A First-Class Education

Which, of course, brings us to Huntington's itinerant O.J. Mayo, a scholastic Harlem Globetrotter of sorts.

Mayo was born and raised in Huntington. Because of a better basketball opportunity, he went to Rose Hill Christian in Ashland, Ky., in seventh and eighth grades. Because of an even better basketball opportunity, he then went to North College Hill High in Cincinnati in ninth, 10th and 11th grades. And, now, opportunity has brought him home to Huntington for 12th grade.

Next year he'll go to Southern Cal -- for 13th grade -- where he likely will stay for one year before graduating to the NBA.

(By the way, Mayo looks NBA-ready -- I saw him the other night on TV. Who would've thunk it? I'm sitting in L.A. watching live prep hoops from 2,000 miles away. But, hey, this is the 21st century; I fully expect to turn on ESPN any evening and be able to see really, really good high school basketball.)

Anyway, Mayo was going to miss the Artesia contest because he had received two technicals and was ejected from a game the previous week, and under West Virginia rules, an ejected player is suspended for the next two games.

But Mayo won a temporary restraining order from a circuit court judge allowing him to play against Artesia pending a decision on Mayo's procedural rights to appeal the penalties. I'll cut through the legal crap to tell you this:

They were in court arguing over a technical foul.

Uh, IT'S HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL, for goodness' sake.

Mayo and his lawyers wanted somebody to reverse a referee's decision to tee him up.

(Wait until Rasheed Wallace gets wind of this.)

So Mayo has a constitutional due process right to a hearing to change a ref's call? Oh, really? Then you might as well close shop on sports, or move March Madness onto Court TV.

It's unfathomable a circuit court judge would step into this fray. Maybe he had really, really good tickets to the Artesia-Huntington game.