And if They Miss a Day, They Need a Note from Mom

In St. Louis, the feeling is that some of Al Davis and his Raider paranoia must have rubbed off on the Rams before they left Southern California.

Members of the media are not allowed to leave their work room for other parts of the team’s new Earth City practice complex without an escort from the team’s public relations department.

That’s better than the Raiders, though. Al Davis didn’t even have a public relations department.

And there is a separate entrance into the work room, so reporters won’t have to come into the building through the main entrance.

Which prompted Jim Thomas of the Post-Dispatch to ask, “Are they afraid we’ll steal the silverware?”

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Trivia time: Has American football ever been part of the Olympic Games?

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Ship ahoy! Bill Parcells has changed his shape and his ships.

The Patriots’ head coach lost a noticeable amount of weight in the off-season, but on the first day of training camp, he denied it would make a difference.

“Like throwing a deck chair off the Queen Mary,” the man they call “Tuna” said of his new figure. Parcells made a similar remark after he won the 1987 Super Bowl with the Giants, but the ship then was the Titanic.

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How about a map: Raider Coach Mike White was jogging around the practice field at Redwood Middle School when a fan reached over the fence and handed White a bottle of Chardonnay.

“I’m going to take that jog again,” White said.

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Jets’ new slogan? Former University of Massachusetts basketball Coach John Calipari has won preliminary approval to trademark the “Refuse to Lose” slogan popularized by the Minutemen in their first trip to the NCAA Final Four last season.

Calipari quit Massachusetts last month to become coach of the New Jersey Nets for a reported $3 million.

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Boola boola: Yale’s bulldog mascot Handsome Dan XIV has died.

The two-year-old bulldog took over for 10-year veteran Handsome Dan XIII, who is still alive and may work some athletic events until a successor is found.

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Moving medal count: Stock car fans can keep track of U. S. successes in the Olympics by checking the right rear panel and the roof of Kenny Schrader’s No. 25 Budweiser Monte Carlo at Winston Cup races.

The car has a red, white and blue Olympic Games paint scheme with gold, silver and bronze spots which reveal the latest U. S. medal count. The number of medals won will be updated three times each weekend, qualifying through race day, to give fans an up-to-the-minute account.

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Trivia answer: Yes, in 1932 a “demonstration game” was held at the Coliseum with the West All-Stars, coached by Howard Jones of USC, Pop Warner of Stanford and Bill Ingram of California, defeating the East All-Stars, coached by Tad Jones of Yale, Henry Clark of Harvard and Nelson Poe of Princeton, 7-6.

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And finally: According to Arik Henig of IBA-TV in Israel, “All over the world, Michael Jordan is as popular as the Pope.”