Look for Louisville to win it all in Monday night's national title game

William Henry "Fatty" Foulke

After the dust settled from this past weekend’s slate of NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games, we saw that this year’s slate of Final Four teams would include Louisville, Wichita State, Michigan and Syracuse. Those four teams will meet in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta this coming Saturday to determine which will move on to the national title game on Monday night.

Louisville, a No. 1 seed, will play Wichita State, a No. 9 seed, Saturday at 6:09 p.m., and Michigan and Syracuse, both No. 4 seeds, will play immediately thereafter. The winners of those two games will meet in the title game on Monday. All three of those games will be televised on CBS.

I look for Louisville to beat Wichita State by double digits, and for Michigan to get by Syracuse. That would set up a pretty good title game match-up between Louisville and Michigan, and I would expect Louisville to win that one too.

Take that with a grain of salt because in the last two editions of The Courant I’ve put the kiss of death on two teams. Two weeks ago, I picked Gonzaga to win it all only to have them go down in flames in the tournament’s second round. The following week, I predicted Duke would win it all, and they were emasculated by Louisville on Sunday night. Such is the state of affairs in the tournament this year, but let’s face it, that’s what makes it so entertaining.

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The Major League Baseball season officially started this past Sunday, and those of you who enjoy listening to the Braves on the radio will have ample opportunity to do so again this year. The Braves have the largest radio affiliate network of any major league team, and more than a few of the stations that carry Braves games are in southwest Alabama.

Those stations include WKNU-FM 106.3 in Brewton, WHEP-FM 92.5 in Foley, WHEP-AM 1310 in Foley, WJDB-FM 95.5 in Thomasville and WJDB-AM 630 in Thomasville. Two AM stations out of Montgomery also carry the Braves – WMSP-AM 740 and WNZZ-AM 950.

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From the weird news file this week I saw in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! on Saturday an item about English soccer player William Henry “Fatty” Foulke. This large soccer player, who was born in 1874 and died in 1916, weighed over 330 pounds and remains the heaviest professional player in the history of this internationally popular sport.

The 6-foot-4 Foulke, who also played cricket, played mostly as a goalie on the various teams he played for. He’s best remembered for a 1902 incident in which he got into an argument with a referee. Foulke, unclothed, chased the ref out of the team’s dressing room, and the ref had to hide in a broom closet to get away from the giant goalie. Other officials had to restrain Foulke, who was in the process of ripping the door off the closet.

After his playing career, he joined a sideshow as part of a “beat the goalie” attraction and some believe that he died from a case of pneumonia he caught while in that line of work.