Cheap Seats

Not just a simple pigskin

You’ve heard football players complain about being treated like a piece of meat. But what about a piece of meat being treated like a football?

Two Pittsburgh brothers are shaping kielbasa like pigskins to commemorate the Steelers’ fifth consecutive playoff appearance.

“Pittsburgh is coal, steel, kielbasa, beer and the Steelers,” said Steve Brestensky of Brestensky Meats.

The brothers have been making the football-shaped meat for four years and sell most of the fatty Polish sausage at playoff time.

“Last year we sold $23,000 worth of footballs in just one week,” - the week the Steelers lost to Dallas in Super Bowl XXX, Brestensky said. Steve and his brother, Tom, have made 1,000 football kielbasas that sell for $10 to $25 each.

Now drop and give me 20

Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong is, to put it gently, eccentric. A few years ago, he took a leave of absence after he left the bench during a game and walked through the stands shaking hands.

This season, during his team’s 73-63 defeat of Seton Hall, Byrdsong dropped to the floor and did a push-up just as Northwestern’s Carvell Ammons was about to shoot a free throw.

It seems Byrdsong has a rule about negative thinking that’s enforced by a push-up for every negative thought. Ammons had missed five consecutive free throws and Seton Hall was closing in after trailing by 21.

Ammons, wouldn’t you know it, made the free throw.

“When Carvell stepped up to the line, I had to do one,” Byrdsong explained of the push-up. “I had lost a little faith.”

To go with all of his marbles.

Severed body parts: just a part of the game

Tampa Bay Lightning left wing Shawn Burr could be lost to the team for as much as two months. The tip of his left ring finger was partially severed in a recent game with the Bruins when he was slashed by Boston’s Rob DiMaio.

The tip of the finger was reattached immediately, and doctors are waiting to see if the healing process takes. If it does, Burr could be back as soon as two weeks. If it doesn’t, plastic surgery will be needed.

“I pulled my hand out of the glove and almost puked,” Burr said. “It was the grossest thing I ever saw.”

Incredibly, Burr wasn’t angered at DiMaio for the slash.

“It’s those aluminum sticks,” Burr said. “They can kill you. And the padding in these gloves is so thin, things like that are going to happen.”

Just like bullet wounds are going to happen unless you walk around in Kevlar underwear.

Taking your personal life to arbitration

Kevin Modesti of the Los Angeles Daily News wonders if there are really people who once were regulars at major league baseball games but haven’t attended since the contract squabble between owners and players began - and if so, do they run the rest of their lives the same way?

“I really enjoy a good meal,” Modesti imagines them saying, “but I haven’t bought so much as a celery stick since the grocers went on strike a few years ago.”

The last word …

“His game is as smooth as a baby’s bottom and, at times, just as explosive.”

- ESPN basketball analyst Clark Kellogg, on Michigan’s Albert White

, DataTimes