They Finally Tire of Lifting Each Other

Marc Henry of Silsbee, Tex., who will represent the United States in the super-heavyweight division of the Olympic weightlifting competition, is 6 feet 4 and 370 pounds. When he was in the fourth grade, he stood 5-3 and weighed 220. His “little” brother, Pat, a defensive lineman at Texas A&M;, is 6-1 and 262.

All told: 632 pounds of Henry brothers under the same roof.

Not surprisingly, Marc and Pat were quite a handful until their mother, Barbara Mass, hoping to find something through which they could channel their energy, bought a set of weights for them nine years ago.

“Marc and I broke a lot of furniture just wrestling or playing around,” Pat Henry told Dwain Price of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. “We would arm-wrestle, and either a chair would break or we would be throwing each other around. I guess our mother bought those weights to keep us from breaking up the house.”

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Hail to the Slugs: UC Santa Cruz was recently judged to have the best team nickname--the Banana Slugs--in college sports by a panel that included representatives from the NCAA.

Second place went to the Stormy Petrels of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.

Others receiving significant numbers of votes: Arkansas Tech Wonder Boys, UC Irvine Anteaters, Northern Montana Northern Lights, Evergreen State (Wash.) Geoducks, Indiana University-Purdue Mastodons, Washburn (Kan.) Ichabods, Heidelberg (Ohio) Student Princes and Lincoln Memorial (Tenn.) Railsplitters.

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Trivia time: What is a Stormy Petrel?

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There was even a game: No simple ceremony to throw out the first ball for the Arena Football League’s Arizona Rattlers, who staged their home opener before a full house of 15,505 in Phoenix’s new America West Arena.

First, the team’s mascot, a motorcycle rider named Fang (with beard, black leather vest and mirrored, wrap-around sunglasses), led the Rattlers into the arena. Then the Phoenix Gorilla, mascot of the NBA Suns, fell from the rafters attached to a bungee cord. On the way down, the Gorilla flipped the game ball to the Suns’ Cedric Ceballos. (No, he didn’t dunk it.)

Also included in the festivities was former Sun coach Cotton Fitzsimmons, who flipped the coin before the game. Fitzsimmons, however, refused a request to ride to midfield on horseback.

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Comic relief: According to Track and Field News, Bill Cosby contributed $160,000 this year to help the Penn Relays stay afloat. The comedian’s interest in the venerable Philadelphia meet dates to his days as a student at Temple University.

In addition to Cosby’s donation, the Penn Relays received an undisclosed sum from George Steinbrenner, New York Yankee owner-in-waiting and track and field fan. When asked why he showed up at a high school meet in Florida this spring, Steinbrenner said: “I’ve seen all the movies I wanted to see. I just wanted to see some track.”

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Trivia answer: According to Dunn Neugebauer, sports information director and tennis coach at Oglethorpe, a stormy petrel is a bird--a member of the gull family that is now extinct.

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Quotebook: Golfer Ben Crenshaw, on U.S. Open pressure: “It’s like playing in a straitjacket. They just lay you up on the rack and twist on both ends.”