Long-time Plain Dealer television critic Bill Hickey was 83 when he died of cancer Friday morning. Please pass this along to other old-time PD writers and editors on your social network list. The obit will be in the paper Saturday or Sunday. McGorray's Funeral Home on Center Ridge Rd. in Westlake from 2-8 on Monday. Funeral Mass Tuesday morning at 10:30 at St. Raphael Catholic Church, Dover Center Rd., Bay Village. Get there early. Huge crowd. Bill and wife Joan have nine children and 32 grandchildren. They'll all be there.

He won a National Headliner Award for his television writing in the 1970's which was the highest award ever for a Plain Dealer writer until Connie Schultz won her Pulitzer. (Editorial cartoonist Ed Kuekes won a Pulitzer in the 1940's.)

He also was the first editor of the PD Action Tab, forerunner to the Friday Magazine, where he created restaurant critic Forchette Escargot.

At least it will keep a few thousand Irishmen out of the bars that night.

St. Eds and St. Ignatius will meet at 8 p.m. Wednesday night, March 17, at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University in the regional basketball semi-final. That happens to be St. Patrick's Day.

It's the second half of a doubleheader, with Mentor and Avon Lake meeting in the other game at 6:15. The regional final is Saturday night in the same arena.

If you're planning on moving your St. Patrick's Day party to the Wolstein Center, be advised beer will not be sold. It's a condition imposed by the Ohio High School Athletic Association.

As for corned beef, keep in mind that the only people in Cleveland who know how to cook corned beef are the Lebanese.

The state football finals are up for bid again. The deadline for a written proposal is April 16. You can get specifics from the OHSAA web site which is ohsaa.org. Scoll down the home page to an item that will tell you where to click for a form.

The documentary movie "Pinned," which I wrote about several weeks ago, has been selected for the Cleveland International Film Festival, where it will be shown three times.

This is quite an honor for Mike and Pat Norman, the brothers who produced the 91-minute film about high school wrestling. They began the project four years ago, going behind the scenes for a season with the St. Edward team and a parallel story of a Lakewood High wrestler.

Movie reviewer David Moss of Fox 8 called it a "perfect snapshot of the pain and glory of high school wrestling." I enthusiastically agree with that endorsement.

The first two showings will be at Tower City Center at 4:45 p.m. on Friday, March 19, and at 11:20 a.m. on Saturday, March 20. The third showing will be at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 25, at the Capitol Theater at W. 65th and Detroit Ave. There will be a reception before the screening from 5:30 to 6:45 around the corner at the Luxe restaurant.

If you have any interest in high school wrestling, you must see "Pinned."

I liked Stephen Colbert's observation about curling. "It looks like housekeeping," he said.

The 108 continuous hours of curling coverage on MSNBC got me so fired up, I went around the house dusting everything.

Do you think that if any country swept through the curling competition unbeaten, it's anthem would have been, "Get out the brooms?"

Seriously, I'm going to start training for the 2014 Winter Games. I'll be in the prime of my curling career. I'll be 75.

Curling is a dangerous game, I must say. A well-conditioned curler is liable to die of old age at any time.

It reminds me of the game we played in bars 50 years ago, sliding silver discs a mite smaller than hockey pucks down a polished wood board. The object was to get them as close to the end as possible without falling over. That game could be resurrected for the Summer Games, something to keep curlers in shape during their off-years.

The hockey gold medal game between the USA and Canada was a thrill a minute, but I couldn't shake the thought that it was essentially the NHL all-star game, except with something at stake. All the players on both sides were NHL stars. Nobody watches the NHL all-star game any other year, but the Olympics made this one important.

Here's why American figure skater Johnny Weir placed no higher than sixth at the Olympics earlier this week.

It was that ridiculous costume. It's my theory that the judges were repulsed by his silly peek-a-boo outfit. Where would you get such a garment? What kind of store would stock such a thing?

It takes a team to produce an Olympic figure skater. There's the skating coach, music director, choreographer, makeup artist and costume designer. They've got somebody to powder their noses and paint on their skin-tight pants. The number one coach, however, is the one who sits next to them when the scores are announced. In Johnny Weir's case that person is a large Russian woman who, I suspect, is a double agent. When she put her imprimatur on Johnny's little outfit, she doomed his pursuit of a medal. Russia never has been known for its fashion, unless you're a fan of bearskin overcoats.

Euphemistically Speaking

The waiter said that what made the cut of meat so desirable was its "marbling," a euphemism for fat. It was full of fat.

"That gives the meat its flavor," he said. They always say that.

Tiger Woods did what he had to do -- and one thing he did not have to do -- in his carefully staged and manipulated mea culpa on ESPN Friday afternoon.

He apologized all over himself about a dozen times for his sexual binge during which time he deposited his seed over all four time zones in North America and possibly all 24 time zones around the world. He turned planet Earth into his personal brothel. It must have been hard for Tiger, standing in front of a national TV camera and saying, for the first time in his life that he was wrong, shameful, selfish and an embarrassment to himself, his family, his friends, his sponsors and the game of golf. It was the most humbling 13 1/2 minutes of his life. In an emotional sense he had to crawl on his belly like a snake. He must have felt like a piece of dung. For a guy like Tiger, it must have been agonizingly difficult. I wonder what was his most compelling motivation to do that, his sponsors or his family. He was a businessman before he was a family man.

That's what I was telling my son, John, as we watched the St. Ed vs. St. Ignatius basketball game in Sullivan Gym last Friday. The St. Ed Eagles had a terrible first half. Missing about 10 of 15 free throws was only part of the problem. They also lost the ball with careless no-look passes in the chaos underneath the basket more than once.

"They watch too much television. They see LeBron do that and because he makes it look easy, they think it's easy," I said to John.

It's not easy. What they don't see are the hundreds of hours of practice and teamwork necessary to perfect the behind-the-back one-bounce pass to Varejao for the easy back door layup. Other NBA teams can't do that, much less high school kids who are captivated by the way it looks on television. LeBron is unique. Before they try to emulate his style, they should emulate his work ethic.

Bang the Drum Slowly

That's the 8 o'clock movie Wednesday night on TCM. It's on most people's top 10 list of all-time favorite baseball movies. It's an oldie, 1973, starring a very young Robert De Niro as a dying catcher and an equally young Michael Moriarty as the ace pitcher of the New York Mammoths. It's a sappy, corny tear-jerker and you'll love it.

I've heard complaints about my silence recently, so let me get this off my chest.

Brent Larkin was so right in the Sunday Plain Dealer about the proposed passenger train linking Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati.

I've been stupefied ever since the governor started touting it about a month ago. Strickland truly is out of touch. A sage once said, "You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy."

Larkin points out that "trains will average about 40 mph -- not quite twice as fast as a well-conditioned bicyclist could pedal, and barely half as fast as a driver can travel on Interstate 71." The Amish travel almost as fast in their horse drawn buggies.

You can drive to Columbus via I-71 in two hours. My Camry will make the round trip on one tank of gas, $40, less than the cost of a train ticket. The train will take almost twice as long, assuming that it's on time, and then you'll take a cab or get a ride to get to where you're actually going. And you'll need a hotel room because you can't do the round trip in one day.

It will be available for viewing in a few weeks, but I don't want to put it on the back burner of my mind. I might get distracted and neglect to tell you about it later. If you're a fan of high school sports -- especially wrestling -- you'll want to see the 90-minute documentary "Pinned."

It chronicles the St. Edward wrestling team of 2005-06 with an interwoven parallel story about Lakewood High wrestler Matt Curley. It follows the St. Ed wrestlers on each step of the season which culminated in the state championship and a fourth straight state title for St. Ed werstler Lance Palmer.

There are fascinating interviews, including provocative remarks from Palmer's father who says St. Ed's wrestling would be even better if he were the head coach.

Palmer's younger brother Collin, who became a multi-state champion himself, will get your attention when he says he doesn't want his own kids to wrestle because he doesn't want that kind of stress a second time.

As many as five cameras were used to shoot tournaments and take you behind the scenes.

That's what often happens after a change at the top in the NFL. The new guy installs his own bugs -- secret, illegal listening devices in offices and meeting rooms. That's how paranoid the NFL has become. The boss wants to know what the assistant coaches, scouts, etc., are saying when they think nobody is listening.

Recall when Eric Mangini took over exactly a year ago. What was the first project he undertook? He started a million-dollar remodeling job in the headquarters building in Berea. In the process, a lot of pictures were moved around on the walls, good places to find the old microphones and hide new ones. I swear, when I looked at the picture of Dante Lavelli on the wall, his eyes seemed to move.

One More Thing about Cribbs