As we have by far the most astute readers in all of North Texas, it is easily discernable that my favorite sport to cover and write about is basketball. Oh, I know that football is king in Texas and its considered blasphemy to take any other position, we have always had a close kinship with hoops.

Perhaps that goes back to our days of playing the sport and getting an opportunity to become a part of the Boston Celtic family after being scouted in the minor leagues. We still have a check from the Celtics as a way of remembering our great times watching K.C. Jones, Cedric "Cornbread" Maxwell and the great Bill Russell perform on the parquet floor of the old Boston Garden, or simply the Gahden as they say in beantown.

You know every sport has its idiosyncrasies; footballs with its head banging and rump slapping, baseball with its sunflower seed addiction and of course basketball players are always larry birding their shoes. You may not have known it was called that since I originated the phrase, but you've seen it done on every court from Little Dribblers to the NBA. A player wipes his hands on the bottom of his shoes to remove the sweat. The great Celtic player and Hall of Famer, Larry Bird started that practice, or so I'm trying to get you to believe.

Anyway, our favorite season has past. Now we move on to the sunflower seed spitting.

Column Interruption: I like going to Wal-Mart and sitting on the benches reminiscing with people I have just met.

Speaking of basketball, Two big hoops acts of injustice are taking place this month. First a coach named Don Meyer is retiring with something like 920 wins in college basketball and some dweeb named Herb Magee passed the great Bob Knight with his 903 win at a place called Philadelphia University. It's all over the web about how these guys have won more games than Knight, blah-blah-blah.

Meyer won his at such places as Hamline, an NCAA division III school, Lipscomb, an NAIA school and the real hoops hotbed Northern State. Yeah, one of those directional schools.

Herbie won all of his at the D2 school in Philadelphia and he got his "record" breaking win against something called Goldey-Beacom College.

Coach Claude Webb down in Melissa told me one time that if you figured in all the games that he coached teams that his kids played on, he would have more wins than Knight.

There ya go, right in our own backyard.

Column Interruption: Did you know that you could call a high school girl phat if you spell it right?

We traveled up to Howe on Saturday to get some shots of a powerlifting meet. Of course with our all-access pass we were able to go down on the gym floor where about 200 area athletes were Squatting, and Benching, and Jerking more weight around than a new Toyota. Saw this one dude there from Lovejoy High School. This guy was huge. Bet he could have eaten 20 of those two-for-a-buck tacos from Jack In the Box. (no I don't own any piece of that action either)

We learned early on that girls don't like to get their picture taken when they are lifting weights. Girls generally don't like to get their picture made unless that have had time to do the make up thing but that's another story. You see, when your about to lift a gazillion pounds, you get a rather intense look. We could make a good comparison here but in a rare, for me, instance of good taste let's just leave it alone.

All that access also means you get to enjoy the smells associated with the event. Let's just say that Beyonce is not coming out with that fragrance anytime soon.

Jack Walker is a staff writer for the Van Alstyne Leader.