It's tournament time

March   madness!

It's time for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and I'll be pulling for three teams: the Louisville Cardinals, the Georgia Bulldogs, and the Belmont Bruins.

Louisville is my present; Georgia represents my past. But Belmont? It's an easy call. Fifteenth-seeded Belmont meets Duke in the first round, and Duke's opponents are always my third-favorite college basketball team after Louisville and Georgia.

I'm sure there are freaks who cheer for Duke, but they are all sick, evil, twisted perverts. None of them are friends of mine. Backing Duke basketball is like cheering for a law school with a $1.7 billion endowment.

There are other reasons to support Belmont. It's the alma mater of Lee Ann Womack and Trisha Yearwood. Doesn't that make you feel the love? If that's not enough, here's one more reason to cheer for Belmont. Unlike the other team from Nashville that will be playing in the tournament, Belmont doesn't have a law school.

Finally, here's a bit of MoneyLaw wisdom from Belmont alumna Sarah Cannon, probably better known by her stage name, Minnie Pearl:

Cannon . . . once aspired to a part in the new musical “Oklahoma!” when she was performing and teaching drama in the late 1940s. During a snowstorm somewhere in Kansas, only 15 people showed up for her little act, and she gave a low-energy performance.

Little did she know . . . that a talent scout was in the sparse audience, measuring her for a part in “Oklahoma!” She never got to Broadway, but she always remembered that snowy night whenever she went on stage. As Joe DiMaggio once said, there will always be somebody in the stands who is seeing you for the first and only time.