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Butte and the beast
It all started for slugger Cecil Fielder in Butte, Mont.: the big salary, the big home runs, the big appetite.
Well, the appetite, anyway.
“Pork Chop John’s, that was my main place,” said Fielder, who hit 20 homers in Butte as a $600-a-month first-year pro in 1982. “And the M&M gave us steak dinners for home runs. I think me and my teammates nearly put them out of business. I’d hit a couple of home runs and take a couple of teammates there for dinner, because you got so much food there that one meal could feed two players.”
Of course, all those meals at the M&M and Pork Chop John’s eventually made Cecil look like two players.
Not-so-grumpy old man
In an age of fading traditions, greed and intolerance, it’s nice to know there is still someone with old-style class and humility - someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Someone like Jack Lemmon.
The two-time Oscar winner returns this weekend for the Bing Crosby Pro-Am/AT&T golf tournament - where he has delighted galleries with his quips, shanks, chunks and skulls for more than 30 years. And never made the Sunday Pro-Am cut.
One year at Cypress Point, he risked life and limb to hit a ball out of the ice plant at the par-3 16th hole. Peter Jacobsen, Greg Norman and Clint Eastwood linked hands to form a human chain to prevent him from falling into the ocean.
“Clint was holding my pants by the inside of the waistband,” Lemmon said. “I hit it clean about 50 yards down the fairway. Then I sliced the next shot into the ocean.”
The highlight, or lowlight, came at the first hole at Pebble Beach.
“My wife and I were staying in one of the rooms alongside the tee,” Lemmon recalled. “She was still in the room when I teed off. I hit my drive off the toe and it went right into the open door and started bouncing off the walls. It didn’t break one single thing. Felicia said it sounded like a machine gun.”
Snow use
The WinterX Games - to be televised on four different channels this weekend - really has some pretty tame stuff: snow mountain biking, ice climbing, snowboarding.
And then there’s super-modified shovel racing.
It all started with ski lift operators looking for a quick ride down the mountain at the end of the day. They would sit on the scoop of their grain shovels and cruise the slopes.
It was exciting and it was fast - but not fast enough. Evolution took over. Now Gail Boles, the reigning world champion, drives a shovel called Thor’s Hammer - 180 pounds of steel frame covered by fire engine-red sheet metal, with brakes activated by liquid nitrogen, on 240-cm speed skis. It’s capable of reaching speeds in excess of 80 mph.
Obviously, this is a little more than you need to clear the driveway.
“In the super-modifieds, the roll cage and harness is all the real safety you need,” said John Strader of Team Shovelmeister. “In the light-modified category, we sometimes wear a cup. When you’re going 75 miles an hour and you’ve got this shovel right between your legs, if you get launched off that thing you don’t want to lose something important.”
Hey, they’ve already got more of those than brains, anyway.
The last word …
“This is like extending a lease on a car after the transmission drops out.”
- Joe Posnanski, Kansas City Star, on the Chiefs giving coach Marty Schottenheimer a contract extension after missing the playoffs
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo