Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > May
May 2008
BLOG: Too Hungover To Golf
DUBLIN — One of the best stories to come out of the first round of the Memorial tournament, Thursday, came from leader Mathew Goggin, who shot a 7-under-par 65.
Asked if this was his first-ever competitive round at the Memorial, the 33-year-old Australian pro from Tasmania smiled:
“Yes. Last time — my first experience playing Muirfield — I was staying with some friends and it was my birthday. And we got so drunk. We were going to play the course the next day and I was all fired up.
“But we had a big night and I think it was like eight holes and I had such a hangover that we decided to pull the pin and get out of the sun. So this was a little different experience playing in the tournament.”
Asked for some more details, he shrugged:
“This was in ‘99. Actually, we were staying with Gary Nicklaus (son of tournament founder and Muirfield architect Jack Nicklaus). He was a bad influence.”
Asked if Jack knew about this, Goggin gave a devilish Tasmanian grin:
“He will now. I better play well the next three days.”
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BLOG: Rev. Rod Parsley — Wrong In Sports, Too
When it comes to the Reverend Rod Parsley, John McCain has learned the same lesson several Ohio college basketball coaches did about the televangelist did seven years ago:
As promising as an association with this charismatic preacher looks, hook up with this guy and you’ll be involved in something you don’t like. Something that is flat our wrong
At a February rally in Cincinnati, McCain appeared with Parsley, whose World Harvest Church — a jumbo-sized Pentecostal institution just outside Columbus — includes over 12,000 members, a a television studio where he tapes his weekly broadcast and a 122,000-square-foot Activity Center that houses a couple of basketball courts..
That gives hint of Parsley’s over-sized love of basketball — he played in high school — and will get us to the problems with the coaches. But first the McCain issue..
In an effort to curry favor with conservatives or Ohio voters or whomever, the Republican candidate for president called Parsley his “spiritual guide,” an embrace — actually more like a one-night stand — from which he’d quickly disengage himself once he learned some of the stuff Parsley was preaching.
Parsley — as writer David Corn noted in detail in a recent story in Mother Jones — has said Christians should wage war against the “false religion” of Islam, in order to destroy it. To him there appears no difference between ordinary Muslims and Islamic extremists. His rants about the prophet Muhammad and Allah are just as skewered.
Parsley also compares Planned Parenthood to the Nazis. and has called for the prosecution of people who commit adultery.
Hearing all this and a lot more, McCain realized all that glitters is not gold with this guy and quickly — and quite publicly — distanced himself.
A few years ago, several coaches from Ohio junior colleges and small four-year schools saw promise in scheduling games with World Harvest Bible College, the higher learning institution — pared with a then-budding K-12 school — Parsley housed on the church campus.
But that first season — with former Miami University women’s coach Lisa Bradley running the World Harvest men’s team — other schools quickly smelled a rat.
In a story that first broke in the Dayton Daily News, it was revealed that Parsley’s World Harvest team was trouncing its opponents thanks to a line-up led by ringers. All this while preacher often sat courtside with a body guard and whooped and hollered at his team and the refs.
As it turned out, World Harvest was led by Alvin Mobley, a 6-foot-8 shot blocking, tomahawk dunking, long-range shooting star who one rival — Randy Lincicome, now a Wittenberg assisrtant, but back then the head coach at OSU-Newark — called “a giant among kids.”
And Mobley was just that. Prior to coming to World Harvest as a “college player,” he had played briefly at three other colleges in Florida and New York and then embarked on a long pro career that included stints with Quad Cities in the Continental Basketball Association, the Wisconsin Blast in the International Basketball Association and tours in pro leagues in Portugal, Holland, Austria and Mexico, where he said he averaged 39 points a game and was the league MVP.
And then there was starting point guard Tony Sullivan, who was listed as a freshman at World Harvest, even though he’d already graduated from Denison University, where he played basketball three seasons.
The then 600-student school had several other college transfers including guard Mills Hawkins, who had played at College of Charleston and center David Mobley, who was from Jefferson College in Watertown, N.Y.
When the story broke in the Dayton Daily News, several of World Harvest’s rivals were upset, though not totally surprised.
“When I saw some of the guys they played against us I said to myself, ‘Oh no, looks like the church team might be doing a little cheating,’” said Wilberforce assistant Michael Cheaney.
After his team was trounced by World Harvest, Ohio-University—Zanesville coach Jeff Butler was disgusted: “You see these kind of things when you’re dealing with a renegade program.”
Lincicome had similar thoughts: “There’s a smoke screen there. Something’s not right. It’s fraudulent to pass yourself off as a college team and play a pro.”
Of course World Harvest officials said they did no wrong. They said they weren’t ruled by the NCAA, NAIA or the National Christian College Athletic Association. They said they were governed by the National Bible College Association, which, back then, had just a few schools in it and had installed Bradley as its new vice president.
By the next season, World Harvest was having trouble scheduling games. Several coaches refused to play them and wanted nothing to do with Parsley’s college.
John McCain now knows the feeling.
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BLOG: Michael Vick — The NAACP and Others Were Wrong
The NAACP and animal advocates like Kristy Winfrey should have kept their noses out of the “Welcome to the Neighborhood” promotion the Kansas City T-Bones had planned for Wednesday night.
The independent Northern League team plays its games 16 miles from the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., where former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick is serving a 23-month sentence for not only financing the dogfighting operation at his Bad Newz Kennel, but helping execute dogs that were not good fighters. According to court records, Vick’s animals were electrocuted, drowned, hanged, shot or slammed into the concrete until dead.
To raise awareness about the plight of abused animals and draw a crowd — while giving Vick a much-deserved poke in the process — the T-Bones originally had planned to welcome the former NFL star by wearing black and white prison stripe shirts, while the visiting Gary SouthShore RailCats were going to wear something akin to the orange jumpsuits seen on prisoners picking up trash on the sides of highways. There even had been talk of relief pitchers being shuttled in from the bullpen in a paddy wagon.
While the over-the-top antics would create the buzz, there also would be a dog parade and a chance for people to adopt dogs on site from the humane society.
The NAACP got wind of this and as national spokesman Richard McIntire told USA Today’s Tom Weir: “It’s personally troubling for me. It sounds like they’re willing to uplift one cause at the expense of another individual’s human dignity. I don’t know when it became sporting to kick a man when he’s down?”
I suggest Mr. McIntire muzzle it.
Where was his indignation when the details of Vick’s atrocities came to light? No one made more sport of kicking someone who was down than the former quarterback.
To understand that in the saddest of detail, read the next few paragraphs about the plight of one of Vick’s dogs written by The New York Times’ Juliet Macur:
“A quick survey of Georgia, a caramel-colored pit bull mix with cropped ears and soulful brown eyes, offers a road map to a difficult life. Her tongue juts from the left side of her mouth because her jaw, once broken, healed at an awkward angle. Her tail zigzags.
“Scars from puncture wounds on her face, legs and torso reveal that she was a fighter. Her misshapen, dangling teats show that she might have been such a successful, vicious competitor that she was forcibly bred, her new handlers suspect, again and again.
“But there is one haunting sign that Georgia might have endured the most abuse of any of the 47 surviving pit bulls seized last April from the property of the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick … Georgia has no teeth. All 42 of them were pried from her mouth, most likely to make certain she could not harm male dogs during forced breeding.
“Her caregivers here at the Best Friends Animal Society sanctuary, the new home for 22 of Mr. Vick’s former dogs, are less concerned with her physical wounds than her emotional ones. They wonder why she barks incessantly at her doghouse and what makes her roll her toys so obsessively that her nose is rubbed raw.”
A guy who inflicted that kind of harm on animals deserves no special consideration. And he might not have gotten it from the T-Bones had not certain animal activists also raised objections about the promotion, albeit for completely different reasons than did the NAACP.
“I think it’s making a joke of it all,” said Winfrey, a Kansas City animal shelter volunteer who writes the blog, The Animal Advocate. “I think once people get there, it’s going to look ridiculous to them.”
And so the T-Bone folks — under fire from too many sides — scrapped their Vick “welcome” night. They’ll still focus on dogs at Wednesday’s game. There’ll be a dog parade and adoptable animals at their park.
“We didn’t want to offend anybody and we are sorry of we did,” T-Bones’ publicity director Tommy Thrall said Tuesday. “We simply wanted to raise awareness for a good cause.”
They would have raised a lot more awareness had the original promotion gone on. No matter how you draw the folks in — and the national media would have been all over this — they’ll end up thinking about abused dogs, and many of them might have fallen in love with an adoptable pet while there and taken it home. The more people, the more chance for adoption.
And if in drawing a crowd, they hurt Michael Vick’s sensibilities — who cares?
Not after all the hurt he inflicted.
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BLOG: Danica Winning Indy — Greatest Female Sports Feat
If Danica Patrick should win Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, would it be the greatest sporting feat ever accomplished by a female athlete?
Or would that lofty acclaim go to one of the following seven women who I also think belong in that debate?
— Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 at age 19, not only became the first woman ever to swim across the 21-mile English Channel, but she bettered the fastest time of the only five men who’d ever made the crossing — by almost two hours!
— Wilma Rudolph, born a premature four pounds, overcame great poverty and polio that paralyzed her left leg and sprinted to three gold medals — in the 100 and 200 meters and as the anchor of the 400 meter relay team — at the 1960 Olympics .
— Florence Griffith Joyner’s shattering of the world record in the 100 meters at the 1988 Olympic trials — with a time of 10.49 seconds — then following that up with an Olympic-record 10.62 at the Seoul Games, where she also won gold in the 200 with a world-record 21.34. Both of those records still stand. And before she left Korea, she also won a gold medal in the 400-meter relay and took silver in the 1600-meter relay.
— Babe Didrikson won six gold medals and broke four world records at the 1932 AAU national championships, which were the Olympic trials back then.
— In 1976, Shirley Muldowney became the first woman to win a national event in the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Top Fuel division. The next year she became the first woman to win the NHRA points title. By 1982, she’d won three NHRA titles and remains the only person -— male or female — to accomplish that feat.
— Jackie Joyner-Kersee — who won the heptathlon at the 1988 Olympics with a still-standing world record of 7,291 points — repeated her gold medal accomplishment at the 1992 Games, where, five days late,r she also won the long jump with an Olympic record leap.
— The most dramatic victory in the 18 year career of 4-foot-10 jockey Julie Krone — who won 3,456 races and earned $81 million in lifetime purses — came in 1993, when she won the Belmont Stakes aboard longshot Colonial Affair. She remains the only female jock to ever win a Triple Crown race.
While all those are worthy candidates, for me, I pick Patrick.
She not only would be defeating the 32 men in the field — including some of the very best drivers in the world — but she would be winning the most trumpeted auto race in the world and in the process, she would be eclipsing generations of machismo that often have reached the extreme at Indy
Women weren’t even allowed on Gasoline Alley until 1971 and things changed then only because of legal action. Five years later — when Janet Guthrie became the first woman driver at the track — some fans cruelly taunted, yelling for her to crash and burn when she went out to qualify.
And fellow driver Bobby Unser made especially disparaging comments about her to The New York Times back then, saying: “I could take a hitchhiker, give him a Corvette from the showroom and teach him to drive faster than Janet Guthrie.”
Times are different now — though the sexism is still there — and a lot of it has to do with Patrick, who is the most talented female driver ever to tackle Indy. She has three top 10 finishes in the race, led the 500 as a rookie and just last month became the first woman ever to win an IndyCar race when she took the checkered flag at Motegi, Japan.
That victory actually could vie for greatest female sporting feat ever, so I think winning the Indy 500 certainly would deserve that distinction.
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BLOG: Mike Tyson - Dayton (the “gynecology” days) to Cannes
I see where Northwestern University has revoked its offer of an honorary degree to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying it didn’t want the controversy engulfing him and presidential candidate Barack Obama to eclipse the school’s commencement activities.
I’m wondering if Central State University now wishes it had done the same before it gave Mike Tyson — then the heavyweight champ of the world and oft-professed “baddest man on the planet” — an honorary doctorate of human letters at the school 19 years ago.
I was there that day — in fact, I was about the only media member on hand — and had been standing in the wings of the stage with Tyson when he was called out to meet a packed house that included a lot of women students sitting right up front.
It wasn’t long before he looked out at the fawning crowd and with a big grin, offered up his infamous line that went something like this:
“I wasn’t sure what kind of doctor I was, but looking at all the lovely sisters here, I think I’ll be a doctor of gynecology.”
The crack brought hoots of delight from a lot of students, but elicited disgust from some faculty members, a few who walked out.
There was a lot more that went on during that trip to the Miami Valley, including some wild escapades at the Crown Plaza Hotel — then Stouffers — in downtown Dayton the night before. I was there then as well.
I’m curious if any of this is touched on in the new documentary film that just debuted with much fanfare at the Cannes Film Festival last weekend.
The former champ received a prolonged ovation at the screening of “Tyson,” the film directed by his pal James Toback, whose credits include “Fingers”.
Tyson — who always said he didn’t think he’d reach 40 because of his self-destructive lifestyle — is now a month shy of 42. He says he hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol in 15 months.
“I lived a wild and extreme life,” he told reporters in Cannes. “I used drugs. I had altercations with dangerous people. I slept with guys’ wives that wanted to kill me. … I didn’t know how to be any other way. I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire. I was crazy.”
That he definitely was when he visited Dayton in 1989. I’ve interviewed and written stories on Tyson for almost 25 years — covered a lot of his fights, seen plenty of his wildness, had plenty of times when I enjoyed him, too — but his trip to Dayton stands out.
The night before his Central State honor, he and promoter Don King had most of one whole floor of the hotel sealed off for them. A local guy involved in the fight scene here brought over a few girls so Tyson would have someone to “party with.”
I remember sitting in the hotel lobby with the last girl who was going to join him and I felt sorry for her. She was wearing what looked to be a bridesmaid dress. She didn’t have a clue what she was getting into, and the the next day a limo driver whispered to me she had been treated rough.
At Central State, they held a press conference that included Tyson, King, then CSU president Arthur Thomas and Jack Kemp, the Secretary of HUD. The theme was how Tyson and King were going to set up a program to address hunger in the nation — that never happened, they never followed through — but as Kemp was sitting there making a serious pitch, Tyson sat next to him, suggestively rolling his tongue around his lips and mouthing the words to a nearby girl: “I love you.”
As his limo was leaving CSU for the Dayton airport, it stopped at the edge of campus, right next to a woman student. The window rolled down, there was a brief conversation and she got in the vehicle with her school books in tow. Instantly, the car was roaring back down Route 42 toward Xenia.
I wonder if she would have something to add to that documentary?
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BLOG: Sports Bosses — Wright State, Odell, LeBron
Here are insights on three sports bosses — Wright State’s new athletics director, Odell’s old grandma and LeBron’s volatile mom, who, by the way, came after me far more fiercely than she did Boston’s Paul Pierce.
— Wright State is in the midst of interviewing its four candidates to fill the job of retiring athletics director Mike Cusack.
Today, Brian Teter, now the AD at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and formerly the sports information director at Miami University, is on campus. Steve Downing, senior associate director of athletics at Texas Tech was there Monday.
On Wednesday, Kevin McNamee, the deputy associate AD at George Mason, is up. Next Friday, May 30, in-house candidate Bob Grant, WSU’s associate AD, makes his pitch.
If I had to handicap the four, I’d say McNamee and Grant are the front-runners. On paper, McNamee seems like the top choice, but Grant has been associated with WSU a long time. He has big donor Fred Setzer behind him, but familiarity also breeds detractors and there are some in the WSU community.
Downing made a decent impression Monday, but word is he didn’t especially “wow” anyone.
— Odell Thurman’s grandma, the late Betty Thurman, was his boss in the early days. The woman raised him from birth, so it’s too bad that the straw that broke the camel’s back may have been the troubled linebacker’s most legitimate absence from the Cincinnati Bengals.
Thurman was cut loose by the Bengals on Monday for missing three voluntary workouts last week while he was home attending his 84-year-old grandma’s funeral and taking care of affairs.
That would have been acceptable had he not missed so much other time — the last two years under NFL suspension — because of violations of the league’s substance abuse policy.
Betty took Odell in at birth and had sole sway on him when his mom died when he was 10. She raised him in her little house in the Frog Town section of Monticello, Ga.
As he once told me: “She done raised three generation of kids on her own. She raised me in her little house right alongside aunts and uncles, cousins and probably some that wasn’t no kin at all. At one time there were 16 of us living there at once. ‘Til I was 12, I slept right there in the bed next to my grandma. Four more cousins slept on the floor next to the bed. She didn’t turn no one away.”
When Thurman left for college, the townsfolk pooled $700 so he would have a suit, some everyday clothes and new shoes. When he left, he promised them all he’d make good in their investment.
Sadly, that has not worked out.
— As for that third sports boss, Gloria James, LeBron’s mom — the woman he described to me a few years ago as “my mother, my father, my sister and my brother” — well everyone knows about her short fuse, especially since she stood at the edge of the court and teed off on Paul Pierce after what she felt was an excessive foul on her Cleveland Cavaliers son by the Celts’ star during game four of their just completed playoff series.
In what’s become a YouTube hit, LeBron backed her off with a very public rebuke: “Sit your (%&#) down!”
I wish he’d done that for me five years ago.
LeBron’s senior year at Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary high school, I was at one of his games at the University of Akron. Afterward, once the crowd left, he was going to be interviewed on court for CBS-TV by Deion Sanders.
His mom wanted the gym cleared of all press, too, but I felt I had a right to at least see what was going on, so I sat far up in stands and just watched.
Suddenly, Glo spotted me. “What the &%#& you think you doing?” she screamed. I didn’t budge and next thing I know she’s marching across the floor, is over a railing and tromping up the stairs toward me, cussin’ with every step.
One of LeBron’s followers finally ran after her, but by then I’d fled.
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BLOG: More on Eight Belles’ death
LOUISVILLE — Here are some other images and comments from the Eight Belles tragedy at Saturday’s Kentucky Derby:
It was an hour after the big grayish roan filly had been euthanized by injection on the track following what — at least in these early considerations — is being called an unexplainable break down.
Running an impressive race, Eight Belles had finished second — behind Big Brown, but well ahead of the 18 other colts in the race. A quarter mile past the finish line, she suddenly crumpled to the track with both of her front ankles so severely broken — her cannon and sesamoid bones broken — she could not be saved.
The death let a lot of air out of what had been a great racing day and nowhere was it felt more than at Barn 43, where Eight Belles trainer Larry Jones had sobbed uncontrollably as he stood outside her empty stall.
“She was our family,” he finally whispered. “It’s just not supposed to happen like this.”
One of the grooms finally closed the stall door. Another barn worker affixed a green bumper sticker to the door that read: “We Love Kentucky-Bred Eight Belles.”
One by one, some of the trainers and owners of the other Derby horses reached out to Jones and Eight Belles’ crestfallen owner Rick Porter
Before he talked to the press about the victory, Big Brown co-owner Michael Iavarone offered condolences to the Eight Belles’ people
Colonel John trainer Eoin Harty and co-owner Bill Casner came over to Jones’ barn, talked to him at length and finally Casner embraced him.
A woman exercise rider from another barn came up in tears and, unable to say a word, simply squeezed Jones’ hands.
“We convinced (Eight Belles) that half the people were here to see her,” said Jones, trying to force a smile. “We knew all the women came out to see her.”
Souvenir stands had sold out of Eight Belles buttons before the race was run. And stumping in Indiana the other day, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton talked about Eight Belles, “the other filly” making a name for herself.
Eight Belles was the first filly in the Derby in nine years and just the 39th — of 1,710 all-time starters — to run the race. Only three fillies — Regret (1915), Genuine Risk (1980) and Winning Colors (1988) had won the roses here.
Just a day earlier, Jones had won the Kentucky Oaks with Proud Spell. Although Eight Belles certainly would have been the favorite in that fillies-only race, her connections opted for the Derby. After all, she had won all four of her races in 2008 — although they all were against fillies — and she was bigger than many of the colts in the Derby.
There are some horseman who aren’t keen about fillies running against what often are more roughhousing males at the Derby.
Asked if this accident gave new credence to that old claim — that, in fact, it was too dangerous for fillies to go against the boys — track veterinarian Dr. Larry Bramlage discounted that:
“One injury is not an epidemic. As bad as it seems right now, it was one incident. Fillies race against colts on an intermittent basis and it’s not like we see this as routine. In fact, I’ve never seen it before.”
He also said he didn’t think a synthetic Polytrack — rather than Churchill Downs’ dirt — would have prevented this. Neither did Jones:”It’s not the track that did it on her today. They did a great job getting the track sealed (after Friday’s rains). The track was good.”
Jones said an autopsy would be performed, so he might get some understanding as to why this happened when, as he put it, “our horse wasn’t even bumped.”
He said Porter was decimated by the loss:
“He’s taking it pretty rough. We’re going to be criticized and second guessed. Somebody will come up with the idea the filly shouldn’t have been in there, but she never got bumped, She never did anything. She could have done this racing against Shetland Ponies. It wasn’t in the race where it happened.
“Still he’s going to second guess himself from now on. But like I told him, all the things that were going against her — that she’d never raced against the boys, that she had never raced past a mile and a sixteenth — she passed all those with flying colors. She’s ran the race of her life …. and went out a champion. She was…”
Jones began to choke on emotion and finally he just bowed his head in silence. Soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.
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BLOG:The Madness that will decide the Derby
LOUISVILLE — One trainer worries about the “carnage.”
One talks about the 150,000 screaming people and the big, caroming, colliding, kicking bodies.
Another says, “It’s in the hands of The Almighty.”
Many say it will decide the outcome of today’s great 20-horse race.
They’re all talking about the First Turn of the Kentucky Derby.
“With 150,000 screaming fans on both sides and the 20 of you going into that tight turn,” said Colonel John trainer Eoin Harty, “it just doesn’t happen any place else — except maybe Talladega.”
When the starting gates open for today’s race, five front-running colts all relegated to outside posts — including Derby-favorite Big Brown in the farthest 20 gate — will veer to their left and race each other full bore to the rail as the rest of the field comes charging straight up at them.
The Kentucky Derby is 1 1/4 miles long, but the race may be settled in the first couple of hundred yards said jockey Kent Desormeaux, who has won the roses twice — with Real Quiet and Fusaichi Pegasus — and today is on Big Brown:
“Everyone talks about the last quarter-mile of the Derby, but the race is really won in the first quarter-mile. There are dozens of snap decisions to make between the gate and the first turn. If I make a mistake on the run to the turn, my chances of winning end there.”
Breaking from post 10, Harty’s colt won’t be part of the early dash from the outside, but he agreed the fate of every horse is decided by that first turn:
“If (the outside speed horses) break well, it’s obvious they’re going to go one way and cross over in front of the field to make the first turn in front. Hopefully, we can avoid all that carnage.
“If those speed horses don’t break as fast as they like and they are hustled to the lead, there might be a logjam going into the first turn.
“I think the race is going to be dictated by what happens there, about who can get in and out of the first turn in one piece.”
Bob Black Jack, who holds the world record for six furlongs, may get on the rail first because he breaks from the No. 13 hole.
“It’s going to be interesting,” said his trainer, James Kasparoff. “You’d like to think your colt can overcome a little trouble, but in reality, if we’re not quick and relaxed out of the gate, it’s not going to go well for us.”
Michael Matz — who trained the beloved Barbaro to a 6 1/2 length victory in the 2006 Derby and has Visionaire today — felt the same way:
“This horse is going to have to come through some traffic. I’m just hoping we can get around the first turn fine and get in a spot where he can be put in a position to use the stretch. That’s all you can ask for.”
Desormeaux guided Big Brown to a wire-to-wire victory In the Florida Derby after breaking from farthest No. 12 post, but he said that was much different than the Kentucky Derby.
He said he had 50 feet to get to the first turn at Gulfsteam Park, while here at Churchill he has 5/16ths of a mile:
“I’m going to break as quiet as a church mouse and try to reel (Big Brown) in and get him to his maximum cruising speed. If you want me to guess, I might be third or fourth sitting on the outside going into the first turn. That’s my guess. But if Big Brown is just cantering alone, I’ll let him carry me to the lead.”
Although he doesn’t have a horse in the race this year, trainer D. Wayne Lukas — who has had a record 42 Derby starters and has won here four times — said the first turn is a rude education for most horses.
As he told reporters the other day, many horses are getting dirt kicked in their faces for the first time, they’re getting bounced around like never before and there’s that cacophony from the 150,000 roaring fans:
“This is one heck of a place to have to learn those lessons, but you have to if you’re going to be the real deal.”
Desormeaux admits that lightly-raced Big Brown — winner of all three of his career races by a combined 29 lengths — has never had dirt kicked in his face and — while he doesn’t think that will be the case — if it should occur, “I don’t know what will happen.”
As Harty put it: “It’s in the hands of the Almighty when you get there.”
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BLOG: Kentucky Wildcats Land Eighth Grader
How crazy is this?
According to the Louisville Courier Journal and Los Angeles Times, Michael Avery, a California eighth grade basketball player who doesn’t know where he’s going to high school next year already has picked his college.
It’s a college he’s never visited. He’ll be playing for a coach he’s supposedly never talked to in his life.
Thursday, he committed to the University of Kentucky.
Howard Avery, a California lawyer, said that his son’s recruitment happened by chance.
He said his son traveled to Culver Academy in Indiana to check out the school and, while there, he was invited to play with the Indiana Elite team at a tournament in Akron.
Gillespie was at the Akron event, told someone he liked the 6-foot-4 kid and Howard Avery heard about it. Although the tale seems a little far fetched to me, Avery supposedly called Gillespie and the coach offered the scholarship for the boy who’s still not sure if he’ll start ninth grade in California or Indiana next year.
“We were not interested in 200 different scholarship offers,” Avery told the Courier-Journal’s Jody Demling. “We just wanted one good one and a good coach and that came through, so we made the decision. We thought about it a lot.”
I’ll tell you one thing, I’m glad I’m not a college hoops coach these days. The pressure to get the jump on young talent has reached the absurd.
The only thing more extreme might be the Democratic presidential candidates trying to woo super delegates.
Hillary Clinton made the scene in Louisville Thursday and told the race-crazed masses here to do her a favor Saturday and “bet on the filly for me.”
She was talking about Eight Belles, the filly three year old, who, as it turns out, is about old enough to draw interest from guys like Gillespie.
