For one day, Mayo nothing more than greatest no-show on earth
Friday, March 24, 2006
BOB HUNTER
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Before North College Hill had tipped off against Archbold, the Greatest Show on Earth already had turned into an Entertainment Tonight rerun.
The news got out three hours teacher said it was a fight. Another teacher told a reporter off the record that it was nothing physical. A kid was overheard telling his friend that he heard Mayo was in jail, and yet another teacher said school officials only wish they could announce what Mayo had done, implying that it wasn’t serious.
The jokes started flying, too. Because Mayo is regarded as the best high-school junior in the country, you’d have to figure that if it were anything less than murder — a simple bank robbery, for example — he might be able to serve his onegame, uh, of not playing and make it back for the state final Saturday.
I made a quick check of the Ohio State banners flying above Value City Arena and because no additional Final Four appearances were missing, it seemed to me that whatever Mayo did, Jim O’Brien had nothing to do with it.
Of course, the other big pregame before the Division III semifinal and spread quickly: O.J. Mayo had been been suspended — check that; this wasn’t a suspension, he just wasn’t allowed to come to the game, North College Hill officials said — and everybody wanted to know why.
Because no one in authority would say, it didn’t take long for the rumors to start flying. A Cincinnati television station reported that it was a cell-phone violation. A reporter who has an editor who has a friend who’s a North College Hill news, besides the hit that scalpers took outside, was how the Trojans would handle the loss of their star player against Archbold.
Would Bill Walker, who is often the second-ranked junior behind Mayo, score 50 now that his friend had gone missing? Sixty? One hundred?
Well, here’s a clue: Not only didn’t Walker get 50, the whole team didn’t.
Archbold came out in glacier mode and turned the Greatest Show on Earth/Entertainment Tonight traveling high-school basketball extravaganza into the basketball equivalent of a documentary on organic gardening.
The Trojans’ 49-34 victory mostly looked like a bad NBA game; it was a bunch of guys standing around while Walker drove to the basket for a spectacular dunk or for a spectacular dish-off or, at other times, just a bunch of guys standing around.
"As a team, we played well and came together and got through another day," North College Hill coach Jamie Mahaffey said. "You know, we’ve been through a lot of controversy today, a lot of issues, but we have a family here and we’ve been moving on all year and we’re going to keep on moving on."
A significant part of the postgame press conference centered on Mayo and why Mahaffey couldn’t answer questions about him. He said he "can’t comment" on whether he agreed with the decision to keep Mayo home and didn’t know whether he would play Saturday. He also went into a rambling speech about how "these boys right here have been through a lot and they don’t get enough credit for what they’ve done.
"We always do a lot of controversy, a lot of issues because of our team. Maybe we draw attention to ourselves, but sometimes that stuff is not necessary to be put on these kids."
Are you kidding me? A top-ranked team that is hounded by autograph seekers, one with two profiles in Sports Illustrated, one that has had home games at the University of Cincinnati, Xavier and U.S. Bank Arena, doesn’t get enough credit for what they’ve done? Give me a break, coach. I feel a whole lot sorrier for the poor guy who brought his son out to see this circus, only to discover that Mayo couldn’t make it. He got gypped. North College Hill is getting what it asked for.
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.
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