John Blanchette

You’re all familiar with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Right. Sounds like the law firm that handled your buddy’s divorce.

Look, no matter how I say this it’s going to sound like a sneer – so I’m just going to say it. Spokane, we are soooooo minor league.

You can tell a lot about a town by its ballpark. So over the course of its 50 years, what has that precious diamond on Havana Street revealed about Spokane?

SEATTLE – Just seeing Detroit on the schedule should have the Seattle Mariners' starting pitchers scared out of their skin by now. But it was nothing like the shiver the Tigers put into Felix Hernandez on Saturday.

Two coupes and a one-car garage. Track talent can be spread pretty thin at the NCAA Division III level, where the schools are small and athletic scholarships, well, don't exist. This is true even at Whitworth University, where coach Toby Schwarz has built up the program to the point that the Pirates men could make a top-five showing in the national meet this week in Oshkosh, Wis.

Walking on air is part of the pole vaulter's job description, but Melinda Owen has taken it to extremes the past couple of weeks. Eleven days ago in Boise, the University of Idaho senior filled a page in the scrapbook when she beat history's most famous female vaulter – Olympic gold medalist and former world record holder Stacy Dragila.

The baritone is still so deep that it has no bottom, and you have to think it is even more persuasive selling pricey resort condos than it was selling a teenage hockey player on the need to go to the body. Really, could you resist surrendering that down payment when it's Bryan Maxwell bearing down with the pitch?

For 40 years, "Beamonesque" has defined implausible improvement, even in applications beyond track and field. Now we have the scaled-down, localized version: "Elviesque."

PULLMAN – Phil MacArthur was handed a discus Saturday afternoon and pointed toward the ring, and damned if he didn't produce a little sliver of history. And not just MacArthur, but others like Luke Lemenager, Dominic Smargiassi, Barry Leavitt and Nathan Bache – not the most prominent names on Washington State's track and field team, but among those who helped piece together a 93-70 upset of Washington to end the longest losing streak for WSU's men in the series since World War II.

So Washington State is towing its Swedish glider out of the hangar today and letting her fly against rival Washington, and though Ebba Jungmark is new at all this, the proper indoctrinations have been made. She knows exactly who the Huskies are. They're, well, Finland.

Throwers at Eastern Washington University, traditionally, have been multiple personalities. One event is never enough.