This Royce White Thing

Hey folks.  I promised a few sentences on this Royce White thing, so I suppose I shouldn't lie about things as if I was your mother when she said she loved you and actually get to it.  The real problem here is, though, I don't much care at this point.

Look, I definitely wanted White to be here.  There's no doubting his talent, and there's even less doubting that this team could really use a big-time banger type of power forward since all the other big guys (without Mbakwe) are perhaps a bit soft, except for Ralph (some people might say he's soft, I say he's playing coy).  But at this point in this season was anybody really still pining for him?  What were the odds he was even going to play this year?  10%?  5%?  It was made pretty clear that his legal troubles, valid or not, were piling up and anybody who thought he was going to play this year was holding on to a thin shred of hope like they were Chris Brander.  Sometimes it works out, but most of the time you're left standing there wearing your mall iron-on cat T-shirt while some jock reads your most heartfelt thoughts you wrote in Jamie's yearbook to the entire graduating class.

As far as Royce goes, all I can say is "Really?"  I mean really?  You've already skated through 18 years of life with little to no regard for the rules that most humans follow, and you've gotten away with it time and time again because the good lord blessed you with 6-7 size and super human athleticism.  Unfortunately, he also cursed you with that ten-cent head and you just couldn't get out of your own way. 

It's disappointing in a lot of ways.  Hell, I even defended him when he first got kicked out of De La Salle and ripped the crap out of Reusse for going after Tubby for keeping this guy on the team.  Now I feel like the idiot.  And it has nothing to do with the Mall of America pants incident or even this laptop framejob worthy of those dudes that framed Nixon.  It is because he quit.  He quit.

It might be different if I believed for a second that he quit because of "what the investigation was doing to his family."  But I don't.  Maybe I'm the asshole here, but it sounds to me like the whining of a privileged child who had his favorite toy taken away for being a bad boy, but instead of learning his lesson or owning up to his mistakes he blames the teacher and refuses to play red-rover anymore.  He had an incredible opportunity, and has now pissed it all away.

It wouldn't even have been that difficult.  Just play one season of college ball and enter the draft.  I could see him going anywhere from the mid-first to the late second with even a mediocre season based on his perceived potential.  But he couldn't even handle that and when a little adversity was thrown his way he quit.  A career in Europe may still be in the cards, but for my money I'd bet he still ends up playing at a JuCo or something on that level.  But the fact is I just don't care anymore.  I used too many words, too much breath, and far too many minutes of my life defending Royce, only to have him quit on everybody who defended and believed in him.

This is the last post you will see about Royce White on this site. (that probably isn't true but it sounds defiant - I'm like Elin Woods to Royce's Tiger over here.)