This is justice?

Here at Turbula, we're no fans of the University of Miami Hurricanes. That school's football program has a well-earned reputation for classlessness that makes us fans of whoever is playing the Hurricanes next.

Yet what Florida law-enforcement officials are doing to the Hurricanes' top football recruit is so utterly without either heart or fairness that we're on the cusp of being pushed into the Hurricanes' camp.

Willie Williams is on parole for a felony burglary conviction. Hey, the kid shouldn't have done whatever he did to get busted and convicted.

But now he's facing five years in the slam for a parole violation because he allegedly shot off a fire extinguisher and hugged a woman at a party without her permission! Hugged a woman – not groped, not sexually assaulted, not raped. Hugged.

Now, as anyone who's ever had a Great-Aunt Mildred or the equivalent can attest, an unwanted hug can be an uncomfortable experience – particularly when followed by a couple of cheek pinches, a pat on the head, and a "My, haven't you grown."

But what that experience was not was criminal.

And while emptying a fire extinguisher is, technically, a crime, it's also a fairly common college prank. Take a poll around the Florida attorney general's office and see how many there never pulled that prank at their college frat house.

Unless there's more to this story than is being reported, this heavy-handed treatment of a troubled young man is the sort of thing to add to the already soiled reputation of Florida's judicial system. Turbula seriously doubts that were Williams a middle- or upper-class white kid that the courts would be hammering him for emptying a fire extinguisher and hugging someone.

A perfect imperfection

The whining in the sports columns and on TV has begun again – that we need a college football playoff so we can know which team is really the best in the nation.

As the 2003 regular season ends, the writers rank the University of Southern California first in the nation, while the computers of the Bowl Championship Series have Oklahoma playing Louisiana State for the national title.

Which means – horror of horrors – that we might have two different national champions crowned. And so we'll have disagreement and argument.

Turbula agrees wholeheartedly that should USC beat Michigan (and if ever there were a game with no team worth rooting for ...), that Southern Cal will probably be voted the No. 1 team in the land by the sportswriters who make up the A.P. poll. As the BCS poll is contractually bound to vote for the winner of the Oklahoma-LSU tilt, we will likely have two national champs this year – just as we have in past years.

But our reaction is "So what?"

So what if there are two teams both claiming to be national champ? It's college football, for goodness sake. Why does everything have to be cut and dried?

Replacing the current messy, political and imperfect bowl games with another sterile playoff system would rob college sports of much of its romance. And to what end? So that sportswriters have one less thing to argue about?

That would even make our morning breakfast read a little less interesting.

Stick with the bowls ...

A fine little tournament

Turbula's publisher spent most of his summer writing a software manual he didn't really want to write – but the pay was good, the company was run by friends, and he wanted to take his kids to Maui.

To Maui in November, actually. Thanksgiving week, to be exact.

For the Maui Invitational basketball tournament.

The specific reason for this desire isn't necessary (it had to do with weird but positive karma involving the teams playing this year) – what does matter is our ability to report that this is as fine a college hoops event as you'll find.

The games are held in the Lahaina Civic Center – a community rec center on the southwest side of Maui, next to the post office and police and fire stations. This little civic cluster is actually about a half-mile down the road from Lahaina proper, up on a hill off the coastal roadway running from the harbor to Lahaina.

Which is to say it's pretty much as far removed from the typical college basketball environment as you can get – and perhaps about as close to the roots of the game of basketball as is possible.

When the Maui Invitational isn't in town – about 51 weeks out of the year – it's a local rec center. Which means that the vast majority of basketball played in this gym, which is what it is, is done by kids and old farts.

Kind of the way James Naismith envisioned it when he nailed a couple of peach baskets up in a college gym way back when.

And so seeing San Diego State and Dayton, Ohio State and Villanova, Santa Clara and Central Michigan, Hawaii and Chaminade (the host school) playing in a gym smaller than many high schools have provides one a view of elite college players you just don't get in most university venues.

The volunteers and staff were unfailingly helpful and friendly, the weather warm and inviting, the basketball stellar. Tiny Chaminade upset Villanova in the first round, the various schools' fans chanted like the high schoolers they were decades ago, and the whole experience provided for a Thanskgiving glow that a New England postcard town would be hard-pressed to match.

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