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No car, no deal
After 4 hours of negotiations with Cincinnati Reds president John Allen to sign top draft choice Austin Kearns, agent Alan Hendricks went to his car to get some papers, the Boston Globe reports.
Problem was, security had towed Hendricks’ rental car because it was parked in a fire lane.
Hendricks returned to the Reds’ office with one last demand: “The deal is off until I get my car back.”
Mis-match
Tennis Match magazine sometimes reads like a racier Tiger Beat. On the heels of an Anna Kournikova cover shot of the teenager leaning over in a tank top comes a Patrick Rafter interview in which he is quizzed about sex, escaping about as tactfully as he could.
“It doesn’t enter my mind so much,” Rafter said. “Even when I’m playing badly, sex doesn’t enter my mind. You know, I have my girlfriend there… .”
Later, asked “What turns you on?” Rafter stalled for time.
“In what way?” he said.
“Wow!” proclaims a letter to the editor. “I had no idea the tennis world is so obsessed with sex and fashion. That must be why I lost my last two matches. Here I am working on my backhand when I really should be concentrating on my ‘come hither’ glance or my butt shake.”
Playing by NASCAR rules
After all the excitement in Indianapolis about the Brickyard 400, it made Rick Bonnell of the Charlotte Observer wonder …
What if NASCAR ran everything in sports?
“One trip to the wind tunnel, and Michael Jordan is banned as illegal equipment.”
“After weeks of whining by N.L. pitchers that they ‘need something’ to level the competition, baseball makes Mark McGwire bat with 20-pound weights strapped to his wrists.”
“Arnold Palmer gets a lifetime provisional start for every PGA tournament. They’d let him play the first hole, then turn his clubs over to a replacement golfer to finish the round.”
The NFL would eliminate injury timeouts to speed up the game, of course. Instead, teams play half-speed under caution while the injured player is scraped off the field.
Is that all you’ve got?
That noted sports publication, the New Yorker, recently printed an article on the World Cup by Adam Gopnik, a savvy admirer of the game but no apologist for its shortcomings.
Gopnik on a much-glorified move by the Brazilian star Ronaldo - a move that didn’t even result in a goal, but was treated by the International Herald Tribune “as though it were the whole of the Peloponnesian War”:
“A nice move, but exactly the same move that Emmitt Smith makes three times a game with three steroid-enraged 300-pound linemen draped on his back (and then Emmitt goes in to score) or that Mario Lemieux made three or four times a period after receiving radiation therapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and having three Saskatchewan farm boys whacking at his ankles with huge clubs (and then Mario would go in to score).”
The last word …
“This is precisely the kind of delusional thinking that turns everybody in a singles bar into Mr. Universe or Miss America by 3 a.m.”
-From the Chicago Tribune’s “Hit & Run” column regarding rumors that Bears QB Rick Mirer is starting to look better.