Cheap Seats
This plan is eatin’ at him
Pittsburgh Steelers vice president Art Rooney isn’t so sure the lunches planned in Cleveland and Pittsburgh this summer to promote the renewal of the teams’ rivalry are enough to fire up the players.
“I’m not sure lunches are the right way to renew this rivalry,” said Rooney. “Maybe we should have a food fight.”
Not many team players
William Clay Ford Jr., the Detroit Lions president and chairman of the Ford Motor Co., is frustrated with the NFL after the league considered taking the Lions Thanksgiving Day game away from them. That after commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a visit to Detroit that the game was a permanent fixture in that city.
Ford, accustomed to running one of the world’s industrial giants, is mystified by all the back-room dealing in the NFL.
“I’m having trouble with this league. It’s a very mean-spirited league,” he said at the owners’ meetings last week. “I could look the chairman of General Motors or Toyota in the eye and if they shake your hand and give you their word, it’s good.
“Here, it’s not the case. There’s always a hidden agenda… . Everybody has their own agenda, nothing’s ever done aboveboard, everybody’s whispering in the corner and it’s not the way you do business.
“The way you do business is you lay it all on the table and everybody has different opinions, you bang heads, count votes and that’s it. I’ve never been a part of anything like this. The CIA has nothing on this place.”
Them’s fightin’ words
Witnesses say an Olympic leader under investigation in the Salt Lake bribery case struck a martial-arts pose amid a shouting match with the IOC’s top administrator last week.
Kim Un-yong, a South Korean member of the International Olympic Committee, and IOC director general Francois Carrard exchanged heated words on a terrace during a break in a board meeting, according to witnesses who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
At one point, the witnesses said, Kim, the president of the International Taekwondo Federation, crouched in a taekwondo stance, sending Carrard running from the terrace at Chateau de Vidy yelling, “I quit!”
Timber!
Rick Telander in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Picture the NCAA Tournament. There are a bunch of logs floating down a river. Some get lost in the shoals, some splinter in the falls, some roll over the tops of others. The giddy survivors reach a sawmill called Duke, and, oops, it’s sawdust city for everyone …
“The sawing is just beginning.”
Time to emigrate
Cleveland guard Bob Sura after the Cavaliers traded teammate Vitaly Potapenko to the Boston Celtics:
“I told him if he could come all the way from the Ukraine to Wright State, he could go from Cleveland to Boston.”
One giant lie for mankind
Jeff Gordon of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wonders: “Would Tim Johnson still be managing the Toronto Blue Jays today if he hadn’t put `First Man to Walk on the Moon’ on his resume.”
The last word …
“I’d take a few chokes to have him on my team.”
- Milwaukee Bucks coach George Karl, on whether he would coach Latrell Sprewell.