Coach's Strategy to Bait Player: Call Him 'Queen'

The Sweet 16 is set, and one of those 16 is Oregon, which easily beat UC Irvine 73-54 despite the losing coach's name-calling strategy. As the Oregonian reports, Irvine coach Russell Turner kept referring to Oregon freshman Louis King as "queen" during the game. But, he swears it was "out of respect," citing a chess analogy. "I was saying 'double team queen' to try to see if I could irritate him, and I did," Turner said after the game. He had his players do the same. "We were calling him queen, because I knew it might irritate him, because of how important he is to their team—the queen in chess."

King scored three points in the first half, but he added 13 more in the second as his team advanced. King himself has not commented, notes USA Today, but he apparently let Turner know during the game that he wasn't pleased. The two then spoke during the post-game handshake. "He’d had a thing or two to say to me during the game, and I wanted to let him know that what I’d done was out of respect," says Turner. The big game story from Sunday: Top-seed Duke survived a crazy finish, and ESPN has the highlights from that. (More March Madness stories.)