Morning Report: The beast behind the Big East

Mike Tranghese is completing his 20th and final season as commissioner of the Big East Conference.

What happened Sunday may well have been his league's finest hour.

The Beast was the first conference to have nine teams ranked in a poll during the season, and on Sunday it became the first to have three teams chosen as No. 1 seeds for the NCAA tournament.

Asked by the Associated Press if he ever worried about the top teams in his league beating each other up too severely, or keeping others out of the big dance, Tranghese was very honest.

"If you're good enough, you'll find a way to win and do what you have to do," he said. "Seven teams in the NCAA tournament is good enough. The others didn't do enough, and I'm OK with that.

"We're still in a competitive business even though we're a league. That the league is too deep and too strong is an excuse. You can't have it both ways."

History lesson. Thursday will be 40th anniversary of one of those seemingly small events that echo for decades.

On March 19, 1969, a pair of NBA expansion teams - the Phoenix Suns and Milwaukee Bucks - flipped a coin to decide which would get the No. 1 pick in the draft.

The Suns got the call, took "heads," and when the coin landed on "tails," the Bucks had won the right to take Lew Alcindor of UCLA.

Alcindor, who had not yet changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was in Louisville that night. The next night at Freedom Hall, he would score 25 points to help UCLA defeat Drake in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament.

Two nights after that, he would score 37 against Purdue, lifting the Bruins to their third consecutive national championship.

Abdul-Jabbar won a title with Milwaukee in 1971. He was traded to Los Angeles in 1975 and (with a massive assist from Magic Johnson) won five titles with the Lakers.

The Suns, who joined the NBA as an expansion team the same season as the Bucks, are still looking for their first crown.

There's more.

With the second pick in 1969, the Suns took 6-foot-10 Neal Walk of Florida. He played eight years in the league, and in his best season averaged 20 points and 12 rebounds.

But most fans considered him a booby prize compared to Abdul-Jabbar.

A Suns photo archivist, Walk has been a paraplegic since 1987, when surgery removed a tumor from his spinal cord. He played wheelchair basketball for years - "I was crappy," he says - and in 1990 was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

"Abdul-Jabbar was Abdul-Jabbar," he says. "To be second to him is no dishonor, if you ask me. But if you're a fan of a team and you want that extraordinary athlete, whomever else you get is a booby prize. Then again, how many people get to be drafted into the NBA No. 2? My feelings aren't hurt. I got to play in the NBA."

Happy St. Patrick's Day. There are six players in NHL history who were born in Ireland. Owen Nolan, whose family moved from Belfast to Thorold, Ontario, when he was seven months old, is the most famous.

The others are Sid Finney, Bobby Kirk, Jim McFadden, Sammy McManus and Jack Riley.