By Eric E. Clingan
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 11, 1998

The P.C. way to pick your Final Four

In the world of women's college basketball individual achievement of a team record takes a back-seat to the more simple method of just giving it away.

In the world of men's professional basketball a player can punch his coach, threaten to kill him and then begin acting on that threat by method of strangulation and he is subsequently spun by journalists into a misunderstood good-guy.

In the world of professional football the cries of racism run rampant with every new hiring of a head coach, as skin color has somehow become a prerequisite to Super Bowl attainment.

In the world of sports, political correctness has pointed its bony finger and demanded change. Well, why fight it.

Last weekend the ultimate college sport began its quest for an ultimate college champion. The road to the Final Four was laid out with the college basketball tournament brackets we have all come to know and love and hate. Now, around the campus and within the administration's own offices secret pools have been set up to capitalize on the feeding frenzy that is March Madness.

With a discerning eye toward the waving finger of political correctness, though, a new method of picking winners is herein advanced by this lone columnist. Get out your tourney sheets and follow along.

Let's start in the East. The No.1 seeded North Carolina Tar Heels face the No.16 Navy Midshipmen. Easy choice, right? Yes, but how one arrives at the choice is of consequence for the politically correct prognosticator. See, a Tar Heel is simply a person from North

Carolina, whereas a Midshipman is a war-maker, a hell-bent, crazy, military wacko hooked on destroying the world. He's probably a sexual harasser, too. You're getting the hang of this, right?

Move to the game between Princeton and UNLV. The Tigers versus the Runnin' Rebels pits a sweet, cuddly, cute animal against some hillbillies set on turning back the clock on civil rights. Take the Tigers. The Gamecocks of South Carolina play the Richmond Spiders. Hmmm. Cockfighting, while legal in Arizona, is still frowned upon as a infraction of animal rights. Looks like an upset brewing there. Final game of note in the East is the Indiana Hoosiers against the Oklahoma Sooners. A Hoosier is a resident of Indiana while a Sooner was an early settler of the wild west, which means the Sooners killed the buffalo, stole from the Indians and raped the land. This is getting easier and easier, isn't it?

Over to the Midwest region we skip.

Here, Texas Christian University, a No. 5 seed, faces the 12th-seeded Florida State Seminoles. TCU's moniker is the Horned Toad, good enough for politically correct rookies, but notice the "C" in TCU stands for "Christian." Got to go with the Seminoles. Ole Miss and Valparaiso match up in a game the politically correct will simply ignore. What choice is there between the Rebels and the Crusaders? Jeers to the NCAA selection committee. Send them to the re-education camps.

Continuous jeers from the politically correct for the South Region match-up of the Oklahoma State Cowboys and the George Washington Colonials. First, with regards to the Cowboys, see the Sooners, above. Second, Washington owned slaves and his Colonials, who founded this awful country, put in place the system of discrimination and oppression which lingers at every level of today's tilted playing field. The politically correct would rather lose their office pool than fill out some of these brackets.

However, baby needs a new pair of Birkenstocks, so we press on. The UCLA Bruins tip off against the Miami Hurricanes. A bruin is a bear. A teddy bear is a bear. A teddy bear is harmless and fun to snuggle with. A hurricane is the result of man's capitalistic, inhumane acts against the environment to include the destruction of the rain forest which, in turn, has spawned El Niño and global warming. Let's pick UCLA. What's that? UCLA is our PAC-10 rival? Too bad. The politically correct have no loyalties but to nature and to that which provides pleasant feelings on this happy planet.

Finally, the West Region brings us to UA's own Wildcats. Don't worry, the politically correct pick the Wildcats because they are "wild cats." If they were the Domesticated Cats and, therefore, extensions of man's selfish desire to dominate the animal kingdom, they wouldn't stand a chance. Unfortunately though, our brethren in Flagstaff, the NAU Lumberjacks, must lose in the first round. These mindless bad men wield axes against the unprotected bellies of helpless trees and only serve to ruin habitats of fuzzy creatures like the Mt. Graham Red Squirrel and the Pygmy Owl. Down with the Lumberjacks. Bad Lumberjacks.

While filling out the brackets in this fashion one wonders if politically correct predictions like these are bound to catch on in a world of sports that has such rapidly disintegrating standards of excellence. Whether it's a lovefest for the latest gangster ball player or a wholesale devaluation of individual records and achievements, today's sports are threatened with becoming the next playground for liberal social scientists. Until that day, however, GO WILDCATS!

Eric E. Clingan is a senior majoring in political science. His column runs every Wednesday.