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Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickes: Storm Before The Calm Edition

The NCAA Tournament is over, The golf majors, the Drafts, the Derby, the NBA Playoffs all loom. The Boys of Summer are warming up. What’s next for the Wildcats?

By Glenn Logan

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Auburn v Kentucky Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, and welcome to the Tuesday Morning Quickies.

That time has come again, the time I like to call the storm before the calm. After the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, there’s always a lot of recruiting action, the NBA heads into the playoffs, and major sporting events like the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, the NFL and NBA Drafts and the meat of the college baseball season take over from March Madness.

But a month from now, it will be back to the Boys of Summer and occasional golf and tennis tournaments. Most recruiting news will be sparse, and college sports will be over for the year. Oh, we’ll be talking about next season but it will seem remote.

But today, I must give a shout-out to Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, who won his fifth Masters tournament over the weekend. It was an impressive, but completely un-Tiger-like victory where he mostly played steady golf and waited for his competition to crack, which they did.

Gone were the hero shots of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. They were replaced by solid target golf, risk-minimization and careful shot placement.

Gone was the crooked driver and putting yips of the last decade. They were replaced by a repeatable power fade, smart situational club selection, hit fairways and putts that always had a chance to go in.

Gone was the emotion-on-the-sleeve swearing, club-tossing and fist-pumping, replaced by a stoic concentration worthy of Ben Hogan in his prime. On the final day, you never saw Woods’ teeth, let alone a smile, until the final put went down.

Gone was the swing manipulation and slavery to supposed perfection, replaced by a familiar and repeatable swing reminiscent more of 2000 than 2008.

Congratulations to him. I am reminded of what our long-time readers will recognize as one of my favorite quotes from the Dune trilogy by Frank Herbert, in this case Dune Messiah:

“Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.”

- Epigram attributed to the Bene Tleilax

But the fall, however great, did not quite topple Tiger’s competitive spirit. He did not win the Tiger way, he won the old-fashioned, very Hoganesque way. Fitting. The old becomes new.

Tweets of the Morning

Jason wonders if UK should try to bring them here.

And:

Condolences to Kyle Macy, John MacCleod’s family and connections.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football
Kentucky basketball
  • Congratulations to Keldon and PJ on great seasons, both careers too short, but sweet.
Other Kentucky sports
College football
College basketball

Right now, it’s too early to know whether Cronin’s middle-America toughness will translate to the palm-tree-filled streets of Westwood. What is clear, though, is what the hiring process says about a program with more national championships than any other: UCLA is further than it’s ever been from college basketball’s pantheon of bluebloods.

I’ll go further – as of now, UCLA is much closer to USC than to Kentucky, UNC, Duke et. al.

Other sports news

A worthy cause.

  • Happy birthday, Kareem!
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