No Question, She Carries a Big Stick in Australia

Three months after the world track and field championships in Spain, 1996 Olympic silver medalist Louise Currey of Australia still is waiting to get her javelins back.

After Currey left them in the care of championship officials in Seville, another competitor came along and claimed them, then later protested her innocence.

The International Amateur Athletic Federation promised action but hasn’t delivered.

All of which means things are pointing nicely toward an arresting showdown at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Currey, after all, is a police officer in New South Wales.

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Trivia time: Who is the tallest player in NFL history?

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Northern exposure: If there’s a basketball player for the next millennium, it might be Vince Carter of the Raptors.

“With every passing day,” wrote the Toronto Star’s Craig Daniels, “he looks more and more like the one player capable of picking up and running with the NBA’s banner, the one left behind by the guy with the initials M and J.”

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Frozen out: Carter is getting plenty of media coverage in the United States, but has yet to make much of an impression on Canadian fans. Raptor teammate Tracy McGrady knows why.

“It’s the hockey thing, man,” he said.

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It’s a nice place to visit but: The people of Miami are being asked to fork out about $300 million to build a new baseball stadium in town. The Miami Herald’s Edwin Pope is all in favor of a new home for the Marlins.

“But not,” he said, “if it piles another load onto one of the worst-run, most corrupt, poorest municipalities in America.”

Words you won’t see in a chamber of commerce brochure.

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An Olympian feat: There’s a lot to be admired about Juan Antonio Samaranch, the 79-year-old IOC president, says Bob Verdi of the Chicago Tribune.

“Not everybody can lick the Fascist boots of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco as a youth, then conspire to convert track meets and snowball fights into a billion-dollar industry funded and packaged by that vast wasteland we know as American television.”

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Let’s be honest: Notre Dame’s NCAA violations don’t bother Skip Bayless of the Chicago Tribune, who says he has long believed “college athletes should be paid whatever their market will bear.”

He would go even further, in fact.

“If a school or its big-cigar alums want to sign a player to a four-year deal, hooray for the player.

“Radical? Long overdue. Some day the Supreme Court will rule that college football is just the NFL with student sections and small-town addresses.”

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Trivia answer: Former Oakland Raider defensive tackle Richard Sligh, who topped out at 7 feet.

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And finally: Like everyone else, Golf magazine had its share of lists of the century, including one on the best quotes. For instance: “Cypress Point is so exclusive it had a membership drive and drove out 40 members.”

Who said that? Who else but Bob Hope.