Bellying Up to the Bracket

For the first time in at least 25 years, I missed my favorite day of the year. Each year I go home to "do my taxes" on the first day of the NCAA tourney. It is a basketball orgy in my basement every year during the tournament's first weekend. I have the projector and two televisions tuned to different NCAA games and I haul the one from the bar over to view the state tournament concurrently. I am like a pig in slop as I sit through 32 games over a 78-hour period.

This year, because I was on a wonderful, Roman excursion with my bride, I missed it. Not only was the tournament not televised there, there was NO coverage. And I truly did miss it.

Steve Rushin has captured the magic of that first weekend here with his "Air & Space" column in this week's SI. It reminds me of the "Razzle Dazzle Club" in Council Bluffs in 1982 or Salt Lake City in 2003.

It isn't easy spending the first day of the NCAA tournament in an Irish pub watching 13 consecutive hours of basketball, from noon tip-off to 1 a.m. sign-off, jump ball to last call. For starters, you need an artful explanation for your absence from the office. I told my bosses I'd be "looking into the NBA draft," by which I meant my Newcastle Brown Ale, drawn from a tap.

Next, you have to find a joint in which it's socially acceptable to hold down a bar stool for 13 consecutive hours. That bar is Vaughan's Public House, half a block from the Hartford Civic Center, home arena of the UConn Huskies, whose fans evidently put the AA in NCAA. "They're boozers," says Johnny Vaughan, Dublin-born proprietor of the pub that bears his name. "Our door swings open at five o'clock on game nights and doesn't swing shut again for 15 minutes."

On Thursday, five o'clock arrived at noon, as it always does on the first day of the tournament, the best day of the year for a sports fan to play hooky. TGIT.

As Greg Gumbel settled in at his anchor desk, I settled in at mine, a 25-foot mahogany bar imported from Ireland. Three overhead TVs lit the beer taps, which in turn lit the lunch patrons. At the bar, as on the bracket sheet, one round leads to another.

As the games ebbed and flowed, office workers alternately crowded and abandoned the bar all day, so that it seemed to swell and contract like the bellows of a bagpipe. Tom Steed fled his office at Prudential around 2:30 when he read on the Internet that Pacific had taken Boston College into overtime. The 42-year-old systems analyst ducked into Vaughan's with two coworkers. That's where I found him systematically analyzing a pint of Harp. "Two years ago," said Steed, "we went to get a quick beer and catch up on the scores. When we walked out, we ran into our boss on the street. She asked where we'd been, and one of my buddies said, 'We just gave blood at the Red Cross.'"

At Vaughan's, businessmen came for lunch and stayed for dinner. "If they're on the fence, we encourage them to stay," Vaughan explained. "If it's cold and rainy outside, that's a win for us." Thursday was frigid, so when Jody Poduje blew in at two for the second half of the BC game, he was persuaded to stay for Marquette vs. Alabama, Tennessee vs. Winthrop and UCLA vs. Belmont. He finally abandoned his post just before George Washington vs. UNC-Wilmington went into OT, ending an impressive lunchtime-to-crunchtime run on the stool next to mine.

A 39-year-old regional manager for a business-services company, Poduje arrived as a stranger, left as a friend. In parting he said, "This has been one of the most enjoyable afternoons of my life."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was now 9:15 in the "afternoon," but then a pub is as timeless as a church, which it resembles, with its stained glass and wooden pews and priestly pints of Guinness ringed by clerical collars of foam.

On the Saturday of the Big East tournament Vaughan's sold 10 pints of Guinness every minute for six straight hours even though -- or possibly because -- UConn had been eliminated the day before.

Over my shoulder stood Justin Tripp, a Lego executive who was born in South Africa, raised in England and moved to the U.S. 18 months ago. "This is the best day for drinking and watching sport in America?" he asked. There followed a litany of rugby anecdotes illustrating a central theme: American sports fans are, on the whole, a lily-livered lot.

Likewise, the Hoops that Vaughan really cares about are his beloved Celtic F.C., referred to as the hoops by Scottish headline writers. Vaughan came to the U.S. 15 years ago, at age 19, to play soccer at Central Connecticut State. "Recruiters told me if I came to America, I'd be picked up in a limousine, I'd be on the radio all the time," he said, roaring at his youthful credulity. As he spoke, America's real college glamour event played out overhead.

In the bar is a lovely mural painted by the Michelangelo of pub artists, Paul Joyce, whose great-grandfather, James Joyce, wrote, "Our national epic has yet to be written." Our unwritten national epic is an empty bracket, pregnant with possibility. Late Thursday night a woman seated at the bar stole a glance at the TV and said, "I haven't paid attention to this all day. I feel so un-American."

Soon after, I was climbing the stairs from the basement gents' room as two men carried a keg down. One of them looked at me and said, "You're still here?"

"I'm staying till the basketball's over," I replied.

The guy squeezed past me and said, "You mean you're staying till April?"

Now there's an idea.

No tears for me though. I still plan to be in Indy to see the national champion crowned for the 25th consecutive year. While I'm there, I intend to belly up to the bracket and throw down a cold one. I think I'll drink to a quarter century of champions!

How to Post Cahoona Style

Here is as close to a Cahoona style step-by-step procedure for posting as I can come up with.

Go to http://www.blogger.com/home and log in with your user id and password. Kirby, if you don't remember your password, just click on the list question mark (?) to have your password sent to you. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

Click on "Cahoona Blog" or on the green plus that says "New Post". You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

That will bring up the "New Post" dialogue box. You can enter a title for your post and then start typing, or cut and paste if you choose.

The tools there are quite self-explanatory. Just move your cursor over the icon and you get a description. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

You can preview your post before sending it. Try adding a link or change the font color. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

You can always click on "help" in the upper right hand corner if these incredibly thorough instructions won't sink into your rock hard brain. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

If you want to have an email sent to whenever there has been a post made to the blog (so you don't have to keep checking back), go back to the dashboard. That's the screen that comes upafter you log in. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indul ge yourself now!

Click on "settings" and then on "email". Just enter an email address to have the posts sent to. You can also email your post so it posts automatically. Just set the address on that same page. You are now entitled to a refreshment of your choice, indulge yourself now!

That's it. It's as simple as your fourth birdie beer. Give it a try.

File this under "Mud-Fairy"

Guess who said:

"Help me out here. I can't get my #%*&^^$^*$&* blogger to work and won't accept my password, I've tried to regain it, but run into walls. Stupid thing."

"Nonetheless, please post the following website. Pretty funny."

Can you guess?

Heard in the woods...

Kirby and Goet get paired up together for best ball on the first day of 2006 Linx & Drinx. Kirby is about to hit his ball when he turns to Goet and says, “Could you please stop checking your watch all the time? It’s very distracting.”

“Oh, it’s not a watch,” the Goet replies. “It’s a compass.”

From the "Picture is worth 1,000 Words Department":

From "The Myth of Spending Cuts for the Rich, Tax Cuts for the Poor," by Brian Riedl, published by the Heritage Foundation:

During the 2005 budget reconciliation debate, crit­ics trotted out the tired old myth that Republicans were cutting spending for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Many commentators accepted this as truth and repeated it, including Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, who accused the Republicans of passing a “cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget.”[1]

However, the facts simply do not support these overheated claims. Rather than reduce entitlement spending, the budget reconciliation bill merely reduced its projected five-year growth rate from 39 percent to 38 percent. Furthermore, the “additional” tax cuts were nearly all extensions of existing tax pro­visions that would soon have expired.

More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004.[3]