Cheap Seats
Cheap golf lesson
Desperate to get out of a golfing slump? Try Mac O’Grady’s method. Trying to help Seve Ballesteros, he and Ballesteros filled a shoe box with photographs of Seve taking ugly swings. They promptly drove out into the desert and buried the box.
“We buried all my bad habits, and I have kept all the good ones,” Ballesteros said. “It was the happiest funeral I have ever attended.”
That’s Danny McKing to you
Don King isn’t Irish, no matter what he tells you.
“St. Paddy’s Day will never be the same,” the fight promoter said last week, after announcing a March 17 card featuring Mike Dixon against Peter McNeeley.
“Not only is it going to be a great fight,” King said, “but I can see the cash flowing all around.”
The news conference at an Irish pub in the shadow of Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall was ostensibly to promote McNeeley. In fact, though, it was the coronation of Irish Don.
“You know I love the Irish,” King wailed. “You know what I mean because the Danny lads will be jumping up in the fields and we’ll be going from glen to glen, the leprechauns will be having a field day now.
“It’s going to be ‘Oh Danny Boy, Oh Danny Boy.”’
King swaggered in an hour late, resplendent in black tuxedo with satin green bow tie and matching pocket square. He shook hands before sitting down to watch a 5-minute video detailing his contributions to boxing.
“It’s just a tremendous delight for me to come here and feel the spirits of yesteryear and Paul Revere riding through the countryside saying the Redcoats are coming up in arms. You know what I mean?” King waxed. “They never thought that we could beat them 13 little colonies, you know, the great British Isles. So that’s demonstrating from here great things can happen and that’s why I’m here in Boston. …
“We’re coming to Boston, paraphrasing that patriot that is the late John F. Kennedy, asking not what Boston can do for us, but what can we do for Boston.”
For starters, Don, you could shut up.
Pulling the plug
New York television station WWOR has opted for replacement programming, canning Kiner’s Korner. Hall of Fame slugger Ralph Kiner has hosted the TV show after New York Mets’ home games since 1962.
Officials blamed the financial environment and a change in WWOR-TV’s program needs.
Among Kiner’s favorite memories: getting a haircut on camera from Mets reliever Tug McGraw, and having the set pulled down by Mets manager Casey Stengel.
“Casey had a special kind of microphone on, and when he got up to leave, didn’t take it off,” Kiner said of the 1962 incident. “He ended up pulling the whole set down. They picked up most of it, but no one picked up the cue cards. And I had to close the show.”
The last word …
“I ain’t doing a damn thing, and I don’t start until noon.”
- Ex-Oilers coach Bum Phillips, on his busy retirement schedule