NHL Quiz: Name the multiple Stanley Cup winners since 1990. [A basic one most sports fans should have some idea of…it’s required to buy a premium, should you so have the coin to do so.] Answer below.
In a stunning upset, Rafael Nadal lost in the fourth round of the French Open to Robin Soderling of Sweden, thus ending Nadal’s record 31-match winning streak at Roland Garros.
Fran Tarkenton on Brett Favre
The other day, the NFL Hall of Fame quarterback, Fran Tarkenton, commented on a future Hall of Famer, Brett Favre, for his blog. Excerpts:
“This blog is about Brett Favre and the comments I made a couple of days ago with my buddies Steak Shapiro and Andrew Salzman who own 790 The Zone, which is a sports talk show here in Atlanta. And we were talking candidly about Brett Favre and him going to Minnesota. And I had an opinion. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t this America? Can’t we have opinions? And my opinion was that Brett Favre is wrong. I said he’s been a great player. He played for 17 or 18 years for the Packers, who rescued him from Atlanta. He played one year in Atlanta and Atlanta dumped him for his behavior here. And Atlanta maybe made the right decision for them then, but it was a bad decision going forward, and Green Bay gave Brett Favre a stable organization – players, coaches and support for 17 years. They gave him the opportunity and the chance to win every year.
“He tells them a year ago that he’s going to retire, and they go down to Mississippi to talk to him, and again he says ‘I’m going to retire.’ So they start preparing their team for the next year, and preparing their quarterback, Aaron Rogers, and they get all their plans in place, and just before training camp he tells them, ‘I think I want to play.’ But what the really wants to do is manipulate the situation and go play for Green Bay’s arch rival, my team, the Minnesota Vikings. How can you do that? And of course, Green Bay stayed the course, and gave him the chance to come and compete. He said he didn’t want to do that, so he went to the New York Jets. That didn’t work out too well! Nobody in New York is sorry Brett Favre isn’t coming back! The players, the coaches, the fans – they don’t care! And now Minnesota goes and commits to two young quarterbacks, and all of a sudden Brett Favre comes and says, ‘I might want to play again.’ We are now almost in the beginning of June! Training camp starts very quickly. The offseason team work out sessions and bonding sessions are all done, and he hasn’t been there.
“See, it’s about TEAM in football. It’s not about Brett Favre or Fran Tarkenton or John Elway. It’s about TEAM. Teams win – individuals lose. And so I express the opinion that Brett Favre is wrong, and I believe that right now. I think it is wrong for the Vikings and I think it is wrong for Green Bay. I think it is just wrong. But I kind of want him to go because if he goes there to Minnesota I believe he will burn every bridge he has in Green Bay. The disloyalty! Can you imagine if Ray Nitschke would have retired then gone to play for the Minnesota Vikings?”
Since Johnny Carson, I can’t say I’ve stayed up too much to catch Leno or Letterman, especially the last ten years with this business of mine. But I watched Leno on Friday for his last performance and I forgot how much I enjoyed him when I did tune in. I’m fired up about his move to 10:00 p.m. It’s got to work, especially the first half hour.
And think about what a team player Leno has been. He didn’t want to leave the Tonight Show, was forced to step down, even as he retained his No. 1 position in the ratings, so NBC could hold onto Conan (who I can take or leave), yet instead of bolting to another network, Leno played the role of loyal soldier.
Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times wrote about what makes Leno so successful.
“Lenoland is a friendly place: friendly for the viewers, friendly for the guests, friendly for the whole apparatus of celebrity self-promotion that such shows both depend on and exist to serve….While Leno can be serious, and is not without opinions, he made his show a protected place; as a critic, he makes a good straight man. It was to Leno that President Obama went, not to Letterman….
“Unlike many comedians, Leno is not the subject of his own comedy but rather a kind of stand-in for his audience. ‘What were you thinking?’ he asked Hugh Grant, coming on the show after being arrested with a prostitute back in 1995.”
Ah yes, Hugh Grant. That appearance solidified Leno’s status and allowed him to finally emerge from Johnny’s shadow.
I liked this line from an interview Leno did for the current Rolling Stone.
“I always enjoyed every aspect of the business. When I was 19, I was working in strip clubs, and I thought, ‘I’m 19, there are naked girls at my job, and I’m making $15 to $25 a night.’ My friends were at Wendy’s or something, and they’re covered in peanut oil. At whatever level you’re at, that’s what it is.”
“The only thing that hasn’t changed in 17 years – the Clippers still suck.”
Two Saturday nights ago, Pat DeMauro took to the craps table at the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. Four hours and 18 minutes later, she had shattered a 20-year-old world record.
As reported by Eugene Paik of the Star-Ledger, DeMauro, a grandmother from Denville, N.J., “rolled the dice 154 times before she ‘sevened out’ by rolling a seven,” beating the previous record of rolling the dice 118 times at a Las Vegas casino. DeMauro has refused to say how much she won.
What had been a sparse crowed turned into a packed mob as the hours went by, “and Borgata officials raced to research the record when they learned DeMauro was still in the game after a couple of hours.”
“According to Michael Shackelford – a statistician dubbed the Wizard of Odds and an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas – DeMauro had only one chance in about 3.5 billion to roll 154 times.”
Most of the time DeMauro plays the slots but she and a friend wanted to do something different.
“After DeMauro’s run ended when she finally rolled a seven, she was whisked away by Borgata officials and pampered with free meals, drinks and a suite.”
Still haven’t seen an estimate of what she might have won on her initial $100.
–Well, as I wrote the other day, when we saw Rachel Alexandra’s owner, Jess Jackson, say his filly had nothing left to prove, the handwriting was on the wall, but it still sucks that Rachel won’t be running in the Belmont Stakes, as we’ve learned.
So now we’re left to watch Calvin Borel, back on Mine That Bird, to see if he can become the first jockey to win the triple crown on two different horses.
As for Rachel, she might run June 27 at Belmont in the Mother Goose Stakes, named after Goose Gossage’s mother.
–Attention track fans. Tyson Gay is back. At a meet in New York on Saturday, Gay annihilated a great field to run the third-fastest 200 meters of all time, 19.58. It was his first race on American soil since his devastating injury at the Olympic Trials in Eugene (with your editor in attendance). Gay defeated Wallace Spearmon and Xavier Carter. The only faster times in history are Usain Bolt’s 19.30 in Beijing and Michael Johnson’s 19.32 from the Atlanta Games.
1946… “Bama Rowell of the Boston Braves breaks the Bulova clock atop the rightfield scoreboard in Ebbets Field, the hit that served as the inspiration for Roy Hobbs’ light-busting shot in The Natural. Bulova had promised a timepiece to anyone who hit the clock; they finally present the 71-year-old Rowell with his watch in 1987.”
So I had to look up Bama Rowell, Carvel William Rowell, to be exact. He was born, and died, in Citronelle, Alabama, Jan. 13, 1916. The second baseman-outfielder came up with the Braves in 1939, and in 1940 had a pretty good season, .305 with 3 homers and 58 RBI. But then he served in the military, 1942-45, and upon his return played sparingly for another three seasons. Overall, he hit just 19 home runs in his career and batted .275. Rowell died on Aug. 16, 1993.
–The other day I wrote of Harvey Haddix and his imperfect/perfect game, May 26, 1959, a 1-0 loss in the 13th, and then the current Sports Illustrated has a big story on the game by Albert Chen. What I didn’t realize is that by the ninth inning, “radio stations across the country, as far west as Los Angeles, as far east as North Carolina, had picked up the broadcast of KDKA in Pittsburgh. Just outside Springfield, Ohio, Haddix’s wife, Marcia, sat in the family car and listened to static-filled radio play-by-play.”
Following the game, as you can imagine Haddix “received congratulatory telegrams and letters from all over the country, from senators, governors, baseball managers and announcers, but his favorite was the one from a Texas A&M fraternity, written on university stationery: Dear Harvey, Tough shit.
“Hours after his loss to the Braves, Haddix and Bob Smith were in their room at the Schroeder (Hotel). The phone rang off the hook, and telegrams piled up on a desk. Around 5 a.m. the pair decided to break curfew and took a walk around the empty downtown (of Milwaukee). After wandering for a bit, they entered a 24-hour greasy spoon, and as they ate breakfast they overheard two men talking about the extraordinary game that had taken place at the ballpark across town. ‘Harv didn’t want to say anything,’ says Smith, ‘and he sure didn’t want me to say anything. The way he saw it then, he pitched a pretty good game, but the team lost. So what was the big deal?’
“The two players got up from their seats. With his teammate at his side, the man who pitched the greatest game ever walked out of the diner, as anonymously as he had entered it.”
—Ichiro is up to .354, with 68 hits in 43 games.
—Adrian Gonzalez has 20 home runs in the surprising Padres’ first 50 games. [San Diego is 25-25.]
–In the NCAA baseball tournament, Texas defeated Boston College 3-2 on Saturday night….in 25 innings…the longest game in NCAA history. It took 7 hours, 3 minutes, and ended at 2:05 a.m. Sunday. Texas reliever Austin Wood pitched 13 innings, 12 1/3 of no-hit ball, and threw 169 pitches. [Poor BC had to play again about 10 hours later and lost to Army, thus eliminating the Eagles.]
In another stunning NCAA contest, Florida State defeated Ohio State 37-6! 37-6!! Stephen Cardullo had seven of FSU’s record 38 hits.
–Very nice touch by the PGA Tour at Colonial this weekend to have ‘pink day’ on Saturday in honor of Amy Mickelson and her battle against breast cancer. A majority of the players wore pink shirts. Steve Stricker won in a playoff, his 5th career title.
Ian Baker-Finch was a sidelight. The 1991 British Open champion, who also won at Colonial 20 years ago but had largely withdrawn from the game by 1995, shot 68 in the first round, but, alas, followed up with a 78, missing the cut by a mile.
–Last fall, when my brother and I were cruising through Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana, I wrote cryptically of a place I’ve overnighted a few times in the past 7 or 8 years because it is the nearest town to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.
“You see, I was in Hardin, Montana, at the time, and Bro and I went back to this bar, you see, because I had a contact lens that fit the prescription of the bartender there who was missing one, and we were on the ‘Res’ as they say in these parts and….oh, you really don’t need to know this story.”
Then on Saturday, I read this headline from an AP story by Matthew Brown.
“Hardin, Mont. – On Capitol Hill, politicians are dead-set against transferring some of the world’s most feared terrorists from Guantanamo to prisons on U.S. soil. But at City Hall in this impoverished town on the Northern Plains, the attitude is: Bring ‘em on.
“Hardin, a dusty town of 3,400 people so desperate that it built a $27 million jail a couple of years ago in the vain hope it would be a moneymaker, is offering to house hundreds of Guantanamo detainees at the empty, never-used institution.”
Yup, that’s Hardin. At least the beer at the Pizza Hut is tasty. The bar I referenced above, though, is one of the worst dives I’ve ever been in. Hope the bartender appreciated the contact lens I gave him, however.
–So I read this piece in the New York Times by Christopher Clarey on tennis player Michelle Larcher de Brito, age 16, who was booed off the court at the French Open after losing her third-round match against Aravane Rezai because of her shrieking (as well as arrogant attitude).
“Grunting is an inadequate term to describe the extended high-pitched wails that Larcher de Brito produces during and after most strokes.”
YouTube her. I just watched a bit of her match with Kuznetsova, Montreal 2008, to get a sense of her act. Frankly, if I were her opponent, I’d have to kill her. It’s the length of the shrieks that is the big issue. This girl’s a piece of work.
–Speaking of women at the French Open, an anonymous reader (ahem) alerted me to the case of Romanian Simona Halep, who has announced she is undergoing surgery to shrink her 34DD “bouncers,” as Britain’s The Sun declared.
“The breasts make me uncomfortable when I play,” said Simona. One British protester recently complained that Simona could be committing “a crime against nature” should she have them reduced.
–I’m shocked…just shocked…that the Memphis basketball program is under investigation for major violations during the 2007-08 season under former coach John Calipari. Shocked!
OK, maybe not. It seems Derrick Rose may have submitted fraudulent SAT scores to get into the school, and that an associate of Rose’s may have received $2,260 in free travel to road games. Memphis may have to forfeit their record 38 wins from that season, as well as its Final Four banner.
Rose, the No. 1 selection in the 2008 draft by the Chicago Bulls, probably doesn’t care one lick. He’s got his, you might say.
–Follow-up: The other day I wrote of sportswear tycoon Mike Ashley (Sports Direct) and his Newcastle United football club that was dropped from the Premier League. He’s put the team back up for sale, conceding he’ll lose over $200 million from when he purchased the team just two years ago. Good lord.
–There have been two shooting incidents at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City this year, the second last week claiming a life. Super publicity…just super.
–Johnny Mac, huge East Stroudsburg University fan, was ecstatic that the Philadelphia Eagles released former Wake Forest kicker Sam Swank for former ESU kicker Ken Parrish. Swank’s future has nose-dived since an injury last season.
—Karine Ruby, winner of a gold medal as a snowboarder at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, died in a climbing accident on Mont Blanc. She was 31.
–Some in Scotland, particularly fishermen, are upset at the reintroduction of the European beaver. Said one, Nick Young, beavers threaten the migratory fish, such as trout and salmon, because of the dams the beavers build.
“Salmon need a depth of water to leap – you don’t find that below a beaver dam, especially a big one. I am sure the people who are reintroducing them know a lot about beavers, but nothing about salmon.”
I would think this will force salmon to adapt and just learn to live in a pond, know what I’m sayin’? And I imagine there will be a lot of conversations between salmon like the following.
“We had to scale back. It’s about the economy,” Jed Salmon will reply, not wanting to break the truth for fear she’ll eat him.
–I can’t believe I missed this one. This past weekend was “Blonde Weekend” in Latvia’s capital of Riga. “People are depressed,” said Marika Gidere, head of the Latvian Blondes’ Association, “they don’t have enough positive emotions. And this is something very positive and fun. And we know that blondes have more fun.” Or so they say.
–Meriden, Conn. – “An instructor at the Connecticut Police Academy has been charged with disorderly conduct after he allegedly responded literally to a co-worker’s ‘bite me’ remark. Francis Woodruff, a former Waterbury police captain, was arraigned Tuesday and released on a promise to appear in court.
“He was accused of biting the arm of 42-year-old Rochelle Wyler, a license and applications analyst at the academy.
“According to the arrest report, she was left with teeth marks and bruising on her left triceps.
“Wyler filed a complaint April 28, alleging the 51-year-old Woodruff was agitating her by calling her a clerk. She said she responded with ‘bite me’ – and he did.
–I’m tired of Susan Boyle…and evidently she’s quite tired herself.
—Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic, died at the age of 97. Dean was only two months old when the ship went down. Her mother survived. Her father didn’t.
–In the end, LeBron didn’t get it done.
–Jeff B. was the first to write in that he always had a crush on Betty Cooper of Archie fame. I happened to think Veronica was pretty cute, though I had long since moved on.
Alas, we’ve learned Archie is marrying Veronica. Veronica wonders if Betty will be the maid of honor, but Betty writes, “I am so sad, I don’t even know what to say.”
Look for Betty to create a real scene at the wedding…turn a few tables over, toss a drink in Veronica’s face…that kind of thing.
–I think it was reader Dr. John who first brought up country rocker Steve Earle, and the other day I saw a notice that he was playing nearby this coming Tuesday, June 2, in South Orange, N.J. (and Princeton on June 4…if you happen to be in the area). I won’t be able to make it, but the reformed renegade (I guess this is how you describe him these days) just released a new album titled “Townes,” covering the songs of his mentor, Townes Van Zandt.
Well it turns out that album sold 17,839 copies its first week and Earle charted at No. 19 on Billboard, the highest chart position of his career, according to Rolling Stone. So I’m running over to the local record store to get a copy (we’re fortunate in Summit to still have a store, though we all are trying to figure out how Gary stays open after at least 43 years).
Anyway, an interview with Earle in the May 28 issue of Rolling Stone by Joe Hagan starts out:
“Once upon a time, a self-deprecating answering-machine message did most of the talking for Steve Earle: ‘This is Steve. I’m probably out shooting heroin, chasing 13-year-old girls and beating up cops. But I’m old and I tire easily, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
“He usually didn’t. Instead, he spent his hours in locked bathrooms plunging a needle into his arm and, later, passed out in crack houses in Nashville, all his guitars sold off for drugs, his reputation as an outlaw troubadour eating him alive. When he was finally hauled to jail for drug possession in 1994, he had his last $20 in his jeans.”
Now if that doesn’t convince you to stay off the stuff, I don’t know what will.
Top 3 songs for the week 6/4/66: #1 “When A Man Loves A Woman” (Percy Sledge) #2 “A Groovy Kind Of Love” (The Mindbenders) #3 “Paint It, Black” (The Rolling Stones)…and…#4 “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” (The Lovin’ Spoonful) #5 “I Am A Rock” (Simon and Garfunkel) #6 “Monday, Monday” (The Mamas and The Papas) #7 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (Bob Dylan) #8 “It’s A Man’s Man’s World” (James Brown) #9 “Green Grass” (Gary Lewis & The Playboys) #10 “Strangers In The Night” (Frank Sinatra)
[Green Day sold 214,828 copies the first week of its new album, “21st Century Breakdown”…not bad…not bad at all. Might have to get this one, too, in my ongoing quest to stay reasonably hip…not totally, mind you, but reasonably so.]
NHL Quiz Answer: Multiple Stanley Cup winners since 1990 – Detroit, 4 (1997, 98, 02, 08); Pittsburgh, 2 (1991, 92); New Jersey, 3 (1995, 00, 03); Colorado, 2 (1996, 01).
Other winners since 1990…Edmonton (1990), Montreal (1993), Rangers (1994), Dallas (1999), Tampa Bay (2004), Carolina (2006), Anaheim (2007)
And…the 1980s were dominated by the Islanders and Edmonton, each of which won four Cups, while in the 1970s, Montreal won six, Philadelphia, two, and Boston, two.
Currently, Detroit is up 2-0 on the Penguins in the finals.
