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Chi Chi’s health tips
Chi Chi Rodriguez quit smoking last November and his game on the Senior PGA Tour has suffered. “I had to choose between my health and my golf,” Rodriguez told Golf World. “I chose my health.
“But you know, my grandfather and my grandmother both smoked and they lived to be 114. My uncle, Jesus, smoked five packs a day and drank a quart of rum and he lived to be 107.”
He could probably shoot his age, too.
Relaxing Knight
Wisconsin doctors Ken Merkitch and Frank Aberger are always playing practical jokes on one another. When Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight got involved in one of the pranks, it was no joke.
Merkitch recently had some fun with Aberger’s loyalty to IU, his alma mater. Merkitch borrowed an IU basketball championship banner hanging in Aberger’s office and took it with him on vacation.
He snapped pictures of the banner at various tourist sites. Each day, Merkitch sent a photo and note back to Aberger. With a photo of the banner in front of Mount Rushmore, Merkitch wrote, “Bobby Knight should be up there.”
Merkitch couldn’t resist stopping in Cooke City, Mont., when he saw a bar named Hoosiers. Inside, he quickly struck up a conversation. “I told this guy about my friend being a huge Indiana basketball fan and the entire practical joke,” Merkitch explained. “The guy said, ‘Well, I’m the basketball coach at Indiana, do you want me to get in the picture?”’ Knight, as it turned out, was on a fishing trip in Montana. “I was dumbfounded, totally flabbergasted,” Merkitch confessed. “Here was Bobby Knight, the guy with the reputation of throwing chairs, wanting to be in my picture.”
He’s just lucky those barstools were attached to the floor.
Let’s go to the phones: Jim, in Chicago
It wasn’t funny 10 years ago, when New Orleans sports personality Buddy Diliberto reported that Bears quarterback Jim McMahon had called the local women “sluts” on a Chicago radio show the week before the Bears were to play New England in Super Bowl XX at the Superdome. It was pure fiction, but even official denials couldn’t help.
“I was getting death threats,” McMahon said. “Nobody wanted to stand by me at practice. Look what happened to Monica Seles. There are nuts out there. Somebody could have shot me or stabbed me. I was thinking about it a lot.”
Then-Bears coach Mike Ditka, who defended McMahon during the Super Bowl fiasco with Diliberto, now does a weekly gig at Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The host? Buddy Diliberto.
“That is kind of funny,” McMahon said.
The last word …
“You’re in a dreamland. You don’t have the skills. You are too slow. You are too everything.”
- Oliver McCall, to future boxing opponent Frank Bruno
, DataTimes