The Big Dance got lost in a fiery cloud of war dust last week: almost canceled, they said, but somehow the games survived—so far, at least—despite the bitching and whining of CBS resident peacock Dan Rather, who cursed his own network for letting the annual NCAA Championship Tournament interfere with a two-day-old illegal, unsanctioned outlaw-style invasion of a defenseless country full of oil.
Why is Dan Rather complaining? Ho ho ho. Here’s why: Danny is no Walter Cronkite, for one, and Two is that Dan Rather is currently on location in Kuwait City, strutting and posing and whooping it up with all the other “embedded” journalists going to war like birds in a gilded cage.
The war was ugly enough, but that was only the start. The Horrible blizzard that shut down most of Colorado for four days and nights was far worse news for me. It destroyed our annual high-risk orgy of gambling and raving that has become a tradition out here. Ed Bradley got jerked up by the roots and sent off to war. Curtis was back in Washington to infiltrate the JDL and the billionaire degenerate Ewing brothers from North Charleston, infamous in gambling circles for their extremely aggressive gambling tactics and quasi-depraved tastes, refused to fly into the blizzard and went to Las Vegas for whatever action they could find.
The blizzard almost drove me crazy. I have nothing against snow. I am totally prepared for it, after many years of practice, and snow has never prevented me from going anywhere I really wanted to go.…
But this blizzard was different. It closed everything—schools, highways, airports, newspaper deliveries, along with food, beer, gasoline, and all human traffic across the Continental Divide for almost a week—and stranded Anita, my beautiful fiancée and soon-to-be wife, on the other side of the mountain.
I also had an elegant diamond engagement ring somewhere out there in the whiteout between me and New Orleans, where I spend a lot of time on occasional sporting business.… So there was no Anita and no ring, and that was heavy on my mind as the tournament got under way. No gambling, no guests, no fiancée, no ring—all this finally caused me to flip out and start trying to charter some kind of bandit jet plane to fly Anita over the hump by any means necessary. I was obsessed with it, regardless of cost. It was madness. I was in the acute stage of a total nervous breakdown.
That was when the Sheriff had to step in and strongly suggest that I get a grip on myself, which I finally did, but not until he promised me that U.S. Interstate 70 was finally cleared of the monster avalanche and Anita was safely on the road. So I hunkered down and stared at the basketball games on TV until I passed out from desperate backed-up passion and 40 frantic hours with no sleep. It was a long and restless night, full of unacceptably rotten dreams and spastic muttering about point spreads.
Anita pulled into the garage just in time for the end of the Butler-Louisville game, which I lost badly, but it didn’t hurt too much, given my circumstances, because I didn’t expect them to go far. There would be no heavy rematch with Kentucky this year, but it wouldn’t have been worth watching anyway. The Cardinals would have been routed.
On Saturday I proposed and gave her the ring, and after that we both went a little crazy for a while, which was clearly the right thing to do.
—March 24, 2003