Papa John at Monday’s national championship game after eating two slices of his crappy pizza. Credit: BroBible.com
Monday night’s NCAA men’s basketball national championship game between Louisville and Michigan was wholly American.
You had the sports world’s sweetheart, Kate Upton, in attendance. You had a jaded person embracing his roots and burying the hatchet with an entire university in Chris Webber. You had Papa John, from Papa John’s pizza, doing something that 98 percent of his customers do on a nightly basis: get bleep-faced. And of course, you had “One Shining Moment.”
Now that we are nearly 48 hours removed from this epic night, it’s time to dig in and see what this all meant in the grand scheme of things.
We begin with Upton. She showed up to Monday’s game looking adorable in a plain, canary yellow shirt – obviously rooting for Michigan (she was born in St. Joseph, Mich.) After the game, Wolverines player Spike Albrecht knew that he’d never again be as big a name in America than he was right then and there. So he swung for the fences. He tweeted Upton, “@KateUpton hey saw you at the game last night, thanks for coming out! Hope to see you again.”
But we all know how this movie ends. The pretty girl turns down the white basketball player who just scored 17 points in the first half of the national title game and instead winds up in bed with a rap mogul who made his fortune ripping off beats from rock bands and is 20 years her elder. Basically the plot to the 1963 Elvis film, “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”
Yes, sorry, Spike. Upton is now reportedly dating Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, or she’s at least making out with him in public. The New York Daily News claims that the pair locked lips at Club LIV in Miami on March 24 (why the delay with this news?)
It was a busy few days for Diddy and Upton, as Diddy had performed at WrestleMania in New Jersey on Sunday night.
We’re still waiting to hear the “how-great-it-is-to-be-back-in-the-family” stories from Webber. He could still very well go back into his anti-Michigan shell and pretend that Monday night never happened, the same way he pretended his actual basketball playing days for the Wolverines never happened for two decades.
Papa John, the guy who makes the best cardboard/vomit tasting pizza in the world, appeared to be blackout drunk at the title game on Monday night. His name is John Schnatter and he is a Ball State grad. It is entirely possible that Schnatter was so drunk that he thought the Louisville Cardinals were actually the Ball State Cardinals, considering they basically wear the same uniforms.
CBS’ “One Shining Moment” went off without a hitch, so much so that no one even remembers the time they had Jennifer Hudson sing it (much to the dismay of sports traditionalists everywhere). But the internet made things a little more interesting, as it always does, a few hours later. Here is “One Shining Moment,” the Mike Rice version:
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Matt Burke is sports editor and a columnist at Metro Boston. Follow him on Twitter @BurkeMetroBOS
