Or maybe it was just fans booing
Manuel Almunia, a goalkeeper for English soccer club Arsenal, was excused from practice this week to rush home to be with his wife, who said she had seen a ghost.
What’s more, the Spanish player told the Sun newspaper that when the couple first moved in they heard “a lot of strange noises like chains being dragged around.”
Ana Almunia claimed to have seen “a monk-like figure with a candle in his hand” as the couple were in bed, trying to sleep.
Presumably, they’ll be moving soon.
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Trivia time
Who won the first NASCAR race at California Speedway in Fontana?
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Ordinary Joes
An HBO documentary titled “Joe Louis: America’s Hero . . . Betrayed” debuts tonight as a lead-in to the Wladimir Klitschko vs. Sultan Ibragimov fight in Las Vegas.
“For which those guys owe HBO a huge favor,” writes Ron Kantowski of the Las Vegas Sun, “because it’s the only time they ever will be mentioned in the same sentence as Joe Louis.”
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Dog tired
Said musher Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Anchorage Daily News, after winning his fourth consecutive Yukon Quest Invitational Sled Dog Race:
“I think my head’s on backwards. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for about 100 miles.”
Mackey won the 1,000-mile race by 15 minutes, edging his next-door neighbor, with a final time of 10 days 12 hours 14 minutes.
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Prophetic?
The shirt off his back has been taken from the wall.
That would be Roger Clemens’ jersey, removed from a Yankees display in the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
Museum staff told the Washington Times it “just wanted to remove controversy from the exhibit.”
The story lead-in was an old quote attributed to Berra: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
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It never stops
From Jay Leno: “Roger Clemens says he is not decided on whether to retire or not. It’s tough for him, you know. He said he’s going to miss the locker room and all the guys needling him.”
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A good point
Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel says he believes we’ve reached an age when even super achievements are becoming mundane.
“Let’s face it,” the columnist writes, “in this age of super-sized clubs in golf, super-charged engines in NASCAR and super-sized craniums in baseball and football, it’s getting harder and harder to believe in anything superhuman anymore.”
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A better counterpoint
Between them are 167 years and behind them are literally thousands of miles of pounded pavement.
They are Don McNelly, 87, from Rochester, N.Y., and Gene Brock, 80, from Arlington, Texas.
Both will compete in today’s Cowtown Marathon in Fort Worth and both are expected to finish the 26.2-mile race in less than six hours.
It’ll be McNelly’s 733rd marathon and he tells the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
“People ought to do something to stay active. They can run, or walk. I don’t think it makes much of a difference so long as you’re doing something.”
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Trivia answer
Jeff Gordon won in 1997 and again in 1999 and 2004.
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And finally
From Jim Armstrong of the Denver Post: “One day at spring training and I have yet to see a syringe, a subpoena or a (wink, wink) personal trainer. And, as far as I know, it’s one man to a bathroom stall.”
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