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Berkeley tightwads want UC protection to watch Cal football for free! |
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November 07, 2006 |
 Tightwaders |
 Bargnani |
 Barbasol |
Los Angeles, November 7, 2006 – In a city that has its own foreign policy comes now a demand to preserve Tightwad Hill above Cal’s Memorial Stadium so that the cheapskates who watch Golden Bear football from there won’t be inconvenienced when the stadium is renovated! Rick DelVecchio of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Cal alum Dan Sicular is circulating a petition to save the hilltop vantage point so he and his buddies can watch the Bears play football without paying for it. Sicular plans to present his petition to the University of California Board of Regents when they meet in Los Angeles later this month. There’s no stadium plan to approve, but early drawings would cut Tightwad sightlines in half. Sicular is asking the Regents to make free viewing of Bears games from the hill a condition of future improvements.
>> Boys behaving badly: local website Fulmersbelly.com reports that there was more to the altercation at Good Fellas Pizza in Knoxville, Tennessee than originally believed. According to the police report, starting tailback Arian Foster was arrested after cursing, yelling and pushing a customer and then not leaving when asked to, and about 10 minutes later, teammates David Holbert, a fullback, and safety Antonio Wardlove were fighting each other in the parking lot. Foster was suspended for the first half of this week’s critical game against Arkansas and Holbert was suspended for one game and Wardlove for two. Good Fellas is now off-limits to the team and Tennessee, which is 7-2, now has a team total of seven arrests since May.
>> More bad boys: at least no one was seriously hurt in the Tennessee scuffle, but that was a possibility for a 40-year-old man named Wayne Derkotch from Philadelphia, who pulled a gun on his son’s Pop Warner League football coach because the son wasn’t getting enough playing time! Derkotch didn’t fire the pistol and was arrested, charged with aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment, over a game played by six and seven-year-old boys.
>> More football: oddsmakers have made the USC Trojans a seven-point favorite over Oregon at the Coliseum on Saturday with the overs-and-unders at 55; translation: USC 31, Ducks 24. And although they lost to Oregon State, the 7-1 Trojans have won all eight coin tosses this season!
Up in Pasadena, those pesky Oregon State Beavers are a two-point favorite over Karl Dorrell’s UCLA Bruins. The over and under line is 48, so the sharpies have it as Beavers 25, Bruins 23.
>> Attention Mayflower Van Lines: relations in Seattle between the city and the new, Oklahoma City-based owners of the SuperSonics are already strained. New owner Clay Bennett wants the Washington legislature to approve a stadium package for the Sonics and does not want a public referendum. Comment: it’s no secret that Bennett and his co-investors can get out of Seattle after this season by writing a $45 million check to buy out their lease at Key Arena, and attendance for the carpet-bagging New Orleans Hornets in Oklahoma City was a sterling 18,169 per game last season, 11th in the league. Seattle, on the other hand, averaged 16,199 and has lost, according to former owner Howard Schultz, about $60 million over the past five years. So get ready for the Oklahoma City Sonics next season when the Hornets move back to New Orleans.
>> More NBA moves: the Maloofs, owners of the Sacramento Kings, are being widely pilloried for their diffident attitude toward two ballot measures which, if passed, would provide about $600 million to build a new arena for the Kings in downtown Sacramento. But the voters don’t seem too interested and polling indicates that both Measure Q and Measure R will lose. No problem for the Maloofs, who seem intent on finding a way to move the Kings to Las Vegas, where they own and operate the posh Palms Hotel, even though NBA Commissioner David Stern says the league will never allow a team in a city where betting on sports is legal.
>> Winning isn’t everything: despite 12 straight losing seasons, things are looking up for the Golden State Warriors. They can’t drive to the hoop, but they can drive to the bank! The Warriors just sold venue naming rights for about $3 million a year to Oracle Corporation, have increased sponsorship revenues by about 30% this season and raised the highest ticket prices in the house from $350 to $450 per game. Attendance has increased for five consecutive seasons, to 16,350 last year and looks good for 2007, even though Golden State hasn’t been to the playoffs since the 1993-94 season. The Warriors are 2-2 to start this season but won last night in Dallas.
>> NBA Buss lane: more injury problems for Shaquille O’Neal in Miami, now day-to-day with a left knee bruise after not wearing his knee pads for the 1-2 Heat. It shows once again that Lakers owner Jerry Buss knew what he was doing when he sent the center packing. The Heat will pay Shaq $20 million this season, $20 million next season and $20 million for two seasons after that! The Lakers couldn’t replace Shaq right away and that’s been their downfall, but Buss knows when to hold ‘em and knows when to fold ‘em.
>> More Shaq: despite the big paycheck, not only couldn’t play last Sunday, but had to watch the Heat lose to the 76ers from the locker room because he didn’t have a sport coat. If he sat on the bench without one, he would have been fined for a violation of the NBA dress code!
>> More Lakers, early-season upset: Lakers coach Phil Jackson is notorious for not playing rookies, but after four games guard Jordan Farmar – who would have been a junior at UCLA this season – is making a definite contribution, playing 18 minutes a game and averaging almost eight points.
>> The next big thing . . . is 6-11 forward Yi Jianlian of the Guangdong (China) Tigers, who averaged 21 points and nine rebounds for the club last season and has his club’s permission to enter the next NBA draft. Now the Chinese Basketball Association has to give permission since their rules require that players must be 22 before they leave for foreign leagues and Yi is only 19.
>> NBA Italian style: the NBA’s no. 1 draft pick, Andrea Bargnani, is all the news in his hometown of Italy even though he’s been relegated to back-up status by the Raptors. According to Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune, he’s even holding news conferences in Italian for the horde of Italian journalists who are writing about him, even what he has for breakfast. Sports journalism is no laughing matter in Italy: there are three newspapers which report only on sports and one of them, La Gazzetta dello Sport, published in Milan, is the third-largest daily in the country!
>> Making waves: Pepperdine University’s basketball Waves received a verbal commitment from 6-7 forward Mychel Thompson of Santa Margarita High. He’s the son of former Laker player and current Lakers radio analyst Mychal Thompson.
>> Love American Style: ex-ESPN baseball analyst Harold Reynolds was dismissed for what was termed sexual harassment of an intern, but he says it was just a hug. Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times asks if it was a “harmless hug . . . or suicide squeeze?”
>> Galaxy of stars: rumors about a move by British soccer superstar David Beckham to play in Major League Soccer for the Los Angeles Galaxy are getting louder. Galaxy general manager Alexi Lalas, a U.S. World Cup veteran, says the Galaxy would be interested in the midfielder . . . and the league’s salary-cap rules are set to be relaxed, allowing the Galaxy and billionaire owner Philip Anschutz to sign Beckham and bring him to Los Angeles.
>> Attention sponsorship executives at Barbasol, Lectric Shave, Noxzema and others: Reuters reported that a sumo wrestler from the Republic of Georgia named Kokkai was required to shave after his opponents complained about getting whisker burns. The wrestler told local newspapers that he doesn’t like to shave every day because he has sensitive skin!
~ Rich Perelman
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