Odds And Ends: Time For The Scheyer Face

Time to play a little catch-up on the blog. Let’s go to the links:

— Great practical joke by Duke’s John Scheyer: On his Twitter account, he wrote “Hollerrrr at me!!!” followed by a phone number. Only it wasn’t his phone number. From the Chicago Tribune:

Scheyer played a prank on high school teammate Zach Kelly by tweeting Kelly’s cell phone number to his more than 6,700 followers, who assumed it was Scheyer’s number. As of Wednesday, Kelly had received more than 2,000 text messages and several hundred calls. Scheyer’s latest tweet begs his fans to stop texting and calling his friend.

Of course, this is the guy who is unwittingly responsible for “Scheyer Face” being an Internet sensation. Like here and here and here.

— I don’t know whether it will sell any shoes, but Nike’s new Tiger Woods ad raises the bar for creepiness by using the voice of Tiger’s late father. Given the buzz the ad has generated, I would say it qualifies as effective marketing.

— The only good thing about Gordon Hayward’s near-miss on a buzzer-beater in the NCAA title game? It means I won my basketball pool, which had 49 entries this year. For about 25 years, I have been running a college football bowl pool and an NCAA pool every year, so I’m now about 1 for 50. Which isn’t nearly as proficient as my daughter, who won the NCAA pool three years ago as a 9-year-old (yes, she made her own picks).

— If Hayward’s shot had gone in, it would have become the iconic moment in a tournament that has a long history of them. What is the defining moment in NCAA Tournament history? I would vote for Christian Laettner’s shot to beat Kentucky in the greatest college basketball game ever played. In Sports Illustrated’s year-end issue in 1992, Alexander Wolff wrote a story about the game that remains one of my favorite pieces of sportswriting.

— And finally, we bring you a man who made a Thai temple out of 3.5 million toothpicks. Still not answered: How long did it take to count all the toothpicks?