SPORTS THE
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MICHAEL NISSMAN FREEZING MY ROYAL RASTAFARIAN NA-NAS OFF
It’s the ‘Flying V’ The Ducks don’t just play hockey. And Aaron Brooks isn’t just a New Orleans disappointment. Confused yet? Well, not if you have been following college basketball and the surprise trip Oregon has taken all the way up to the top 10 rankings. After two wins over top 10 teams since the new year, including previously undefeated No. 1 UCLA, quacking Ducks have never been so loud. Both wins came from the heroics of Aaron Brooks. No, not the former Saints quarterback. Instead, the 6-foot guard from Seattle has hit game-winners in each occasion and led UO to its best start (16-1) since 1938, just a year before it won its only national title. Brooks has taken the role as “Mr. Clutch,” reminiscent of UCLA alum — dare I say? — Reggie Miller. Forget “Miller Time.” It’s “Duck Day.” Their basketball prowess and surprise upsets have been the most exciting sports on TV since Disney’s Ducks. I’m talking about — yes — the Mighty Ducks. You remember, “The Flying V?” Take away the body checks, facemasks, goal cage, penalty box and 1,700 square feet of ice ... and they’re pretty much the same. It’s Duck fever, and allow me to jump right in. As Gordon Bombay eloquently once said, “Are we Ducks or what?” MIKE’S PICKS A few predictions from yours truly: Ducks quack to title championship. They play small with run and gun style, powered by the workings of guards trio Brooks, Tajoun Porter and Bryce Taylor. Porter, a freshman Muggsy Bogues replica, is doing it BIG. When he gets hot, there’s no stopping the 5-foot-6 Detroit native. Porter scored 27, 28 and 38 points in his first three career college games this year and recorded 10 threepointers in a 116-68 romp over Portland State Nov. 12. The Ducks have the momentum thanks to two game-breaking performances by Brooks, their last victim being No. 9 Arizona, to go far, and with Emilio Estevez on your side, how can you go wrong? My mid-major favorite set to be this year’s Cinderella story is Drexel. The Dragons (12-4) have been snubbed from the rankings despite impressive wins over Syracuse, last year’s Elite Eight team; Villanova; and George Mason, last year’s Final Four qualifier. Center Frank Elegar is a legitimate big man and expect them to win the Colonial Athletic Association conference and enter the tournament. But, most importantly, on a local note: Brooks-less Saints vs. Bears. C’mon, do you have to ask? Better book your ticket to Miami, because we’re taking Mardi Gras to sunny South Florida for one fiesta for the ages.
MAROON
FRIDAY, JANUARY 19, 2007
LIFE. CAMERA. ACTION. For Mario Faranda, it’s all about love, basketball and a Hollywood ending. By RAMON ANTONIO VARGAS SPORTS EDITOR
If a director tried to plot the events that took Wolfpack forward Mario Faranda from his birthplace in Peru; to his grandfather’s picturesque, seaside hometown in Chiavari, Italy; to prep school and his first love in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; to playing basketball in New Orleans for Loyola, audiences would shake their heads and say, “Only in the movies.” So it’s a good thing that the finance junior has loved films since he was eight, when he’d watch them with his grandfather on late-night Peruvian television. But nothing compares to the theater in Elmwood, a 10-minute ride from Cabra Hall down the Earhart Expressway, where Faranda says he’d live if they let him. If only ticket stubs to “Glory Road,” “Sideways,” “Star Wars: Episode III” and 39 others that were in a shoebox under his bed, priced $5.50 a trot, were valid currency for a cot in one of the projector rooms. It’s just something about the way moviegoers who don’t know each other and make a movie funnier or scarier because of their reactions to moving pictures in a darkened room, Faranda says. The scene where the father, marching off to his death, makes his little boy chuckle one last time to mask the gravity of the situation at the end of “Life is Beautiful,” his favorite movie. The “A Whole New World” magic carpet ride in “Aladdin,” the first movie he remembers seeing in a theater. They get him every time. And why wouldn’t they? Basketball, wanting to make his parents Aldo and Antonella’s (still in Chiavari) efforts to get him to the United States worthwhile and wanting to be an example for his kid sister Luciana opened another world up for him. But it wasn’t just that, he sheepishly grinned. It also snagged him his first leading lady. NEW WORLDS One day during his freshman year in high school, Faranda sat in a study hall in St. Stanislaus, a boarding school in Bay St. Louis. The room was quiet as students concentrated on their work, but Faranda couldn’t process a word of what was before him on his desk — his mind and heart were across the Atlantic, and he’d just about had enough of being in Mississippi. Life was beautiful in Peru — not in the loneliness of Stanislaus’ dorms, where in his first year living in America he “had no close friends that could take me out.” In Peru, every Sunday without fail, generations of Farandas would flock to a long table in his grandfather’s house for an afternoon brunch. They’d chatter about Universitario (his grandfather’s favorite soccer team), or they’d listen to the Faranda patriarch recount tales of World War II bombings that expelled him from the seaside haven he was from to seek refuge in Peru. Or how he’d denounce Peru’s politicians as crooks.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE KASHISHIAN / THE MAROON
Movies have been basketball star Mario Faranda’s favorite off-court activity since he was 8-yearsold. When he lived in Peru, he’d watch them on late-night television with his grandfather. “Of course, in Peru, most of them were,” Faranda joked. So much so that they weakened the country’s economy, spooking Aldo and Antonella into seeking safer jobs and a more secure existence in Italy, taking Mario (age 11) and Luciana with them. Life was beautiful in the Italian seaside haven, where Mario spent his days carousing with his aunts and cousins atop the beachfront’s cobblestone boardwalks, bumming on the sands, gazing at verdant hilltops lining Chiavari’s horizon; and where he spent his nights watching (of course) movies or playing basketball for a club in Repalo, Italy. It was basketball that got him noticed by the Italian junior national team. The 6-foot-4 kid had the post prowess of someone 6-foot-9 — he somehow played bigger than he was, a role he still revels in. And that team took him to a whole new world yards away from the glass pyramid outside of the Louvre in Paris, during a tournament. But even then, life wasn’t beautiful enough to allay the allure of the American dream and of chiseling a name out on U.S. wood floors. “We found a Catholic boarding school we looked up on the Internet. Because my parents were Catholic, they liked its discipline, with 150 years of history associated with the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. So they sent me there,” he said. There, to Bay St. Louis — a whole new world. TREKKING ON Faranda snapped up from his desk, storming out the classroom to the phone in the hallway. He dialed his parents in Italy, not sure of what he was going to say. He knew he couldn’t go home, not after all the trouble it took to ship him to Mississippi, not after his parents spent
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARIO FARANDA
Beachgoers enjoy a sunny day in Chiavari, Italy. Mario Faranda moved to the beachside haven from Peru when he was 11. up to $350 on school uniforms alone. But basketball season was over. There was no rush from playing in games — just studying and movies. Maybe he just needed to hear their voice. “I just talked to them. I never told them I wasn’t okay where I was to not make them worry. I told them I was all right,” he remembered. Faranda treasured that his parents told their friends in Italy about their son chasing the American Dream. He knew one day his beloved Luciana would run into a hard class in college, or an unreasonable professor once she was older, and Faranda wasn’t about to show her that he resolved adversity by quitting. So he hung up the phone and refocused, deciding to hang around Stanislaus long enough to become a star forward by his junior season. “Bay St. Louis is a small town. So people started to recognize me.” Among them was Ashley Ladner and she, like any all-American dream
girl, made the loneliness oh-so-bearable. THE LEADING LADY Faranda once grew an Afro so Amazonic that the Stanislaus coach told him, “You’re not playing with that thing unless you cut it.” Always a team player, Faranda did — while his team loaded the buses for a game, Faranda sped across a parking lot into a Supercuts and got a “two-minute haircut.” “It was all uneven and terrible. Just terrible,” he said, chuckling. So his coach allowed him to take the floor, and Faranda made the most of it. But what caught the eye of Ashley Ladner, cousin of Faranda’s teammate Philman Ladner, wasn’t the rebounds he ripped down or the baskets he finished. It was the two-minute haircut. “She told Philman, ‘Hey, did Mario get a new haircut? Tell him I said hi.’” And then she wrote him a note:
see FARANDA, page 8