Recently, I spent a week in Walt Disney World. "WOW," you're
probably thinking, "That's like, the happiest place on earth."
No, you
ignorant fool. Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. "Oh," you're now
thinking, "Screw you, Bill."
It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that Walt Disney World is the
second happiest place on earth. That is, unless you're a Kansas basketball
fan trying to find a place to watch the much-anticipated,
billed-as-a-battle-of-titans, KU vs. UNC-Asheville game. It would have been
equally difficult to be an Asheville fan in Disney World, but what are the
chances of such a person a) existing and b) being in Disney World at that
time? Not very good. So let's focus on me.
My mother - who, I'm almost positive, was conceived by Walt Disney
and Minnie Mouse - has the inhuman power to instantly know anything and
everything about the Disney Corporation. It was this power that gave her
knowledge of the brand new ESPN Club at a nearby hotel. So, we went there
for dinner. We managed to get a booth in the section where each table has
it's own TV screen. But alas, it was stuck on the Orange Bowl. We asked
out waitress, Shannon (no joke), to kindly put the KU game on TV #53. Yes,
fifty-three. There were AT LEAST 150 TV screens in this place. Each stall in
the bathroom had it's own set. I'm not kidding. She did, and we tipped her
enough to start her own sports bar in Lawrence.
During the game, my brain could hardly process all of the sports
input. As Wayne Simien threw down one of his monstrous dunks, the clientele
of the ESPN club erupted with the kind of cheering/grunting mixture that can
be caused by only two things: a sickening, cover-your-child's-eyes dunk, or
a kickoff return for a touchdown. It took me a while to realize that this
enthusiasm, sadly, was for the latter. Iowa had just returned the opening
kickoff of the Orange Bowl one hundred yards.
No matter, though. When the
Iowa fans left the club, they were in distress. Their team was, to put it
politely, caught with their pants down on national television. When my
family left the club, they were... well, tired, but I couldn't have been
happier. By the time Brett Olsen, Roy's hundredth-point specialist, put the
Jayhawks over the century mark yet again (he's done it three times now; all
three baskets he's scored this year have broken the mark), it was obvious to
me that the 'Hawks were finally playing like the #2 team in the country.
At
the time, I shrugged it off as a fluke. After all, it was UNC-Asheville.
They're even worse than the other UNC... Greensboro, that is. But an
identical performance against UMKC and the handling of Iowa State on their
home floor have made be a believer. Hinrich shoots threes, Collison
dominates the post, and heck, Jeff Graves nearly had a double-double against
ISU. The Asheville game was the beginning of the Jayhawks ascent this
season.
Forget Disneyland. On that Thursday night, the ESPN club was the
happiest place that I could possibly have been*.
* - except Allen Fieldhouse.