I was 8 years old when I had my first taste of March Madness. Sure everyone likes to look back to 1986 and pretend that Buckner brother their heart, too. Or, they pretend that the Bears stomping of the Pats had significant meaning for them as a 4 year-old. It's all bullshit. But when you're 8, things finally start to come into focus. Your own sports "career" is beginning to take flight. You are no longer hitting off the tee, the three-point line seems a little closer, and you're wrist shot might even be getting some separation from the ice. Seemingly as a result (or maybe it's just coincidence), sports as entertainment (rather than exercise) begins to take on a bigger role in your life. Memories begin to fasten themselves to your being. Often times they're silly; such as Pete Stoyanovich's NFL record 58-yard playoff field goal against the Chiefs (I was actually 9 when that happened, but let's not split hairs). But some memories are not silly. Rather, they are meaningful and perhaps more importantly, enduring. My first memory of March Madness falls into the meaningful, enduring category. And the reason for this is because of Hank Gathers.
With Brett Favre now rumbling and stumbling around his land on the back of a John Deere on a permanent Vicodin buzz, the sports world was yearning, needing, hungering, nay…CRAVING a new egomaniacal attention-whore, whose every ambiguously idiotic phrase would be latched onto as a child waits in earnest for his parent’s permission to drink some Ecto Cooler with lunch instead of 1% milk, while he manipulates 1 or 2 memorable performances into a lifetime of fellatio from the athletic populace; the entire time operating under the assumption that anyone truly fucking gives a shit whether or not he ever steps onto an athletic field again. What would we ever do without his batshit-ignorant right-wing, bleeding from somewhere role in our world? We’d be a little emptier inside, that’s what. Thank you, 38 Pitches, for stepping up to the plate.
Considering the Dallas Cowboys become seemingly more and more irrelevant each year, where would we turn to find a franchise willing to overpay for any and every marginally available superstar, indoctrinate them and their fan base to portray said superstar as some sort of organizational legend, dominate the collective psyche of its entire industry, and commit to bringing onboard any living, breathing, lazy, piece-of-shit hominid criminal who quit on a team and a city, as long as he can contribute 8 points and 22 minutes-a-game and a tattoo of his own logo on his head. In a time where one may have been misguided that sports franchises employ any sort of ethical responsibility or concern for a man’s character, I salute the Boston Celtics for stepping up to the plate, and bringing us back to the reality. 
