Saturday, Feb. 28, 2009

Guesspert: Boom goes the dynamite for USC's March Madness

SINCE I MOVED to Columbia in 2005, I knew that eventually South Carolina and Clemson would both have basketball teams poised to roar through the March Madness brackets in the same year.

I just figured that would happen once the NCAA expanded the field to 128 teams.

OK, 256 teams.

But this year will work too.

Although the Tigers proved the better team head-to-head in December, I like the Gamecocks’ chances to win the SEC tournament a whole lot better than I like Clemson’s in the ACC tourney. This has to do with the fact that the Gamecocks have a star who’s surrounded by a team full of contributors. As opposed to most other SEC teams that either have a) a star and no contributors, or b) no stars and no contributors, or worst of all c) the word “Arkansas” on their jerseys.

I’m not claiming to be a Carolina hoops authority. My best piece of Gamecocks-Guesspert-pop culture trivia is this:

Did you know there’s an S.C. connection to the “Boom Goes the Dynamite” video?

Go to about the 3:28 mark of the clip. After that poor Ball State student mangled his way through a campus TV sports broadcast full of teleprompter bewilderment that makes Ron Burgundy look as eloquent as J.F.K, Ball State Boy meekly offers a surrender of “Let’s check out some of the scores tonight.”

And under the heading of “NIT Scorebook,” we see: “UNLV 11, South Carolina 15.” That fills the screen for a solid 10 seconds of dead silence. Maybe the guy was debating whether to blurt out “Boom goes the Gamecocks.”

Now get this — that was the first game I ever attended at the arena formerly known as Colonial Somethingorother.

I’m sure I’ve still got the ticket stub to prove it. And I’m also fairly positive 15-11 was not the final score against Lon Kruger’s Runnin’ Rebels.

Here’s one other Gamecocks-Guesspert piece of trivia for you. March 1973 was a landmark month for all of us.

You see, March 17, 1973 was the last time the Gamecocks won an NCAA tournament game. You remember, a 90-85 victory against Southwestern Louisiana in a consolation match.

Well, nine days later — March 26, 1973 — was the born-on date for none other than (you guessed it): “Grey’s Anatomy’s” T.R. Knight. Oh, and me and my evil twin brother Orville too.

Was March 1973 a party month in Columbia? I guess we can check the birth rates in area hospitals for December 1973 to find out.

All I know is that the Hardy family photo albums tell us that mom and dad took a trip to Paris in June 1972. The first time I pointed that out to Orville, he shrugged and said, “C’est la vie.”

Twit this, not that. For the past few weeks, I’ve been telling myself that I don’t have enough free time on my hands to start a Twitter account. Then, Thursday night I had about three and a half minutes of downtime, so I signed up for a Twitter account.

So if you want to prove to me that you’ve got an invaluable Twitterable lifestyle, show me your stuff by linking to my feed at HardyVision. Don’t forget that O. and I each have Facebook profiles too.

And just to prove I’m ahead of the curve, I started an account at Avehrp. It’s the new site that specializes in sports commentary social networking. You sign up, you pick your favorite teams, your favorite types of sports, and you can access stats, video clips, team and player histories, you name it. Once you’re logged in, Avehrp offers real time smack talk chat features from fans around the globe. Lots of A-list players and coaches are in on the ground floor of this, and Avehrp’s three founders (all a year out of college, they met as video editing interns at ESPNU) are counting on 150 million users by the World Series.

Actually, I just made all that up. “Avehrp” is what happened when I banged my fingers on the keyboard at the same time.

But Orville said if you’d like to lend him $100 million in seed money, he’d be glad to get some HTML instruction books out of the library and start an Avehrp.com for ya.

What was I saying a minute ago about not having enough time on my hands?

Correction. Last week I asserted that Clint Eastwood would be playing the role of Dr. Manhattan in Zack Snyder’s upcoming film version of “Watchmen.” Clearly, that was in error. Clint plays Silk Spectre II.

ORVILLE’S LAST WORD

“Where did Tiger Woods go? After all that hype and buildup, I couldn’t find him on TV at all Friday. Did he give up golf for Lent or something?”

Greg’s PCS Rankings and Hardy Vision column appear each week on CBSSports.com. Find Twitter-rific ribbing at thestate.com/guesspert

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