Tao of Pauly

Kentucky Grovel of the Day: Hunter and the Wildcats Disgrace

This article is for one of my new readers and diehard Kentucky fan... Lori. The Good Doctor recently wrote a sad, but great story via ESPN.com. Check out: Woe is the world of the Wildcats, written by Kentucky's native son... Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a bit:

The painful truth about Kentucky's defeat at the hands of UAB is that the Wildcats played like drunkards trapped in a frozen hockey rink. They committed 16 turnovers, three in the last two minutes, and missed three life-or-death shots in the final 12 seconds. They couldn't even get the ball in-bounds, much less take it to the other end of the court and score like the champions they used to be. The committee tabbed Kentucky the team to beat. UAB did just that Sunday night. It was disgraceful, and Tubby Smith should be run out of Lexington.

Any No. 1 seed that blows a four-point lead in the last two minutes of any game -- and especially in the early-exit stages of the NCAA Tournament -- is a team with a second-rate coach. That is well understood in Kentucky, and Tubby Smith will be fired before Labor Day.

Where he goes after Lexington, I don't care, just as long as it's not in the state of Kentucky. Not after embarrassing the school, the state, his own players and everything Kentucky stands for, by not preparing his team for this Tournament. The team was lazy and slow and careless -- more like a family of obese morons than big-money athletes. It was sickening. I felt humiliated and betrayed by a gang of losers with no pride...

Man, Hunter is wicked pissed off! Here's some more:

"SEPPUKU" is defined in my huge leather dictionary as "ceremonial suicide, by ripping open the abdomen with a dagger or knife, formerly practiced in Japan by members of the warrior class, when disgraced or sentenced to death."

That is the word I was looking for when my boys from Kentucky went belly-up and disgraced the whole state by losing ugly in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. It was a terrible shock to every cell in my body. My heart went limp and the air rushed out of my lungs for 20 or 30 seconds when I saw the final score, and I fell sideways into a plate of watermelon. It was like being whacked from behind with a baseball bat.

The shot that sent Kentucky home and the Good Doctor into a state of shock.I blacked out momentarily, but the room had already emptied except for two girls who were snickering at me as they backed out the door. I was so swollen with shame that I felt like a Japanese Fugue fish in heat -- and that was when I thought about Seppuku. It was the only honorable way out, so I reached for my gold-handled Samurai sword...

And what is Hunter's pick for the rest of the tourney? He likes Vanderbilt at 15-1 to double up his money. I must disagree with my idol. I'm sticking with UCONN. Come on... Inside the Paris Hilton!