He Might Feel Relaxed With CONCADECAF
Reader George Kiseda says he knows one of the reasons soccer has a problem in the United States.
“I see where Mexico beat the U.S. in the CONCACAF Gold Cup final,” he wrote. “Does anybody know what a CONCACAF is? Let’s take a poll. How many people do you think you’d have to poll before you get one who knows what a CONCACAF is? 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
“What do you do with a CONCACAF? Do you shake it, roll it, eat it, drink it, inhale it?”
Trivia time: Tom Lasorda pitched in only four games for the Dodgers in 1954 and ‘55, when they were in Brooklyn. For which other major league team did he pitch in 18 games?
Golf parity: It has been 11 years since the leading Senior PGA Tour player has won fewer than four events in a season. So far this year, seven players have won two tournaments apiece.
Campus life: USC’s John Robinson, on why he and two other former NFL coaches, Stanford’s Bill Walsh and Alabama’s Gene Stallings, prefer what they are doing now:
“There’s something about college football that gets a hook into most people when they’ve been in it awhile.
“Some of the best times of your life are the years you spend in a college environment. Later, when you’re in pro football or whatever, you look back now and then on the joy of being on a college campus.”
Not the first: When Davey Allison won the four-race International Race of Champions posthumously, it wasn’t the first time a driver had earned enough points to win a series before being killed.
Jochen Rindt of Austria was killed during practice in Italy in September of 1970, but was later declared Formula One champion.
And Danny Caruthers, 21, was the youngest champion in the history of the U.S. Auto Club when he earned the national midget series title in 1971. However, he died of injuries suffered Oct. 30 when his car crashed at Corona Raceway, eight days after he had clinched the championship.
A for effort: Joe Spring of the San Francisco Seals of the old Pacific Coast League caught a ball dropped from an aircraft at about 1,000 feet over Treasure Island, on San Francisco Bay, in 1939.
It took him five tries. When he caught No. 5, the force broke his jaw.
No laughing matter: Fran Murray, the New England Patriots’ owner, says he is serious about his threat to move the team to Hartford, Conn. When he said on the radio that Boston area fans wouldn’t mind the 200-mile round-trip drive because they could enjoy the New England foliage along the way, it prompted Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy to comment: “We’re supposed to take that with a straight face?”
Trivia answer: The Kansas City Athletics, with whom he was 0-4 in five starts and 13 relief appearances, in 1956.
The natural: Someone asked Rickey Henderson if the new Toronto leadoff hitter could teach his fellow Blue Jays how to be flashy. Murray Chass of the New York Times reports the answer:
“Flashy is just the way I play the game. I can’t teach it.”
Quotebook: Donald Marr Jr., on becoming president and chief operating officer of baseball’s Hall of Fame: “I’m like a kid turned loose in a candy store.”
