So your bracket is busted and your dream of getting your hands on Warren Buffett’s billions has been crushed.
No biggie. SeatSwap has a nice alternative for you with its Manhattan Madness beer pong tournament, which includes a $5,000 grand prize for the team that dominates the competition in the college drinking game.
The idea first began with grand intentions. Organizer Daniel Marcus used a spreadsheet to identify all of the official alumni bars in the city and thought of having a massive, 64-site pong tournament. It didn’t take long for Marcus, who runs the ticket-exchange website, to realize the madness of that plan, so he decided to whittle it down to a Sweet 16 sites.
“Every day we’re getting closer to this I’m regretting ever having thought of it,” he told The Score before settling on a more manageable, eight-location tournament on the Saturday of Final Four weekend with a championship set for that Sunday, April 6.
So here’s how it works: Eight bars are teamed up with eight different charities. You pay $60 a team to get in the game (that doesn’t cover what goes in your pitchers, but all participating bars are offering drink specials) and if your win at your bar, you play in the championship at a TBD location (follow @RealSeatSwap for updates as many bars are vying to host the championship).
But it’s not just about boozing. There is a charitable component to the day — the details can be found at crowdrise.com/manhattanmadness — and you must register at the bar you want to compete at. So if you’re a Syracuse fan, head over to East End, where proceeds are going to the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation.
Here’s a list of the participating bars (only seven, because pubs are actually competing for the eighth spot), along with the school and charity affiliations: Saloon (Florida State), Wounded Warrior Project; Turtle Bay (Maryland), Boomer Esiason Foundation; East End (Syracuse), Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation; Mad River (Wisconsin), Decker’s Dogs/Freedom Service Dogs of America; Brother Jimmy’s Lex (Michigan), Hootie and the Blowfish Foundation; Duke’s (Texas) and Madhatter Saloon (Oklahoma). The charities for Duke’s and Madhatter are still in the works, but there is a recent Oscar winner with a charitable foundation who happens to like the Longhorns. Just sayin’.
In addition to having better odds at winning in this bracket challenge, it’s also helping several good causes. Take that, Buffett!
SIP FOR A KING
If you ever wanted some sugar from LeBron James, now’s your chance.
As if King James doesn’t have enough already, he can now drink his own brand of soda from his throne. Sprite announced Wednesday its plan to release Sprite 6 by LeBron James. The soft drink has the classic Sprite lemon-lime flavor but has cherry and orange flavors mixed in. The logo features his No. 6 with a crown inside it and below is his name in gold lettering.
This calls to mind some other, ahem, interesting athlete-product collaborations. Remember the classic Reggie! Bar? Made by Clark, the chocolate bar with Mr. October Reggie Jackson on the wrapper had peanut butter and roasted peanuts (who can forget when those bars rained from the stands in 1978 after Reggie went yard on Reggie! Bar Day) How about Michael Jordan’s cologne? Because if you can’t be like Mike, you might as well smell like him.
More recently, Shaquille O’Neal has teamed up with Arizona to graciously bring us Shaq Soda, a strawberry cream soda in 8 oz. cans which have Shaq sticking his tongue out at you. Fitting, becuase you felt like a sucker after buying it.
In a statement, James said he enjoyed working with Sprite to “turn my favorite flavors into a pretty cool variation of one of my favorite brands.” We wonder, though, why stop at three flavors? Not five? Not six? Not seven?
READING IS ACCIDENTAL
The NCAA adopted two reforms in 2003 that have come back to haunt college sports: It required colleges and universities to graduate a majority of each of their teams or face penalties that included a loss of scholarships and a ban on postseason play. It also dropped its requirement that student-athletes have a minimum score of 820 on the SAT in order to play college sports in order to increase minority participation in athletic programs.
In a “Real Sports” segment scheduled to air on Tuesday, correspondent Bernie Goldberg reports that those two reforms have forced colleges to spend millions of dollars on academic advising centers — described as “schools within schools” — to make sure their athletes make the grade.
“They’re coming in with reading levels of fourth, fifth, sixth grade, maybe eighth grade if we’re lucky,” University of North Carolina learning specialist Mary Willingham tells Goldberg. “But there’s even some who are reading below a fourth grade level.”
Willingham says big-time athletes at UNC have been funneled into custom-made, no-show classes that they couldn’t possibly fail.
“They would just have to turn in a paper at the end of the semester,” she says. “There was no class.”
YEAH JEETS!
Good news, Yankee fans: Derek Jeter, who broke his left ankle during the 2012 playoffs and spent most of last season sidelined with injuries, is healthy and ready to rumble in 2014, according to broadcaster Michael Kay.
“He is moving better than he did at any time last year,” says Kay, who interviewed the Yankee shortstop for “Yankees 2014: Power, Pinstripes,” which airs on YES on Sunday afternoon after the team’s spring training game with the Blue Jays.
Kay, who has known Jeter for more than 20 years, tells The Score that the Yankee star is not expressing concerns about his injury or reservations about his impending retirement. “He is about as open, happy and carefree as he has ever been,” Kay says.
Kay has watched other key members of the Yankees championship teams — Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera — retire in recent years, and while Jeter may not seem melancholy about his last season, he is.
“It makes you feel your own mortality,” Kay says. “It’s a little bit sad. The group that he came up with was very, very special.”
