Dispatches, Vol. 4 (April 2024)
From the baseline of an Elite Eight game. From the baddest 21 seconds. And trophies in ⚽🏒🤸🏼♀️🏌🏼♂️🏀➗
The first dispatch of April is actually from the Milennium Falcon on Batuu. My wife planned a spontaneous trip to Star Wars Nite at Disneyland on April 30. We resisted and smuggled and toured the galaxy. We flew through hyperspace and ate galactic cuisine. That, combined with hosting her parents after returning from California, bumped the month’s miscellany of championship moments back. I’m so glad we went, and now I’m caught back up. May the force be with you.
Being there: No. 6 Clemson vs. No. 4 Alabama in the Elite Eight
Pepperdine hosted second weekend games in Los Angeles. In a West region that included No.1 North Carolina and No.2 Arizona, the teams that upset those traditional powers in the Sweet Sixteen met to decide which program would earn their first Final Four appearance.
Kyle Cajero, assistant director of athletic communications at Pepperdine, Thrill Shot subscriber and former student of mine, watched the basketball version of a football playoff rivalry from beneath the basket.
“I snagged an extra credential and found an empty spot,” Cajero said.
Here’s Kyle’s view of the Crimson Tide’s starting five: senior guard Mark Sears (1), sophomore guard Rylen Griffen (3), senior forward Nick Pringle (23), senior forward Grant Nelson (2) and senior guard Aaron Estrada (55).
This is a view of a modern college basketball team. Of the starters who led Alabama to an 89-82 victory and the first third weekend of tournament basketball in program history, only Griffen began his career with the Crimson Tide. Sears played two years for Ohio. Pringle started at Wofford and spent a season at Dodge City Community College.1 Nelson made the 2023 All-Summit League team at North Dakota State. Estrada moved from St. Peter’s to Oregon to Hofstra.
My pick of Kyle’s shots from the Elite Eight: Clemson senior forward PJ Hall, frozen mid-finish at the rim, every eye in the arena — his team, his opponents, the cheerleaders, the referee, the photographers, the fans — on him2 floating a few feet above the floor. The March Madness logo on the base of the basket and at center court remind us that this is the most important game of both teams’ seasons so far.
Moment of the month: The buzzer beater that ended the bout between Max Holloway and Justin Gaethje
There’s a perfect story structure to the final 21 seconds that decided the BMF Belt at UFC 300.3 Fighters nicknamed “Blessed” and “The Highlight” combined for a mini-epic with a lightning-fast conclusion. Here’s how it happened.
Exposition: Eleven seconds of kicks that don’t land between Max Holloway and Justin Gaethje near the end of the fifth and final round. The most notable is Gaethje’s whiff on a spin kick that tried to correctly predict where Holloway would move.
Inciting incident: Holloway gestures to the center of the ring, an invitation for Gaethje to spend the final 10 seconds squared up and firing. Every account I’ve read indicated that Holloway did not need to extend this invitation to secure victory. He was ahead on scorecards and would likely win by decision at the end of the fifth round after those final 10 seconds ticked away.
Rising action: Both fighters unleash a flurry of blows.4 Gaethje fires off six or seven. By my count, Holloway doubles that.
Climax: On his 12th (or maybe 13th) punch, Holloway’s right hand connects with the left side of Gaethje’s face. The clock reads 0:02.
Falling Action: Literally. Gaethje crumples like every string holding him together went slack at once. He collapses face-first onto the mat at 0:01.5
Can any other competition pack this into twenty seconds? The closest I can think of is this: Holloway dug into Gaethje’s body and wasn’t looking up when he threw the winning punch, like a soccer player instinctively feeling the location of the goal and the keeper. But the dominant participant putting a win on the line in the last 1.4% of a contest, then transforming a judges’ decision into a legacy knockout? That doesn’t happen in other sports.
Champions in April
Bayer Leverkusen clinched the club’s first Bundesliga trophy. The best football story of the year? A 120-year-old club with three cups in the trophy case adds a first league title and could be on its way to doubling their entire haul in one season. That’s not a misprint. Leverkusen won the DFB-Pokal in 1993. They won the UEFA Cup in 1988. They won the 2. Bundesliga in 1979.
And in the fog of flare smoke, wunderkind Florian Wirtz completed a hat trick to cap a dominating claim to their fourth piece of silverware on April 14. The crowd spilled onto the field before 90 minutes elapsed, the game over, the league decided. The referee blew his whistle with fans, stewards and club staff everywhere on the pitch.
“Pomp & Circumstance” played. Manager Xabi Alonso and his unbeaten squad celebrated. More fans filled the field and set off more flares. The song Americans recognize as the graduation anthem is three years older than Bayer Leverkusen and was played at the coronation of King Edward VII. It fits. This game was a coronation for a team that will live in Leverkusen and Bundesliga lore, and a graduation into the ranks of league winners.
Bayer Leverkusen’s final four games include league tilts against VfL Bochum (May 12) and Augsburg (May 18), then the Europa League final against Italian side Atalanta (May 226) and the DFB-Pokal final against Kaiserslautern (May 25).
Denver Hockey won a contest between top NFL draft prospects and claimed a record-setting Frozen Four title. Zeev Buium and the Pioneers topped projected first overall pick Macklin Celebrini and the Boston Terriers to claim the program’s record 10th NCAA hockey championship on April 11.
Denver hockey blogger Puck Swami put this trophy into championship context: “This 10th DU title now effectively ended years of fan arguments over which NCAA Division I program is the best in the history of the sport. That answer is now definitively Denver, as the Pioneers are now standing alone on the NCAA D-I hockey title mountaintop as the only school with double-digit crowns.7”
LSU claimed the school’s first NCAA women’s gymnastics championship with a clutch performance in the final rotation. The Tigers led after the first and second rotations, then fell to second after the third. They leapt over Utah on the beam and finished first with a team total of 198.2250.
Senior Haleigh Bryant won the all-around title on Thursday, April 18 and helped the Tigers claim their first championship on two nights later. She’s not the most famous name on the LSU gymnastics team. That would be NIL star Olivia Dunne. But Bryant completed a Gym Slam, a perfect score on each apparatus, with a 10.0 on balance beam in February, and will return to defend her team and individual titles next season.
Scottie Scheffler won his second green jacket in three years with an 11-under performance at the 2024 Masters Tournament. After the first round, Scheffler told reporters he was “ready to go at a moment’s notice” if his wife Meredith went into labor with the couple’s first child. The due date wasn’t imminent, and Scheffler stayed on course and became the 17th golfer to earn a spare green jacket.8
UConn men and South Carolina women both claimed trebles in March Madness (which ends in April). These squads turned in two dominant campaigns. UConn lost three times all season. They won the Big East league title, the Big East tournament and extended their record streak of double-digit tournament wins with back-to-back national titles. South Carolina notched the program’s first undefeated season and added the national championship to SEC league and tournament trophies.
So the number of trebles in both men’s and women’s college basketball went up by one. I covered the history of women’s three-trophy seasons here. History extends further back on the men’s side, and I hunted down the squads who claimed their league, conference tournament and national titles. I’m curious if you think there’s been more trebles by women’s teams or men’s teams. Choose your answer below…
…then check this footnote for the answer:9
My daughter won her 5th grade March Madness (in April): Math Edition. We’re ending this month’s dispatches with a championship in my household. Harper won a math tournament organized by her classmates and supported by her teacher. Two fifth graders went up to the whiteboard and raced to complete a math question. The fastest to solve three questions moved on in the 20-competitor bracket. The peer selection committee gave Harper one of the two No.1 seeds, and she topped a No.2 seed (one of the organizers) in the final.
“Most of the kids [in the audience] were standing the entire time,” Harper said, “because it was very suspenseful. I had to take depth breaths because I was very stressed. Obviously, the other person is also one of the smartest kids in the class.”
The last question of the final was 12 and 1/2 divided by 100. Both competitors spent minutes at the board dealing with the decimal version.
“But then I realized,” Harper said, “you just turn it into an improper fraction and do a lot of other steps."
“I wrote ‘1/8’ and then I said it to my teacher, and she said, ‘That is correct.’ [The class] was all like ‘Oh my gosh!’ We shook hands and then he just sat down. I sat down because my legs were shaking very hard.”
Harper won a basket of Jolly Ranchers, a bag of gummy bears and the hand-written tournament bracket.
“Here’s your little prize, let’s take a photo, and let’s get to History. Grab your notebooks.”10
If there was a championship in April that I didn’t include, let me know if in the comments. And if there’s one coming up that you’re curious about, give me a heads up to keep it on my radar. I’m following the NHL and NBA playoffs, and I’m excited about college softball and baseball nearing tournament time.
I’m from Kansas, so I’ll tell you that Dodge City is about as far from anything as you can get. But the community college athletics scene is strong in the Sunflower State, so maybe Pringle wasn’t as far from a major college program as it might seem.
Okay, if you zoom in you can see a handful of people in the bottom left corner looking left instead of gazing up like the rest of the crowd. If this was a Renaissance painting, that detail would mean something. Here, who knows. But everyone else is focused on Hall.
BMF stands for what you think it does. Here’s a short history of this irregular title.
In Dungeons & Dragons, monks can use Flurry of Blows to add two additional unarmed strikes to their attack action. A player character’s turn in D&D takes six real-time seconds in the game world. Holloway and Gaetje multiply that by 3x and 6x in real life. Most of Holloway’s dice rolls hit, and he gets a nat-20 at the end. This would be a stand-up moment at the gaming table, as it was in the octagon.
I couldn’t write about this moment without looking up Gaethje’s post-knockout condition. He’s taking time off. “I do think that repeated concussions,” Gaethje said, “with me going to sleep like that, me receiving that shot, it would be foolish for me to jump back into training any time before 180 days.”
My sister’s birthday and a Wednesday. Happy birthday, Sal! Also, a major cup final on a Wednesday feels so strange. The Europa League is the second-tier continental cup, but the tournament provides first rate competition between less repetitive opponents than its big brother.
Head over to LetsGoDU for the full fan’s perspective on this title. And I’ll let you consider whether Most Trophies equals Best Program. Not that I’m disagreeing. It’s just an interesting thought when considering the history of sports and leagues.
Two notes for the future. 1) How many wearable trophies are there? I know about Hall of Fame jackets, but that’s an honor, not a win. 2) What do Masters winners do with their green jackets?
It’s even! 20-20. Duke and Kenturcky (Kentucky, obviously, but I left an “r” there and then Chad caught it for his comment below) have three. So does Louisville if you consider that the 2013 tournament did happen. If you chose the women’s total and take umbrage with counting that vacated banner, I understand. But it happened. Louisville claimed it at the time. Kansas, North Carolina and UConn all have two. Florida, Michigan State, UNLV, Georgetown and NC State all have one. Kentucky snagged the first two trebles in 1948-49, but they didn’t start happening frequently until conference tournaments became a trend in the 1980s. I’ll come back to more about the history on the men’s side in the future.
Harper brought home her trophy, and I asked her if we could test out a new mic. She obliged me with a short interview about her math championship.
Great Stuff. Congrats to Harper.
I love this : "Kenturcky" . And, yes, Louisville has 3. Those kids played those games ; they won those games ; they hit 4 3 pointers in a row and sent Michigan packing. No matter what the corrupt NCAA say :-)