Going to Puerto Rico Is Expos’ Hot Topic

Sending the Montreal Expos to P.R. will amount to nothing more than bad PR if early reviews of the Expos’ upcoming 22-game experiment in Puerto Rico are any indication.

Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post and ESPN posed a few questions for Bud Selig about the unprecedented arrangement: “Who did Puerto Rico beat out, Malta? Where you gonna send the Expos next year, Yemen?

“Nobody goes to Puerto Rico in the summer, Bud. Does the phrase ‘en fuego’ mean anything to you? Vladimir Guerrero will be frying eggs on his forehead in the outfield. That homestand in September, that’s right in the middle of hurricane season.

“You going to have a Nail Yourself to Your Seat Night? Whatever else is wrong with Montreal, it certainly isn’t its climate in the summer.”

Trivia time: Which schools played for the Bourbon Barrel?

No Gamble: Wide receiver-defensive back Chris Gamble of Ohio State is like the hard-to-find Waldo when it comes to Heisman Trophy consideration.

Wrote Chuck Culpepper of Newsday:

“The mad craving to anoint a best player in the nation has included everything but a flashlight and a canary, has meandered from region to region and quarterback to quarterback and hunch to hunch, yet somehow has never homed in on the one player who most commands the game like he’s still a 10-year-old star of the backyard.

“He receives. He intercepts. He runs back punts. He runs back kickoffs. He tackles. He gets tackled. Occasionally. They try to rest him with 80 or 90 snaps, but last week, he played 130.

“He’s everywhere, so it’s weird that he’s been nowhere in national discussions.”

Hoops of humility: Britton Johnsen of Utah didn’t think he deserved the Mountain West Conference basketball player of the year award last season.

“I’m not trying to sound humble, I just don’t believe I deserved it,” he told Slam magazine. “Maybe they did it based on potential?

“I got a lot of hype before I came here, and Coach [Rick] Majerus never liked that. Neither did I.”

Time machine: Mail service can be a little slow, but the arrival of magazines in back-to-back months had some wondering if it was the ‘80s all over again. John McEnroe landed on the cover of Tennis magazine one month, Bjorn Borg the next.

McEnroe won his last Grand Slam title in 1984 at the U.S. Open, and Borg’s last Slam was at the French Open in 1981.

Trivia answer: Indiana and Kentucky. The awarding of the barrel was discontinued in 1999.

And finally: There’s paranoia and then there’s pragmatism. Because the student manager of Maryland’s football team is dating Virginia running back Marquis Weeks, Maryland Coach Ralph Friedgen told her to take off practice last week.

His players didn’t understand, so the coach explained.

“Of course, everybody thinks I’m nuts,” he told the Washington Post. “So I said to [Bruce] Perry, ‘Let me ask you this: If your girlfriend was a manager for Virginia, would she tell you what they were doing?’ He said, ‘Well, I’d make her.’ I rest my case.”

Virginia apparently didn’t need any inside information, defeating Maryland, 48-13.

-- Lisa Dillman