The ferocious second game was brilliantly scorched in a second overtime by Kansas State, almost in a mimic of Adolph Rupp.s gun and run quuintets he pioneered at Kentucky.... the dawn of modern basketball,.prior to World War 2.
II
Former Laker coach., a Kentuckian from the word “go” Pat Riley, sat in the bleachers, his profile look alike John Barrymore....his once black hair streaked with gray, combed straight back..., watched with the acumen of a Miami Heat owner.... those piercing eyes searching for another Dwayne Wade Shaq O’neil....even to a Wes Unseld or Jerry West role he opposed in his playing days/
Million dollar NBA magicians in disguise..
Like the Pope, coach Johnny Wooden at Ucla, Riley understood the apparatus .the calibration..the differential geometry and calculus of what it takes to shoot the lights out on a 93 foot Mississippi riveted raft..
III
“What hath these larger than life human beings?” asked Robert Frost on his birthday .”To bring a happiness that transcends the poetry of the Old Testament’s storied word.”
Wasn’t their passage to fulfillment a coveted “Phantom of the opera”, North Hollywood High’s Ucla Laker Gael Goodrich.
Elgin Baylor gambled, putting his life on the line, didn’t he? Maintaining a low profile . in a hoop de hoop cosmos gone bonkers. in a Magic Johnson promotion. Beyond the ghetto of wish fulfillments.
Right Pat Riley?.......Right......sitting in the bleachers ,his eyes sizing up his treasure trove.
“This is my life” .Don Malmberg, ex Bruin footballer, assistant to Ralph Edwards,.producer, not unlike squeezing blood out of a turnip on the fifth floor of dynamic Maimonides led medical
center in the Big Apple’s Boro of Brooklyn.....
IV
Hungering for approbation...an emancipation Big Jim steered their raft while Huckleberry Finn aided and abetted . “Not having Tom Sawyer at my side ,” he said. hoisting his own sails of larceny
“There is nothing to believe in,” said Big Jim, his own life on the line as thou he had escaped from steerage. Eluding the posse’s noose, the price a “ plantation” slave pays for escaping.
“An allegory , “claimed Big Jim, manipulating the rudder in the ebbs and tides of the Mississippi, the raft merging with the sweat swaggering players.
“We ae the stuff dreams are made on our little lives rounded with a sleep”
Huck,remembering Aunt Polly’s take on “civilization:”
The Sweet Sixteen plunging ou the larceny in our souls.. opposing forces of guile and trickery..finesing their bodies and souls in a thrust toward freedom and victory....
The Wildcats and Kansas State in doulbe overtime March 26, 2010.
