Snowballs May Soon Be Flying His Way

Bob Kravitz of the Rocky Mountain News writes that Denver “has some of the worst sports fans in America. . . . We like to think we’re better than the folks back East.

“At the very least, we’ll accept that we’re no worse than the fans in Boston and New York and even Chicago. But that’s a convenient lie we tell ourselves. We are worse.”

Kravitz listed numerous incidents, the latest Monday night “when hundreds of clods started pelting the Raiders with snowballs, inspiring at least one player, Lincoln Kennedy, to go into the stands and punch a fan.

“What’s wrong with us?”

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Trivia time: Stanford last played in the Rose Bowl game in 1972. Who did the Cardinal play and what was the result?

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His own worst enemy: Jean Van de Velde, of British Open blow-up fame, on the golfers he’ll be facing in the Australian Open this weekend: “The one I’m most worried about is me.”

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Parity: UCLA and USC finished in the bottom half of the Pacific 10 Conference football standings. Is it the start of a trend? Perhaps.

“With the scholarship limitation of 85, there are a lot of players out there,” said Oregon State Coach Dennis Erickson, who has revived the once-moribund Beavers. “There is not much difference between the guy USC gets and the guy we get. . . . In the old days, with 105 scholarships, they’d take all those guys.”

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Top turkeys: Patrick Reusse of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis nominates Isaiah Rider as the Turkey of the Millennium. “ We needed greed, egomania and a complete lack of responsibility, with a little pot smoking for good measure,” Reusse wrote.

“With this, Rider joins the previous Turkey of the Millennium, Nero, the Roman emperor who promoted those Lions vs. Christians mismatches starting in 37 A.D.”

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Rationalization: After being fined $10,000 for his profanity-laced exchange with fans in Oakland, Latrell Sprewell of the New York Knicks told the New York Post: “I’m a survivor. As long as I’m not dead, life is fine.”

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Boohoo: Warren Sapp, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ star defensive tackle, on the NFL now fining players for the throat-slitting gesture: “This is the No Fun League and we can’t have any fun.”

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Bed check: Here’s a scientific finding certain to send athletes partying into the night: Sex on the eve of a game probably will improve, not hurt, an athlete’s performance.

The theory comes from New Scientist magazine. According to its report, levels of the male hormone testosterone rise with sexual activity. Therefore, an athlete retains strong feelings of aggression the following day.

“If he needs to be more aggressive, he needs to have sex,” Emmanuele Jannin of the University of L’Aquila in Italy told the magazine.

“It’s an adaptive mechanism. If a man has sexual intercourse, testosterone causes him to desire the next sexual intercourse.”

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Trivia answer: Stanford defeated Michigan, 13-12.

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And finally: The Anderson & Hester/Seattle Times computer, one of the many systems used in computing the bowl championship series rankings, doesn’t take into account the scores of games.

“According to the Times,” says Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated, “the iceberg would be ranked No. 1, with Titanic a close second.”