A8 | MONDAY, 04.2.2012 THE LEDGER INDEPENDENT

For more information contact:

Chamber of Commerce606-564-5534 or 888-875-MAYS

www.maysvillekentucky.com email:chamber@maysvilleky.net

Visit our MultiSport website: www.buffalotrailsraces.com

Mark Your Calendars

Gold Sponsors:

May 26, 2012

8 a.m. startMultiple races all skill levels can enjoy:

TRIATHLON .5 mile swim, 25 mile bike, 3.1 mile run

SPRINT .3 mile swim, 12 mile bike, 1.5 mile run

DUATHLON 2.4 mile run, 25 mile bike, 3.1 mile run

5K Run

BLOCK PARTYFriday Night • May 25th

Lower Market Street

Registration website: www.active.com

LOUIS D. RYAN, CWA®

Senior Vice President Financial Consultant

334 Beechwood Suite 302 Ft. Mitchell, KY 41017859.426.7030 800.514.7410 fax 859.426.5270

Maysville 606.564.7711

J.J.B. Hilliard, W.L. Lyons, LLC Member New York Stock Exchange, Inc., FINRA and SIPC

STATE FARMINSURANCE COMPANIES

HOME OFFICES:BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS

533 North Shawnee RdP.O. Box 67

Maysville, KY 41056Cell: 407-3250

Off.: (606) 564-4900Home: (606) 564-4690

Fax: (606) 564-4934

YourLocalStateFarmAgentBill Boggs

•Car •Life •Health•Business •Home

State Farm

Mason Family DrugYour Hometown Pharmacy

OWNERSDr. Michael &

Elizabeth Berry

OWNERSDr. Michael &

Elizabeth Berry

• Competitive pricing• Low wait time• Delivery • Drive-thru

759-0700912 Kenton Station Drive

MaysvilleConveniently located beside

Meadowview Regional Medical Center

Comfortable Work WearAff ordable

PricesWe carry

all the brands you love.

606-563-94001315 US 68 • Southgate Plaza

Maysville, KY 41056

SCRUB STOREWe’re on your side at Homeside.

SCRUB STORESCRUB STORE

A8 | MONDAY, 04.2.2012 THE LEDGER INDEPENDENTA8 | SPORTS MONDAY, 04.2.2012 | THE LEDGER INDEPENDENT

HANK KURZ JR.Associated Press

MARTINSVILLE, Va. | Ryan Newman ended a 22-race winless streak by holding on for the victory at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday, grabbing the lead when a three-wide accident took out leading teammates Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson with two laps to go.

Gordon, who dominated all day, and Johnson seemed poised for a showdown in a green-white-checker fin-ish, each eager to give Hen-drick Motorsports its 200th victory.

But as the green flag flew on lap 503, Clint Bowyer sneaked inside Gordon’s car heading into the first turn, and the three cars slid up the track as Newman zipped past.

A.J. Allmendinger fin-ished second, followed by Dale Earnhardt Jr., Matt

Kenseth and Martin Truex Jr. Johnson wound up 12th and Gordon, who led for 328 laps, finished 14th.

The finish overshadowed what had been a stirring duel between Gordon, a seven-time winner on the 0.526-mile oval, and John-son, a six-time winner. It seemed certain to end with one of them giving owner Rick Hendrick a landmark Sprint Cup victory.

Johnson first took the lead when he passed Gor-don on the 356th lap. He lost it on pit road, then passed Denny Hamlin on lap 393. He held off a mod-est challenge by Gordon with about 30 laps to go and then dueled side-by-side with Gordon until the caution, which came when David Reutimann ran out of gas near the entrance to turn one.

Gordon, who had just nudged in front of Johnson before the yellow flew, was

the leader, with Johnson second and everyone be-hind them heading to pit road for tires.

What had been an atypi-cally clean raced turned into mayhem on the restart.

“We were not a dominant race car,” Newman said. “Clint kind of cleared out Turn One for us and we were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.”

Earnhardt, who was in position to give Hendrick a sweep of the top three spots before the caution, said ev-eryone being on fresh tires played a factor in the crash.

“We all took off and ran into the back of the leaders, all of us,” he said.

Earnhardt didn’t blame Bowyer for trying to take the inside line, but was at a loss to explain what Reuti-mann was thinking.

“I would like an ex-planation on why that happened,” he said of Re-utimann stopping where he did after having made several laps with trouble

without going to the pits. “There doesn’t seem like there could be a logical rea-son for him to have to stop on the track.”

Reutimann said his mo-

tor just died.“I would not have

stopped on the freaking racetrack. I would have limped it around there and come to pit road, which is

what I was trying to do,” he said. “The thing quit going down the back straight-away, and it shut off. I just didn’t stop there intention-ally.”

Newman wins wild fi nish at Martinsville SpeedwayENDS 22-RACE WINLESS STREAK

ASSOCIATED PRESSClint Bowyer (15), Jeff Gordon (24) and Jimmie Johnson (48) get sideways while racing for the lead with just laps to go in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday, in Martinsville, Va.

KANSASFROM A6

Kansas dribbled out the clock and celebrated a win that played out sort of the way the whole season has in Lawrence.

“It was two different games,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “They dominated us the first half. We were playing in quicksand, it looked like. And the light came on. We were able to play through our bigs; we were able to get out and run, but the biggest thing is we got stops.”

Early in the year, Self wondered if this team was even tournament material. The Jayhawks trailed most of the night against Purdue

in the regional semifinals and were no better than North Carolina for most of the next game.

One win. Then another. This latest one came on the biggest stage — in the Superdome. Next, a meet-ing Monday with Kentucky and a chance to bring the second title in five years back to Allen Fieldhouse.

The game will be a coaching rematch between Self and John Calipari, who was coaching Memphis in 2008 when the Tigers missed four free throws down the stretch and blew a nine-point lead in an overtime loss to Mario Chalmers and the Jay-hawks.

“It would be a great honor” to win, said Kansas senior Conner Teahan,

who could become the first Jayhawk to win two rings. “First we have to make it happen. Honestly, it’s not something I’ve focused on.”

This was a heartbreaker for the Buckeyes, who came in as co-Big Ten champions and a slight favorite in a game — a rematch of a 78-67 Kansas win back in De-cember when Ohio State’s star, Jared Sullinger, was not available.

Sullinger was there a-plenty Saturday night, but he struggled. He finished with 11 points on 5-for-19 shooting, no fewer than three of them blocked by Jeff Withey, the Kansas center who finished with seven swats. Sullinger also had 11 rebounds and a steal, but the sophomore who gave up NBA lottery money

to return and win a cham-pionship will go without for at least another year.

When the buzzer sound-ed, he plopped at midcourt, clearly pooped — and may-be wondering how his team let this game slip away.

Ohio State-Kansas was billed as “The Other Game” of this Final Four — garnering much less ink than the Kentucky-Louisville blood feud that preceded it — and started off looking like every bit the undercard.

The Buckeyes built an early 13-point lead on the strength of the shooting of William Buford, who came out of a 13-for-44 tourna-ment slump to lead the Buckeyes with 19 points on 6 for 10 from the floor. Kansas trailed 34-25 at the

half and only a steal and la-yup before the buzzer pre-vented the Jayhawks from a season-low.

But things changed early in the second when Ohio State came out and promptly missed its first 10 shots from the field, while Deshaun Thomas — the Ohio State big man in charge of shutting down Robinson — headed to the bench with his third foul.

That opened everything up for KU: A couple easy layups for Robinson and a kick-out to Elijah Johnson for a 3-pointer were part of a 13-4 run to open the half. It tied the game at 38 and set up for a nip-and-tuck finish between these No. 2 seeds, each of which took at least a share of their conference regular-season

title and were in the hunt for top seeding all the way up to Selection Sunday.

Releford finished with 15 points and six rebounds for the Jayhawks. Johnson had 13 points and 10 boards. Taylor finished with 10 points and nine assists — not bad considering the time Craft spent nearly inside his jersey much of the night.

Releford’s free throws with 1:37 left put KU ahead 60-59. Buford tried to take the ball to the basket on the next possession, but With-ey swatted it away. John-son followed with a layup — hardly as dramatic as his game-winner against Purdue, but enough for a three-point lead, which seemed like a million for the Jayhawks in this one.

FINALFROM A6

one team whose founder invented the game and an-other that likes to claim its

legendary coach perfected it.

Kentucky (37-2), in search of its eighth nation-al title but its first since 1998, has five, maybe six, players who will be playing in the NBA soon. Most are

freshmen and sophomores. None are better than Davis, the 6-foot-10 freshman who had 18 points, 14 re-bounds and five blocks in Kentucky’s 69-61 win over Louisville in the semifi-nals.

“Anthony Davis is a great player, but he’s not Super-man,” Self said, clearly ignoring the fact that, only moments earlier, Davis had been walking around the Superdome with his prac-tice jersey slung across his shoulders like a cape.

As he has all year and all tournament, Calipari has not so much defended as explained his coaching philosophy, which is to go after the very best players and not demand they grad-uate, but only that they play team basketball for whatever amount of time they spend in the Com-monwealth.

“I don’t like the rules,” Calipari said. “I want An-thony to come back and be my point guard next year. It’s really what I want. There’s only two solutions to it. Either I can recruit players who are not as good as the players I’m recruit-

ing or I can try to convince guys who should leave to stay for me.”

He won’t do either. By pulling no punches, the coach finds himself work-ing with the most talent — Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist are likely lottery picks, while Terrence Jones, Marquis Teague and Doron Lamb are among the others with first-round potential.

Calipari is a win away from the first national title of a stormy and controver-sial career, one that began as a volunteer assistant at Kansas. His first two trips to the Final Four have been vacated because of NCAA violations. Though his 2008 trip with Memphis is no longer in the record books, it’s clearly embla-zoned in his memory.

That team, led by Der-rick Rose, had one essen-tial flaw — bad free-throw shooting — and the coach dismissed it every time he was asked about it in the days and weeks leading to his final against Self and the Jayhawks.

The Tigers missed four free throws down the stretch and blew a nine-point lead in what turned into an overtime loss that gave Kansas its third NCAA title.

Lessons learned? Well,

Calipari does make his team run more after bad free-throw shooting nights.

But regrets? Not many.“At the end of the day,

we had a nine-point lead,” he said. “I have to figure something out. Go shoot the free throws myself, do something to get us out of that gym and I didn’t.”

A year later, Cal was out of Memphis and putting the pieces in place for his run at Kentucky. It began with a trip to the Elite Eight, continued last year with a spot in the Final Four and oddsmakers have Kentucky as a 6.5-point favorite to seal the deal this year against Kansas.

“Doesn’t bother us,” Kansas guard Tyshawn Taylor said. “They’ve got high expectations, and they had a great year so the expectations should be high. What we think, though, is that we match up with them well. We feel confident going into this game.”

And why not?Though the talent level

may not be as strong as Kentucky’s from top to bottom, the Jayhawks (32-6) get more reinforcement every game that anything is possible.

On Saturday, they over-came a 13-point deficit against Ohio State for their latest escape act. Before that in the tourna-ment, they won close ones against Purdue, North Carolina State and North Carolina. They were come-

back kids in the regular season, as well — a season that began with low ex-pectations for a roster that got hit hard by graduation and other departures, then fell to 7-3 after an ugly, unexpected home loss to Davidson.

“I was a little frustrated because I thought that we were underachieving, un-derperforming,” Self said. “I thought we were a stale team. I thought we were slow. I thought we didn’t play with great energy. I thought the things we had to do to be successful, we weren’t committing to do-ing them.”

Somewhere in that mess, however, he saw the po-tential.

Much of it shined through thanks to the de-velopment of Robinson, known for his first two years in college as a role player with NBA skills. He was allowed to blossom when he got regular play-ing time this season and is averaging 17.7 points and 11.7 rebounds a game. He was the only unanimous AP All-American and was in the conversation, along with Davis, in most of the player-of-the-year voting.

“We know how good Thomas Robinson is,” Cali-pari said. “We all up here know. We went against him in New York. He is as good as they get. He’s a vicious competitor, great around a rim, expanded his game.”

These teams met in No-vember at Madison Square Garden, a 75-65 Kentucky victory in the second game of the season. There wasn’t much conversation about that one Sunday.

More noteworthy were all the historical aspects of this game.

Basketball, of course, was invented by James Naismith, who later went on to establish the KU bas-ketball program in 1898.

Adolph Rupp grew up in Kansas and learned the game under Naismith and the next KU coach, Phog Allen, then moved to Ken-tucky. Over four decades, “the man in the brown suit” won 876 games and four NCAA champion-ships.