Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 3/15/2011

3/15/1963:
Striking a blow against segregation, Mississippi State's basketball team plays in an NCAA tournament game against Loyola of Chicago. Mississippi State won the Southeastern Conference championship and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament in 1959, 1961 and 1962 but refused the invitation because it would mean competing against African American players from other universities. The Bulldogs won the SEC again this year, and the school announced it would play in the tournament. Segregationists obtained a court order to keep the team in Mississippi, but it could not be served. Loyola, which has four African American starters, wins today's game, 61-51, in East Lansing, Michigan.

Birthdays:
Punch Imlach b. 1918
Norm Van Brocklin b. 1926
Harold Baines b. 1959
Terry Cummings b. 1961
Kevin Youkilis b. 1979

Packers Fact:
The Packers acquired safety Derrick Martin shortly before the 2009 opener from Baltimore. In exchange, Green Bay sent offensive lineman Tony Moll to Baltimore.

ON WELL, YOU’LL CERTAINLY GET IN A FIGHT
WITH LOGICIANS

---

I’ll probably get into a fight in this room with some, but i happen to think that we need stronger death penalties for those that kill police officers.

President George H. W. Bush

“Success and failure are both greatly overrated but failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.”

—HILDEGARD KNEF, German actress and singer

RAVE REVIEWS

Abraham Verghese, whose nonfiction titles (My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, 1995, and The Tennis Partner, 1999) were widely acclaimed, shows the same attention to detail and scope in this fictional epic of conjoined twins born to a nun in Addis Ababa and abandoned by their father, Dr. Thomas Stone, after he saves them. We then follow Marion, the elder twin, as he becomes a doctor and takes on a quest to find his father and brother and to understand their actions. But a synopsis hardly does justice to the scope of humanity and color and characterization Verghese brings to this brilliant and utterly absorbing novel.

CUTTING FOR STONE, by Abraham Verghese (Knopf, 2009)