Oden and Tex

So, the Ohio State Buckeyes are first into the Final Four. Good for them. I still think Greg Oden makes Tim Duncan look like Jim Carrey. The guy never changes expression. He's a force, but seemingly a very dull one. This post on True Hoop, a blog that recently found cover under the ESPN umbrella, helps to humanize Oden a bit by quoting a piece in the Washington Post:

At Lawrence North (High School), (Oden) took calculus as a senior and other college-level math courses for two years and earned a 3.8 grade-point average.

Oden still keeps in contact with (math teacher) McCord. When Oden called her two weeks ago, he talked about how much he liked his History of Rock & Roll class and told her a funny story about one of his friends. They never mentioned basketball.

"If you take basketball away from him, I don't think he's going to lay down and die on us," Keefer said. "He wants to be an accountant."

Hmm, actually, I'm not sure if wanting to be an accountant makes him more interesting or more dull. In any case, it seems that everyone who knows him says he's very likable.

But what's really been bothering me has been my inability to figure out who Oden reminds me of, physically. His 19-year-old face looks like the visage of someone who's lived for 1,400 years. More specifically, though, something about the combination of his deeply furrowed forehead, his recessed eyes, his boxer's nose, and his perpetual look of disinterest recalled someone else. And then yesterday, it dawned on me. He looks like Randall "Tex" Cobb, who played the bounty hunter in Raising Arizona. I couldn't find two pictures that really do the similarity justice, but I'll let you decide. Oden's first, then Cobb:



(PS -- I just did some research to see if I was the only crazy one to think of this. Turns out, I'm not. Scroll down on this page for the same comparison. Of course, this only means I'm not alone. It says nothing about whether I'm crazy.)