America at Large/George Kimball: In the winter of 1983, Sugar Ray Leonard, who a year earlier had retired following retinal surgery, was plotting one of his many comebacks, and invited a handful of boxing scribes down to Washington to watch him spar. The work-out took place in a ring erected in the gymnasium at George Mason University.
That long-ago visit gave me a leg up on at least 95 per cent of the nation's sportswriters this month, because a couple of weeks ago most of them couldn't have found George Mason on a map.
Over the past two weekends an obscure college basketball team from Fairfax, Virginia, has emerged as "America's Team". A 400 to 1 underdog with the Las Vegas bookies when the NCAA Tournament commenced, George Mason has crafted an unlikely series of upsets to join powerhouses UCLA, Louisiana State, and Florida in this weekend's Final Four at Indianapolis.
And while the quartet of survivors from an original 64-team field includes not a single top-seeded team, you'd have to say that George Mason has single-handedly wrecked more office pools than any team in NCAA Tournament history. (One survivor in a $10,000 contest sponsored by ESPN who correctly picked each of the Final Four teams confessed that he had included the Patriots in his pool only because he'd gotten his Georges mixed up: he had intended to pick George Washington, which was eliminated in the second round.)
As 18th century political figures go, George Mason the Patriot was nearly as obscure as the George Mason Patriots.
The University's namesake was an outspoken critic of British rule who, following the War of Independence, helped draft the United States Constitution - and then refused to sign the document until it was amended to include a Bill of Rights.
Although he advocated the abolition of slavery as early as 1765, the original George Mason was himself a slave-owner. One wonders what he would have made of the predominantly African-American basketball team bearing his name which has suddenly elbowed its way into the national consciousness, but this week a campus statue of the Founding Father stood bedecked in an ensemble of a GMU T-shirt and a jaunty cape cut the green-and-gold school colours.
In a tournament that saw all four regional top seeds - Duke, Memphis State, and Villanova - ousted on the way to the Final Four, George Mason made its own path. Generally speaking, when a longshot goes this deeply in any sort of elimination tournament, it can be assumed to have benefited from a combination of lucky bounces and a favourable draw, but neither has been the case with these latter-day Patriots.
On its way to Indianapolis, George Mason solidly defeated the two previous national champions (North Carolina and Michigan State), and then last Sunday knocked off top-seeded Connecticut in an 86-84 overtime thriller.
In connecting on 30 of 60 field goal attempts against UConn, by the way, the Patriots became just the second team in 10 years to have made half their shots in a tournament game against the notoriously stingy Huskies.
No sooner does the tournament selection committee convenes each year to announce the NCAA draw than an immediate and predictable outcry ensues, bemoaning the inclusion of so-called "have-not" schools at the expense of larger and arguably superior programmes.
No team in any bracket was more of a have-not than GMU: they may be the most obscure university to reach the Final Four since Indiana State in 1979 - and since that team boasted a forward named Larry Bird, its achievement, while surprising, wasn't exactly earth-shattering.
George Mason, alone among the Final Four participants, must make do with a $10 million athletic budget unsupported by a football programme. (By contrast, Florida's is $63 million, LSU's $55 million and UCLA's $42 million.) And, noted the New York Times this week, the other three finalists have between them accumulated a combined 164 National Championships. George Mason has won exactly two - in women's soccer (1985) and indoor track and field (1996).
While George Mason head coach Jim Larranaga is unlikely to starve on his $200,000 yearly salary, the Times also pointed out that his wage pales in comparison to his counterparts: Florida's Billy Donovan earns $1.7 million, UCLA's Ben Howland $920,000 and LSU's John Brady $715,000.
When the tournament began, even basketball insiders might have been familiar with the name of just one George Mason player, point guard Tony Skinn. And Skinn was notorious for his temper, not his hoops prowess: during the Colonial Athletic Association tournament he punched an opponent in the groin and drew a one-game suspension from Larranaga as a result.
The odds-makers have Florida a 5 ½-point favourite to end George Mason's Cinderella ride on Saturday. The Patriots' two tallest players - Will Thomas and the beefy, 275lb Jai Lewis - each stand 6ft 7in, and will have to contend with the likes of Florida's 7ft centre Joakim Noah (the son of onetime French tennis star Yannick Noah), who scored 21 points and garnered 15 rebounds in Florida's 75-62 win over Villanova on Sunday.
But George Mason has been at a disadvantage in size throughout the tournament, and has still out-rebounded its opposition 158-148.
"There must be a million Washington fans who can name 100 current local pro and major college athletes, but couldn't name one person who had ever played for George Mason," marvelled columnist Tom Boswell in the hometown Washington Post.
"Count me, too," Boz added sheepishly.
