To Sign Player, Soccer Club Appeals to a Basic Instinct
How did the Italian league club Fiorentina steal Brazilian World Cup defender Marcio Santos from England’s Tottenham Hotspur, which was on the brink of signing Santos?
By promising him a date with movie siren Sharon Stone, of all people, if you believe a report in the British tabloid Sunday Mirror.
“The amazing promise has been written into his two-year contract by Italian club President Vitorio Checci-Gori, who once beat up a referee and linesman after being sent off in a charity match,” the Mirror wrote.
“He is well connected in the movie industry, having inherited a major film production company in Rome from his father.”
Then the tabloid quotes an unnamed Tottenham insider: “We offered Santos a good deal, but we could not match Fiorentina--and no wonder!”
Trivia time: What is the most common jersey number worn by Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees?
And stay out: Don’t look for Washington Post columnist Johnette Howard to join the chorus of sportswriters bemoaning the impending baseball strike.
“I say let ‘em walk,” Howard wrote. “And don’t let the door smack their stadium seat cushions on the way out.
“There was a lot wrong with baseball even before the strike began to loom. The games move like glaciers. The expansion boom to 28 teams has nurtured whole new genres of big leaguers--the rag-arm outfielders who can’t hit the cutoff man, the rag-arm pitchers who can’t string together three outs in a row, the power-hitting hulks who’d have the range of a bird bath if they had to play the field, the long-toothed veteran who’d hang on forever if the other guys didn’t kid him unmercifully about those boxes of Depends in his locker.”
Name game: When Dave Otto of the Chicago Cubs and Robb Nen of the Florida Marlins pitched in the same game last week, it marked the first time in baseball history that two players with palindromic last names pitched in the same game.
A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same forward and backward.
According to research by the Marlin public relations staff, there have been six other palindromic players in the major leagues: Truck Hannah, Toby Harrah, Eddie Kazak, Johnny Reder, Mark Salas and Dick Nen (Robb’s father).
Trivia answer: Eight Hall of Fame players wore No. 16 at one point during their NFL careers--George Blanda, Len Dawson, Frank Gifford, Ed Healey, George Musso, Arnie Herber, Walt Kiesling and Bronko Nagurski.
Quotebook: Dal Maxvill, general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals: “Did you really believe at all in spring training that we’d be this bad? I must be the dumbest guy in the world. I had no clue this bunch would be like this.”
