Hansbrough Goes Out In Fitting Fashion

Last night’s NCAA National Championship game was somewhat of a disappointment, but in the end I was glad to see Tyler Hansbrough wrap up his college career with a national title.

Don’t get me wrong. With as much national media coverage as “Psycho T” has gotten over the last four years, it seems like he’s been at North Carolina since the late 90s, and I’m as ready for him to move on as everyone else.

However, it has lately become the trendy thing to do to talk about how overrated Hansbrough is as a player, and I think that’s largely unfair.

Certainly, he’s not the ideal NBA prospect. He’s not big enough to really play the 4 or 5 position in the NBA, and he doesn’t have the outside game or athleticism to play the 3. In fact, many NBA scouts have suggested that if it wasn’t for the fact that Hansbrough always plays harder than anyone else on the court, he wouldn’t really be an NBA prospect at all.

But none of that has anything to do with his abilities as a college player, and as a college player, he is absolutely in no way overrated. In fact, he’s probably one of the top 5-10 college players of all time, and belongs in the same category as guys like Oscar Robertson, Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton and Christian Laettner.

It was annoying to always see him on SportsCenter and to hear Dick Vitale talking about him all the time. It was annoying to see him try to take 12 charges every game, and to watch him shoot the most awkward shots imaginable and have them go in time and time again. But, as a 4-time All-American and the ACC’s all-time scoring leader, he deserved all the attention he got.

Hansbrough may never find success in the NBA, and he’ll almost certainly not find anywhere near the level of success he found in college, but when considering him as a North Carolina Tarheel, it really doesn’t matter.

He was one of the all-time college greats, and going out with a National Championship was the appropriate ending for him.

Opening Day—“The Old Game”

“The old game waits under the white,

Deeper than frozen grass.
Down at the frost line it waits
To return when the birds return.
It starts to wake in the South,
Where it’s never quite stopped.
Where winter is a doze of hibernation,
The game wakes gradually,
Fathering vigor into itself.

As the days lengthen in late February
And grow warmer, old muscles grow limber.
Young arms grow strong and wild,
Clogged vein systems, in veteran oak and left fielders both,
Unstop themselves,
Putting forth leaves and line drives in Florida’s March.
Migrating North with the swallows,
Baseball and the grasses’ first green,
Enter Cleveland , Kansas City, Boston.”

—Donald Hall, from Ken Burns’ Baseball.

New Pictures

I updated my Flickr page with some pictures I’ve taken over the last few months.

Some are from a couple of mini trips that Caroline and I made, and a bunch of them are from the ice storm that we had back in January. I mainly just posted some of the prettier ones, but you can get a sense of some of the damaged caused by all of the ice.

Robinson Crusoe On Repentance

I read a children’s version of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I was a kid, and I remembered the story being interesting enough that I wanted to try the real thing.

Considered by many to be the first novel written in English, Robinson Crusoe is an interesting tale of a man (who the book is named after) who lives for over 20 years by himself on a deserted island after being shipwrecked there.

One thing that surprised me a little bit was how much of the book was dedicated to Robinson’s thoughts on theology. He considers a few topics (sin, repentance, providence, the extent to which God reveals Himself in nature vs. revelation in scripture), and over the course of his time on the island, becomes very devout in his desire to follow God.

Unfortunately, these religious passages grow a little tedious, as Crusoe basically makes the same arguments over and over. However, I liked the following thoughts on sin and repentance:

“…I have since often observed how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases—namely, that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; not ashamed for the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men.”

I think he’s right on target here. So often we fail to admit that we’re in the wrong because of how it will make us look. We don’t generally have the same qualms when we misbehave in the first place.