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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > April > 02
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Final Four Fiasco winner a keen observer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Winning the 21st Final Four Fiasco required a bracket of surpassing sagacity, and Joe Thomas of Atlanta surpassed the other 2,741 entrants. Thomas was one of 289 Fiascans — 10.5 percent of all who entered — who picked the four No. 1 seeds to reach the Final Four. (One of them lives under this roof, as we shall see.)
Thomas claimed the coveted sweatshirt on the final tiebreaker — first-round winners. He had 27 of the 32. For the record, he also tabbed seven of the Elite Eight and 12 of the Sweet 16, meaning he nailed 50 of the 60 games.
It wasn’t as if Thomas, who’s 46 and a director of production for a Norcross-based staging company, was flying blind. He has season tickets at Alexander Memorial Coliseum in Section 13, which gives him a fine view of the Georgia Tech bench and enables him to study Paul Hewitt closely as he calls all those extremely effective timeouts. (That’s my little joke, by the way, not our winner’s.)
Thomas attended Tech in the early ’80s “when there was nothing to watch and nobody to watch it,” he said. “Bobby Cremins came just as I was leaving. But I saw [Duke’s Mike] Gminski and [Virginia’s Ralph] Sampson come through. Brooke Steppe was our star back then.”
By virtue of this year’s Tech home schedule, Thomas saw two of his Final Four in person — Kansas in December and North Carolina on a snowy night in January. “I watched us lose both games on the last possession,” he said, and he also had something else working for him: Without the Jackets in the field, he said, “it was easier to pick” — no nagging pangs of loyalty.
“I’m a college basketball fan,” Thomas said, and he has entered Fiascos in the past. Never, however, had he picked the correct Final Four: “The closest I came was the year Tech went [2004].”
He picked the Tar Heels, he said, because “this is the best Carolina team I’ve seen in a long time.” This despite his antipathy toward Tyler Hansbrough: “I don’t really care for him — he whines like a Duke player. It’s hard to watch, especially live and in a close game.”
Thomas picks Carolina to win it all, beating UCLA in the championship game. He likes the Bruins over Memphis in the semifinals because “I’m still convinced free-throw shooting is going to matter.”
As for Davidson: Thomas had the Wildcats winning one game but losing to Georgetown in Round 2. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to pull against that team: “That’s why we watch.”
Had Davidson’s Jason Richards made his last-second 3-pointer Sunday, the Fiasco would surely have had a different winner, and it could well have been the Rev. Jim Aiken of Acworth. In one of those tantalizing “almosts” that have passed into Fiasco lore, Aiken had the Wildcats reaching the Final Four.
“I went to Furman, and I go back to the days when Lefty Driesell was recruiting for Davidson and sleeping in the back of his station wagon,” said Aiken, who is 66 and a Methodist minister. “I remember them playing North Carolina in the [1968 and 1969 East] Regional finals and losing [narrowly both times].”
As he watched the final seconds of the Davidson-Kansas game unfold, Aiken said he “felt good about our chances when [Stephen] Curry had the ball. But then it was taken out of his hands.”
Four decades later, tiny Davidson lost another regional final at the end. Such moments and such stirring stories are indeed why we watch this tournament and why we, hoping against hope, fill out brackets every blessed year. And it’s why I, who identified just three of this Final Four, can take some solace in having raised a brilliant bracketologist.
For the second year running, Elizabeth Bradley, who’s now 10, outpicked her dumb ol’ dad. In only her second try, she was smart enough to go with the four No. 1 seeds. As the Fiasco founder, I’m proud. As her fretting father, I fear the rest of her life will be an anticlimax.
