It’s March Madness - so what better time to talk about college basketball’s greatest players? A poll by www.HOFmagazine.com provides a consensus list of the Top 10 college players of all-time from which to choose. The list consists of (alphabetically):

• Lew Alcindor, UCLA
• Larry Bird, Indiana State
• Bill Bradley, Princeton
• Wilt Chamberlain, Kansas
• Pete Maravich, LSU
• Oscar Robertson, Cincinnati
• Bill Russell, San Francisco
• David Thompson, NC State
• Bill Walton, UCLA
• Jerry West, West Virginia

Again, the poll question asks who is the greatest - not who’s your favorite. That’s an important distinction. For me, my favorite college basketball player was Bill Bradley. But my greatest Top-5 is as follows:

• 5. Oscar Robertson
• 4. Pete Maravich
• 3. Bill Russell
• 2. Lew Alcindor ( Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
• 1. Bill Walton

Choosing between Walton and Alcindor was difficult. I give the slight edge to Walton for his rebounding and more aggressive style of play. However, being a three-time Player of the Year with two National Titles, plus leading his UCLA team to an 88-game winning-streak certainly helped!

I’m a believer in our capitalistic society. As a businessman, I understand marketing and maximizing profits. However, as an American sports fan, I’m not in favor of our professional leagues’ fascination of playing games on foreign soil. International marketing and the selling of product is fine – but, do we they really need to send our teams to other countries? We open our doors to international athletes, but having actual games played beyond our borders seems to be going too far.

For some reason, I’m having trouble with regular season NFL games in London and MLB games in Japan. Does America really need to force feed the world our culture, including our sports? Exhibitions, as the NBA recently did in Europe, seem reasonable, but let’s keep games that count in league standings in America.

The Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox will be playing two regular season games in Japan – that’s two fewer games the fans in Oakland will get to see. Baseball games are a hard enough draw in Oakland these days, so why take away two Red Sox games from them? The New York Giants and Miami Dolphins played a game in London this past NFL season. How memorable was that? And God forbid the NFL does the most sacrilegious of all – and plays the Super Bowl in England! The next thing you know, we’ll be moving the New York City 4th of July fireworks to London, too!

NFL Europe was a failure, Japan has its own professional baseball league, and the world has soccer (excuse me, football). Let’s leave the rest of the world alone and play American games on American soil.