It's 4 a.m. I can't sleep. I'm watching "Mike and Mike in the Morning" on ESPN2, and if I'm not delirious, I think there was just a commercial that said Brook and Robin Lopez, the 7-foot twins from Fresno, will be on the sports talk show "Cold Pizza" at 7 a.m.
Crap, now I have to stay up for that.
I got to see the twins, who both play for Memorial High, for the first time on Tuesday night when they played Firebaugh in the playoffs.
Memorial is ridiculously good, with three Div. I recruits, and they were up on poor little Firebaugh something like 44-6 at halftime. No exaggeration. The only real entertainment, besides seeing McDonald All-Americans -- which the Lopez twins are -- was the Firebaugh fans.
They had a lot of signs, that said a lot of things, many of which accused Memorial of cheating. "We're proud of our homegrown guys," one read. "FHS! Homegrown players," another read.
Apparently all of Memorial's players were orphans. Or at least grown somewhere other than their homes.
They also had signs that read, "Yawn" and similar messages of boredom, which they would hold up when one of the Memorial players was dunking, which happened so often, their arms had to be getting tired.
These weren't just students. There were parents holding those signs.
Isn't it sending the wrong message to your players to be hanging signs that accuse the other team of cheating, before the game has started? Is that the time to be making excuses?
At one point in the second half, the Memorial students started cheering for Firebaugh baskets. The Firebaugh fans did not appreciate that and started chanting, "Stop recruiting! Stop recruiting!"
If you're a private school such as Memorial and you have good basketball players, you must be cheating, it seems, or maybe Firebaugh fans know something we at The Bee do not. But I doubt it.
Word is, these twins are really smart and really interesting, on a social level, so I want to see what they're like in a national interview. If I can stay awake.
