Trev and Trump

So today is the opening of March Madness. May the best bunch of guys--and women--dangle the nets from around their necks come the glorious end. Lots of good tv a'comin'.

I'm reminded of a story from my coaching days, long, long ago. Once upon a time I was a freshman team coach at Greenway High School, Phoenix, Arizona, during a long winter season that coached me to see that my joy was in the classroom, not on a gym floor. 

Freshman basketball at Greenway meant two teams--A and B. It was never said publicly, but the truth is that the A team contained most of the kids the head coach thought had a future as a varsity Demon (nickname, of course), which left the B coach--me--with the others, which would have been unfair had not all the rest of the schools in the district done something similar. 

Thus, when we'd play Thunderbird High School, just down the road, we'd travel together, one team taking the court before the other. We lost--a lot too, but then the A team wasn't a whole lot better. 

Trev was Trumpian in arrogance, a real cookie who had to be ridden like a ill-tempered mule. He was talented on the floor, as long as he was out there, but often as not he was beside me on the bench because he had issues, as they say.

I once called his father to enlist him in the quest to temper the tantrums, but he backed off. "I haven't been able to handle Trev for the last several years," he said. "Good luck."

Something about the kid drove me nuts; something about him was charming--and a challenge. 

But here's the deal. We were playing away from home one afternoon, some other high school, when the squirrelly ref blew his whistle, stopped things on the floor and threw up his hand. "On 44," he said, or whatever and pushed his hands out as if it were pass interference. Trev blew up, claimed he'd never touched the guy, screamed bloody murder, which drew a technical.

I called the ref over. Now you've got to see us--it's a freshman team, late afternoon in the city. Maybe a half-dozen people in the stands. What I'm saying is there's no big crowd protest.

I call the ref over, tell him my Trev didn't push theirs.

"I don't care," the ref says. "I don't like his looks."

"You can't slap a foul on the kid because you don't like his looks," I said.

That went nowhere.  Trev had a foul and a tech, and I don't remember if  he stayed long in the game.

March madness wasn't what got me to thinking about Trev, Trump did. On the sly, his government thugs rounded up a ton of Venezuelans--does anyone know they are--wrestles them to the ground, shaves their heads, clothes them in t-shirts, and hustles them off to El Salvador, where Trump has assurances that the crook in charge of the government there says they'll be taken care of, then points at  some kind of hellish penetentiary. The government has nothing on these men. They just didn't like their looks.

These Venezuelan hombres may well have been gang members, may well have required deportation, but in this country, just like on  the basketball floor, there has to be cause.

As the judge told the administration, "Prove it."

That's the American way.