John Blanchette

Brent Gilchrist and his Kelowna Wings teammates had reasons to be leery. Their team was being uprooted and transported across the border to Spokane, which had already buried one Western Hockey League franchise. Ownership and management were, well, volatile and generally penurious. Senior amateurs had owned the city’s hockey heart.

PULLMAN – Washington State has landed its athletic evangelist, and he came Wednesday with a warning. “If you like the sermon,” Bill Moos said, “show it when the collection plate is passed around.”

Prominent among the explanations for the obsession that is Gonzaga basketball is location. The Zags are, it’s pointed out, the only game in town, so it’s no wonder they’re loved half to death. The big-city conceit inherent in this rationale is that the only entertainment alternative in Spokane is stopping by the nearest Les Schwab’s to watch them sipe the snow tires. Besides, there’s this other game in town.

PULL- MAN – If this sports gig is all about taking them one game at a time – and we know that to be The Gospel – then there is no choice but to draw conclusions one game at a time. Today’s conclusion: Washington State has given up on this basketball season.

Alpha dogs impose their will as a matter of nature, not strategy. And in American distance running, Dathan Ritzenhein is our alpha dog. So plans were pretty much cast into the gentle breeze Saturday at the USA Cross Country Championships at Plantes Ferry Park. What coach Alberto Salazar had mapped out for Ritzenhein was a move on whatever there was of a lead pack with a kilometer remaining in the 12K race. But not long after he passed the 8K mark with Patrick Smyth and Scott Bauhs, Ritzenhein couldn’t help himself.

Let’s hope this won’t endanger Andrew Kimpel’s amateur standing. For his fourth-place finish in the junior men’s race at Saturday’s USA Cross Country Championships on Saturday, the Washington State University freshman from Spokane won more than just a trip to the world championships.

Shalane Flanagan has an ulterior motive for running in Saturday’s USA Cross Country Championshps at Plantes Ferry Park. Reconnaissance.

Such a thing never would have occurred to the Kennel Clubbers who have hounded (and cussed) him for four years, but they should have considered an ovation – and it would have to be standing, since they never sit – for Omar Samhan. And he, in return, for them.

We’ll know that the extreme sports daredevils will have changed the face of the Olympic Games for good when the motto gets amended to something like, “Swifter, higher, stronger … epic.” But the change is certainly under way.

At last, reinforcements for The Three Basketeers. One for all and all for … well, for drilling the Portland Pilots a new one.

Under anesthesia when her right foot was amputated, it wasn’t until the time came to change the cast that Mariah Alexander would see just what she no longer had – in what surely would be a tense, grisly, heartbreaking moment. “You don’t have to look,” she was told.

One of the articles of Gonzaga’s basketball faith has been that the company the Bulldogs keep in January and February is universally disdained – though slightly less nationwide than by the Zags’ own fan base. Apparently, however, it’s now just a half truth.

Maybe the best tributes are the subtle ones. This time, at least, subtle will have to do. Gonzaga returned to play at home for the first time in three weeks Thursday night, with emotions raw and regretful tugging at their coach, Mark Few. His old boss, Dan Fitzgerald – who launched Few’s college coaching career 20 years ago by hiring him for comically sub-starvation wages – died Tuesday evening. It was a shocking loss to everyone who knew him but especially to the young coaches – Few, Dan Monson and Bill Grier – who worked side by side with him to establish the Bulldogs’ success, and an ethos.

In Fitz’s memory, a story about Fitz. Not the best one, not the worst. Dan Fitzgerald never ranked them like a Top 25 anyway, because there were too many for that. He had given up coaching basketball at Gonzaga University to be a full-time athletic director, but he still booked himself on the team’s Bay Area trip – and not just because he grew up the son of a saloonkeeper in San Francisco. The rooming list for the weekend paired him with a sports writer, on the road with the Zags for the first time because the competing staffs of the morning and afternoon papers had just merged and there was all this money to spend, for one season anyway.

He was the godfather not only of Gonzaga University’s remarkable and unprecedented rise as a college basketball power, but of the game itself in Spokane – and a friend to virtually everyone who ever played, coached or watched it. Now Dan Fitzgerald – not only a basketball coach but one of Spokane’s most irrepressible personalities – is gone, dead at the age of 67, after collapsing at an Airway Heights restaurant on Tuesday evening.