First of all, Dick Vitale was right. If Tony Bennett does want back in, Indiana should pay whatever it takes to hire that man. When your choices are a nice handsome guy and a big ugly fella who allegedly strangled his fiancée, you hire the nice handsome guy.
Second of all, I don’t think Dick Vitale’s tweet on Monday about Tony Bennett got enough attention. I just Google News searched “Tony Bennett” and only three of the ten first-page hits were about Tony Bennett and IU. The first three were all about the singer! That singer’s dead! I thought you couldn’t google dead people!
In case you missed the tweet, it happened on Monday and it reads as follows:
“If Tony Bennett decides to want to coach again the @IndianaMBB should do whatever it takes to bring him to Bloomington. Absolutely the best available as he is a sure future Hall of Famer.”
Simple enough, right? And yet nobody is taking this seriously.
Everybody thinks the funny thing here is the concept that Tony Bennett—who retired because the NIL/transfer era changed his job and he didn’t like his new job—would immediately unretire to go to a more dysfunctional university. Everybody is wrong. The funniest thing here is the concept that Tony Bennett would sit there and let Virginia raise that in memoriam banner and then say, “Alright, see ya. I’m going back to the Midwest now.” Think of how mean this would be to Virginia!
I don’t dislike the University of Virginia. Charlottesville’s a great town, UVA seems like a good school, and Thomas Jefferson helped design a really good country, so while for some reason I hold very little respect for men who went there (I really don’t know why this is; I have plenty of respect for UVA’s female students), this isn’t me being a Virginia hater. I’m not a Virginia hater. I was cheering for Virginia in that 2019 exhibition tournament. Nice little consolation prize, you know?
No, this is the kind of bullying that’s just too funny not to do. I don’t care if they deserve it or not. When a joke is funny enough, you have to make that joke.
So, going forward, let’s all promise one another that every Indiana coaching hot board will include Tony Bennett. And let’s promise that when we find one that doesn’t include Tony Bennett, we’ll accuse the writer of hating Dick Vitale and therefore hating college basketball.
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