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The Cal Ripken of schuss
For Paul Schipper, a retired airline pilot, skiing is life’s sweet obsession. How else to explain his streak a 15-year run that adds up to 2,600 consecutive ski days on the slopes of Sugarloaf, Maine?
So consumed is the 73-year-old former pilot that he rearranges life to fit around slope time. When his son graduated from college nine years ago, Schipper went to the graduation in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. But he was back at Sugarloaf in time for two moonlit runs that night - skiing in front of the snow-grooming machine.
There have been other moguls to negotiate to keep the streak alive. In 1992, Schipper needed to have a kidney removed because of cancer. He asked if doctors might wait until after the ski season.
Naturally, there are limits to his celebrity - as Schipper discovered in a conversation with a man who “was really impressed with The Streak, and was explaining to his son who I was.
“The father introduced us, and the kid just looked up at me and said, ‘Why?”’
The gospel according to St. Bobby
As Bobby Bowden remembered it from the pulpit of First Baptist Church in New Orleans last Sunday before the Sugar Bowl, he and his wife Ann once sat in the front row of an Alabama worship service. Between them were their six children. The preacher decided to use Bowden as an audience.
“If I stretched an I-beam across this altar, would you walk across it?” he asked the young coach.
Bowden said he sure would.
“Now if I took that same I-beam and put it between the Twin Towers in New York, 110 stories over the ground, would you walk across it then?”
Bowden said absolutely not.
“Now,” thundered the preacher, “if I dangled the legs of one of your children from that beam, and said I’d drop that child if you didn’t walk across, would you do it then?”
Bowden thought a moment.
“Which child?” he asked.
The laughter mounted. Bowden, invited to speak before his Florida State Seminoles were dismembered by rival Florida, doesn’t deliver a sermon so much as a monologue. At one point, he expressed bafflement that Americans believe whatever they read, “but they don’t believe what’s in The Bible. Read the doggone book! Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - they’re a lot more accurate than the writers nowadays.”
Then he spotted Tallahassee Democrat columnist John Nogowski in the sanctuary.
“Sorry, John,” Bowden said with a grin.
Elsewhere on the religion front …
When NBA beanpole Shawn Bradley of the Nets recently tried to argue with referee Hue Hollins over a call, Hollins barked, “Don’t use profanity on me.”
Nets coach John Calipari then complained, “He’s a Mormon. He doesn’t swear.”
Responded Hollins: “I’m Baptist and I don’t lie.”
Typecasting
The makers of the movie “Jerry Maguire” were shooting for realism. To teach Kelly Preston how to punch Tom Cruise, they brought in retired boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, prompting Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Sun-Times to comment: “To teach Cruise how to be an agent, we hear they brought in a rat from ‘Ben.”’
The last word …
“I haven’t met an agent yet who looks like Tom Cruise. They should have used that guy who played Ratso Rizzo.
- Jazz director of basketball operations Scott Layden on “Jerry Maguire.”
The last word II …
“Surely it is no coincidence that Steve Young announced his engagement during a week when he had his head examined.”
- Barry Horn, Dallas Morning News
, DataTimes