Cheap Seats
Just what the sport needs: a captive audience
No need now to ask if the shooting sports have any practical application.
Coaches from the biathlon teams of Russia and Belarus were driving along a rural road near Warsaw recently - their teams having just competed in the World Championships of the sport, which combines skiing and shooting.
Four bandits in a truck appeared, forced the coaches’ car off the road and demanded money. The coaches stalled, knowing a bus carrying their athletes was behind them.
When the athletes poured out of the bus with rifles ready, the bandits “were seen running away for all they were worth,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Right. The bandits were probably afraid they’d have to actually watch biathlon.
It does a body good
Gold-medal swimmer Amy Van Dyken has done a lot of commercial gigs since her big splash in Atlanta - but nothing as visible as posing underwater with a milk mustache for the current series of print advertisements featuring celebrities promoting milk.
And now, of course, the ad campaign is a bigger conversation starter than Van Dyken’s actual athletic accomplishments.
“Everyone asks, ‘Was it really underwater?”’ she said. “Yeah - but it was paint. They were worried it might come off.”
Was she?
“I was more worried it might not come off,” she said.
No, that would be Michelle Smith.
Hocked off
Think it’s easy to get back in shape? Jay Buhner worked out for the first time at Mariners training camp in Peoria, Ariz., and began the day with his usual wad of chewing tobacco in one cheek. The first time he tried to spit, however, he hit himself in the arm.
“It’s spring training for spitting, too,” Buhner said. “You’ve got to get your spitting routine down the first couple of days.”
Guess columnist
After Arizona routed USC 101-77 last week in Tucson, columnist Greg Hansen of the Arizona Daily Star was dutifully unimpressed with the Trojans.
“When did USC last win a road game that mattered?” Hansen wrote. “Wasn’t it 1974? Wasn’t Paul Westphal the last guy to rally USC in a late-season, stay-in-the race road game?”
If so, he was ineligible, seeing as how he was playing for the Celtics in 1974.
Stamp of disapproval
A Chicago man is accusing the U.S. Postal Service of bridging the famous gap between Vince Lombardi’s front teeth on a new commemorative stamp of the former Green Bay Packers coach.
“It’s completely inaccurate,” complained Noel Franus. “Everybody loved the Lombardi with a gap.”
Postal Service spokesman Barry Ziehl noted the portrait was approved by family members and the curator at the NFL Hall of Fame.
Orthodontia isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
The last word …
“Bill Walton was so impressed with Riddick Bowe’s decision to join the Marines that he has decided to join the Salvation Army.”
- Marv Albert, Walton’s NBC broadcast partner
, DataTimes