The Other Basketball Tourney

By C.J. JANOVY

Homegirls carried the day yesterday, the first day of the Big 12 Women’s Basketball Championship at Municipal Auditorium. Yeah, Mizzou pulled of a big upset win over Oklahoma. But the homegirls who were clearly the most hardcore were the folks from Ames. The Cyclones played the first game yesterday, but at 10 p.m., fans dressed in red and yellow still filled out half of three sections behind the north goal for the Kansas-Nebraska game — apparently just for the hell of it.

Oh, sure, most of the attention is on the sold-out men’s tourney at the Sprint Center. But the women’s action has its own unique charms – especially for anyone who enjoys seeing tall, tough gals show their stuff. I missed the Mizzou game early in the day (something about having to send a newspaper to the printer yesterday), but the KU women earned my respect last night. It was a sloppy, physical game, and it seemed as if players spent as much time crashing to the floor as they did driving to the basket in the first 10 minutes. Nebraska couldn’t seem to sink anything – by the end of the night, a pack of middle-aged Husker fans behind me were wailing that it was as if the team had never played a game before.

Other observations from the tourney’s first day:

• Municipal Auditorium might have been recently redone, and its Art Deco architecture is charming, but did they have to repaint the concourse walls in that same pinkish color left over from, I don’t know, 1950? It’s the color of Silly Putty, the shade of a flesh-colored crayon – a color that, no matter how new it is, can only be described as “Dinge.” And I don’t know about the men’s bathrooms, but it’s weird in the women’s, where stalls have cool marble dividers that only go up so high – I’m 5-foot-10, and the dividers only come up to my shoulders. I’m no basketball player, but if there were one standing in the next stall, we could have had a face-to-face conversation while zipping up. Couldn’t they have fixed that in the renovations?

• At one point, hyping all the fan activities just four blocks away, the announcer had trouble spitting out “the Sprint Center,” calling it instead the “Spring” Center.

• The most annoying – and, therefore, best – pep band was from the University of Texas, where the fight song seems to be a mashup of “In Heaven There Is No Beer” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” It’s been awhile since I’ve heard that song, but it’ll be stuck in my head for the next few months.

• Best pom-pom squad: Texas Tech, which had the tightest abs, tightest smiles, tightest black pants – and tightest routines. These four gals, with their glittery red-and-black poms, moved like Stepford-hot girlfriends on speed. But the best cheerleader outfits were definitely Nebraska’s: along with the requisite short red skirts, the girls wore red tanks with retro-’08s on the front, and – this was the best – knee-high tube socks with two white stripes.

• That didn’t help their team win last night, though. And afterwards, despite the sandwich board outside Municipal advertising the fan-fest four blocks away, 13th Street was so empty and quiet that it wouldn’t have been surprising to see a tumbleweed blow through.