primary mission of a Marine fire team. And so Marines are trained - to survive, to win!
It is after the fight Marines play, sometimes basketball, and score; sometimes.
Game on!
Go Heels!
Post Script
Why was so much said about Coach Krzykewski's comments to the Oregon player? Because he wins and builds men - right along the lines of what Marines do. Maybe that the coach graduated from West Point, played basketball, and served in the Army has something to do with his leadership methodology. Just guessing, but doubt during his 36 years he's recruited a woman to play on his team. Coach, for what it's worth, I'd have mentored that Oregon player, too. Continue to march, Sir!
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