A while back a friend alerted us to a site which we find ourselves watching
with a certain fascination periodically, like a train wreck or a Bob Knight keeper tantrum. It's hard to turn away
from those kinds of things.
Anyway, the site is www.lobobasketball.com,
and are they ever interesting now. They are convinced that Fran
Fraschilla is really a bad and evil person, and are pressing forward on all
fronts in an effort to prove it, including lawsuits, Freedom Of Information Act
requests, and a lot more fun along those lines.
We don't know what the real deal is, but we do know a couple of things: 1) these
are the guys who called Bob Gibbons a wife beater and a drunk; 2) they have
been going after Fraschilla for a good while now, and 3) Fran Fraschilla left
St. John's under a cloud which, for some reason, never seemed to garner much
attention. Lobo Basketball tracked down a story from Adrian Wojnarowski which
detailed some of the allegations about Fraschilla, and also had some
unidentified people who described how Fraschilla could allegedly be tyrannical
and, if they are to be believed, quite bizarre from time to time.
Lobo Basketball, which is also bizarre from time to time, picks up on the
theme and adds new (alleged) variations: players
being mistreated by Fraschilla, a booster paying players, doctored drug
tests and transcripts, a booster and lawyer who "represent kids for
tickets," and one player whose father allegedly threatened to beat
Fraschilla up.
They call the local radio station KKOB "KKKOB" and refer to
Fraschilla's coaching as goomba coaching, which is likely an offensive term to
Italians.
In the other corner, the University
of New Mexico is filing to gain control over the domain names www.lobobasketball.comÂ
and www.lobofootball.com . One
of New Mexico's complaints apparently deals with an image of a
squirrel with large, animated testicles.
The websites solution to the problems? Bring back Norm Ellenberger, who
destroyed New Mexico basketball in a terrible scandal.
Wow! All this on one website? How can it be!
Now to be fair, the Adrian Wojnarowski column has to give one pause.Â
The New York Post and other New York papers reported the charges when they came
out - bizarre allegations of self-exposure and bathroom tirades like the one
alleged about Bob Knight.
Also, here's an article from the Albuquerque newspaper referencing
some of the charges found on this site.
Anyway, as we said, this site is compelling
and disturbing all at once. We don't want to go look, really, but once you peek
in you have to look around: it's like a circus funhouse with lawyers and clowns
all trying to serve papers on each other, only some of the lawyers may be
dressed as clowns, and some of the clowns are standing in front of the wrong
mirrors.
Then again, maybe that's how they got that shot of the squirrel with nuts to
take him through two winters.
One final question: we're still curious why Bob Gibbons has allowed
an article which called him a wife beater, a drunk, and titles him "Inbred
Bob" to stay up. The value of ignoring it we understand, but these
are pretty specific and, we're quite sure groundless accusations. We'd
hope he'd fight them.
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