Cheap Seats
I’d hammer out a warning …
There was no editorial comment attached to Ken Norlen’s wild hammer throw Monday at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials - even if it did land on a long jump runway barely 20 feet from Carl Lewis.
A respiratory therapist, Norlen failed to qualify for the final but found himself surrounded by notepads and realized he would soon be known as The Man Who Almost Hammered Carl Lewis.
“That’s N-O-R-L-E-N,” he told a writer.
When Lewis walked by, Norlen said, “Sorry about that, Carl,” to which the eight-time Olympic gold medalist replied, “It wasn’t your fault.”
As Lewis headed into the interview room, Norlen said, “I don’t think he knew who I was.”
Safe to say. Carl only knows who he is.
The Natural, Part II
A thunderbolt lit up Milwaukee’s County Stadium just as Greg Vaughn homered in the Brewers’ 9-4 victory over Kansas City on Monday night in a game twice delayed by fog and rain.
Before the second delay, a thunderbolt illuminated the sky with the crack of Vaughn’s bat as he sent Kevin Appier’s chest-high fastball 415 feet into the left-field bleachers. As he rounded the bases, music from “The Natural” played over the sound system.
“That was surreal,” manager Phil Garner said. “We get the thunderclap when it’s going up into the lights.”
Vaughn’s shot gave Milwaukee a 5-0 lead in the third, when Appier twice left the mound as lightning lit up the sky.
“He was in his windup and kind of fell off the mound one time,” Brewers catcher Jesse Levis said.
Before the rains came, the game was delayed by fog for 66 minutes - on the same day Mayor John Norquist suggested the retractable roof be dropped to salvage the Brewers’ embattled new stadium project.
“Tell him to rethink his thinking,” Vaughn said.
He’s always been someone to look up to
Muggsy Bogues is a big man on campus again - or as big as a 5-foot-3 basketball player can be. He’s returning to Wake Forest after a nine-year hiatus in the NBA.
“I was preaching to kids to finish their educations, stay in school, and I’ve been a hypocrite about it,” said the Charlotte Hornets guard.
“You don’t know how much I respect him for doing this,” said Mardene Moryk, one of Bogues’ instructors. “Not just because he’s a basketball player who came back, but because he’s a grown man with a wife and children who made the time to do this.”
We’ll buy everything but “grown man.”
Do you still beat your pitcher?
Orioles manager Davey Johnson played for the Yomiuri Giants in the mid-1970s and recalled the respect that managers had in Japan.
“Before games, the players would line up, bow their heads and the manager would go down the line and say something to each guy,” Johnson said. “And, occasionally, he’d smack a guy on the head. That’s something I wish they had over here.”
The last word …
“At the urging of a radio station, some fans in Cincinnati unfurled banners in support of Marge Schott. The one I was a little concerned about read: ‘What’s All Der Fuhrer?”’
- Michael Ventre, Los Angeles Daily News
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo