Alaska Team Will Take to Air for Its Opener

The sprawling Southern Section of the CIF is one of the nation’s largest high school districts, spanning a distance of more than 400 miles between Brawley and Santa Maria, but that’s nothing compared to the travel plans facing Chugiak High in Alaska.

Chugiak opens its football season 3,200 miles and three time zones from its home field in Eagle River, about 20 miles outside of Anchorage, against Brentwood Academy in Tennessee.

For the occasion, the Chugiak team is bringing salmon and caribou sausage for a cookout that also includes a Southern-style barbecue.

Trivia time: What is the most expensive golf club in America to join?

Second job: In what is believed to be an NFL record, eight Green Bay Packers will have their own TV shows this fall in a lineup highlighted by “The Inside Rush with Reggie White,” “Inside with Edgar Bennett” and “The Don Beebe Show.”

These programs won’t focus solely on football. White, a minister, will talk religion. Beebe, an outdoorsman and amateur chef, will talk hunting, fishing and cooking.

Moscow no different: Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin did what countless NHL players, coaches and general managers have done with the Stanley Cup.

He drank champagne from it.

Vyacheslav Fetisov, Igor Larionov and Vyacheslav Kozlov--three of the five Russians who helped the Detroit Red Wings win the Cup--took the trophy to Moscow, in keeping with the tradition of allowing players on the winning team to take it home during the summer.

What others say: Some pithy comments from The Vent, in the Atlanta Journal & Constitution:

“What’s up with the picture of some fisherman thrusting a trophy the size of his behind in the air like he won the Stanley Cup? Sitting in a boat and tossing worms into water isn’t a sport.”

And, “The Nike swoosh looks like an overweight check mark.”

Family matter: Melanie Mills could have a difficult time this fall in deciding whether she should go to New Jersey on weekends to watch her son Samuel Davis Mills III play or stay in Charlotte to see her husband Sam’s games.

The elder Mills, 38, is a Carolina Panther linebacker, while the son, 19, will be a freshman defensive back at Montclair State, where his father had his uniform number retired more than a decade ago.

“She’d better be at my games, I bring home the checks,” the father said.

Trivia answer: Nantucket Golf Club in Massachusetts, which charges an $180,000 initiation fee.

And finally: In the September issue of Buzz magazine, writer Ron Rapoport advises Rupert Murdoch on what to expect, should he own the Dodgers: “Los Angeles, you will soon discover, is home to the smartest sports fans in America. Not the best, the smartest. They are front-runners who simply won’t support teams that don’t win. Al Davis of the Raiders can tell you all about it. [Dodger fans] love their team so much that 3 million of them will turn out to see them in a bad year. So treat them with the respect that their loyalty and their credit cards deserve.”