If This Movie Is as Exciting as the Title ...
“Sofia: A Documentary About World Champion Surfer Sofia Mulanovich” will have its Southland premiere Sunday at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
The famously modest Mulanovich was reluctant to get involved in the project, saying to her agent, “You make documentaries about dead people, why make one about me?”
Mulanovich, who attained cult-hero status in her homeland of Peru after winning the 2004 world title, will not attend the premiere because she is in Fiji competing in the Roxy Pro.
Trivia time: A running back has been the No. 1 overall draft pick only six times since 1970. The first was Ricky Bell by Tampa Bay in 1977, and the last was Ki-Jana Carter by Cincinnati in 1995. Who were the other four?
Foot-in-mouth disease: NBA analyst Charles Barkley was asked recently about the woefully bad and financially hamstrung New York Knicks, and what he would do if he were James Dolan, the Madison Square Garden chairman.
“The first thing I’d do,” he said, “is kill myself.”
Squashed in the act: Perhaps burglary is not the best line of business for petty thief Konoshin Kawabata, who sneaked into what he thought was a deserted building in Tokyo recently and found himself surrounded by 20 sumo wrestlers.
The building was a sumo training facility and Hideyuki Kawahara locked Kawabata in a bearhug until police arrived.
The British are coming! An estimated 100,000 English soccer fans will travel to Germany for the World Cup and the government is issuing translation booklets with helpful phrases.
Among them: “Can I have a beer, please?” and “May I pitch my tent in your back garden?”
German sign makers reportedly are also translating useful phrases, at the request of homeowners. Among them: “Beer for sale” and “Please stay out of the garden.”
Mood music: Most baseball players have songs they hit to in batting practice or use as intro music. They’ll keep the same song as long as they’re hitting, and change songs if they’re slumping.
Todd Jones, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who has a weekly baseball column for the Birmingham (Ala.) News, writes that some take their music more seriously than others.
For example, when the Reds’ Adam Dunn is slumping, he trots onto the field to Toby Keith’s “I Ain’t as Good as I Once Was.”
A cut above: Dave McGill recently won $50,000 in a tournament in Las Vegas. Poker? Nope. Rock-paper-scissors. “God gave me a gift,” he told his hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald. “It’d be a shame not to pursue it.”
It would indeed, with that kind of money on the line.
Trivia answer: Earl Campbell (1978), Billy Sims (1980), George Rogers (1981) and Bo Jackson (1986).
And finally: Jim Armstrong of the Denver Post on the Detroit Tigers’ Chris Shelton, who has ascended from obscurity by blasting an American League-leading nine home runs: “So far, all we know is he was born in a manger and gets queasy at the sight of kryptonite.”