Cheap Seats
Good advice: keep your shirt on
A James Madison swimmer whose picture appeared in a magazine for teenage girls has lost his eligibility.
A photograph of a shirtless Matt Miller appeared in the April issue of YM. The NCAA said Miller violated a rule by promoting the magazine and the cologne sponsoring the “Young & Modern Man Contest.”
Miller said his girlfriend suggested he enter the contest. If Miller wins, he would be in the magazine again and be eligible for a $10,000 prize.
“I don’t see what I’m promoting,” he said. “It isn’t a big deal. It’s a silly little contest.”
Nothing big like a James Madison swim meet.
If you can’t say something overblown …
If publicity is an art, then what they practice at Arizona State University is fingerpainting.
The school’s sports information office recently mailed out posters touting three of its football players for post-season awards. Alas, ASU’s flacks made the mistake of asking coach Bruce Snyder to turn on the hype machine.
Endorsing 6-foot-8, 318-pound tackle Juan Roque for the Outland and Lombardi trophies, Snyder gushed, “All other left tackles stand in Juan’s shadow.” Well, yeah - Unless they’re bigger than 6-8, 318.
But Snyder really went hyperbolic on quarterback Jake Plummer: “He has the toughness of Mike Pawlawski, the arm of Pat Haden and the mobility of Eric Hipple.”
To say nothing of the name recognition of Rick McIvor.
Help, help me, Rhonda
Was it the physique or the risque pose? Whatever, a pinup of bodybuilder Rhonda Jorgenson has inspired the boys soccer team at West High School in Nashville.
The Runnin’ Rebels had won two games in five years before coach David Gohn sent them to the weight room for some off-season conditioning last year. There they found a thong-clad Rhonda from a “Flex” magazine foldout.
Players started calling their workouts “Rhondas.” Where they once ended each practice with a shout of “1-2-3-Pride,” now it’s “1-2-3-Rhonda.”
“Nobody in the stands - the very few that we had - knew who Rhonda was,” Gohn said. “But they started yelling, ‘Put Rhonda in’ and ‘Go Rhonda.”’
Last season, the Rebels won 13 games. This year they’re 3-0-1, and celebrated last week by inviting Jorgenson to campus.
“I am overwhelmed,” she said. “I have competed and posed all over the world, but this, like, tops it.”
A little more steroid punch for the guest of honor, please.
Than to curse the darkness
Perhaps you heard that Boston Red Sox reliever Vaughn Eshelman’s hotel room caught fire recently because his wife had used a candle to heat a baby bottle.
The story is only half true. The fire was started by a scented candle in the bathroom, but “my son drinks his bottles cold,” said Eshelman. “My wife’s ticked.”
So why was there a lit candle in the bathroom? “Why do women do a lot of things?” Eshelman said. “She likes a good smell when she wakes up, I guess.”
The last word …
“I’ll never take that long of a flight again.”
- Kevin Mitchell, on what he learned while playing in Japan
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo