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A fly on the line
Last January, Hunt Archbold of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser-Journal called the usual number to join one of the twice-weekly Southeastern Conference basketball coaches’ teleconferences.
The operator, however, mistakenly patched him into a teleconference between SEC referees and the league’s supervisor of officials, John Guthrie.
Here are some of the things he heard while choosing to leave out names:
-“You know you can’t out-talk (LSU coach) Dale (Brown).”
-“I wasn’t mean enough.”
-“Don’t worry about the foul ratio.”
And, of course, “May I kiss your ring, Mr. Pitino?”
Old blood and guts
Providence coach Pete Gillen resembles David Letterman, but his outlook on Big East Conference basketball sounds more like Gen. George Patton discussing the charge across Sicily.
“You’ve got to win in the Big East,” he said. “Everyone’s stabbing each other in the eyeballs with can openers. Everybody hates everybody, nobody smiles, everybody kicks each other in the groin. … It’s brutal.
“It’s tough to be relaxed when people are carving out your gall bladder with a scalpel. They say ‘have a nice game, coach.’ I say, ‘where’s my gall bladder?’ My prostate is wrapped around my earlobe. That’s the Big East. If I get a twitch sometimes, it’s because my Ritalin isn’t taking effect.”
If only he had grinned instead of bared it
The Rio de Janeiro Soccer Federation has suspended soccer coach Paulo Matta for 420 days for pulling down his pants to protest a goal that beat his team.
Matta was furious when the referee validated a goal by Vasco’s Edmundo in the 83rd minute for a 3-2 victory. Matta complained Edmundo was offsides when he received a pass and raced in to score.
Matta charged onto the field, pulled off his shirt and was removing his pants when police stopped him.
“It was a protest,” he explained. “This was my last game. I work honestly all week and then a line judge who’s in somebody’s pocket does something like this.”
Matta later decided to stay on as coach - but he won’t be able to until next year.
Jerry has left the building
Joe Posanski isn’t impressed that the Chiefs have signed Elvis Grbac, the former 49ers quarterback. The Kansas City Star columnist thinks throwing to Jerry Rice the last couple of years made Grbac look good.
“It was the Joe Piscopo illusion. Joe Piscopo was funny when he was with Eddie Murphy on ‘Saturday Night Live,”’ Posanski wrote. “Then he went solo, and next thing you knew he was peddling weight-gaining chemicals on the Prime Sports Network.”
The tears of a clown
ABC golf analyst Peter Alliss thinks there’s more to dour Nick Faldo than meets the eye.
“The sad thing is that after all these years of being in front of the cameras, he really hasn’t learned how to do it,” Alliss told Golf Digest. “I am sure he has a sense of humor that is a little bit Monty Pythonish. Inside of him is a Robin Williams dying to get out.”
Only because Nick swallowed him whole.
The last word …
“I’d like to lose another 500 and put it on my headstone.”
- Denver Nuggets coach Dick Motta after 1,000th loss
, DataTimes