Golf Quiz: [Got the idea from Golf Magazine] What three schools lead in golfers who went on to win a major…all three with four players or more. Answer below.
–When you’re a Mets fan, and it’s the dog days of August, thoughts turn to….football!
1. Alabama
2. Ohio State
3. Florida
4. Texas
5. Boise State…22 of 24 starters returning…play Va Tech in opener, Labor Day night in Landover, Md. (FedEx Field)
6. Virginia Tech
7. TCU
8. Oklahoma
9. Nebraska
10. Iowa
11. Oregon
12. Wisconsin
13. Miami
14. Penn State
15. Pitt
16. LSU
17. Georgia Tech
18. North Carolina
19. Arkansas
20. Florida State
21. Georgia
22. Oregon State
23. Auburn
t-24. Utah
t-24. West Virginia
Wake Forest doesn’t merit a single vote. It’s going to be a long, long season, my fellow Demon Deacon boosters.
And this is interesting. Think preseason polls don’t matter? In the last six years, no team outside the coaches’ preseason top 10 has reached the title game. In the BCS’ 12-year history, 18 of the 24 qualifiers for the national championship game have started in the top five, which is why Boise State’s early ranking is so important.
–Huge upset in track on Friday. Tyson Gay defeated Usain Bolt in the 100 meters at a meet in Stockholm before a sellout crowd at Olympic Stadium. Gay ran a 9.84 to Bolt’s 9.97.
–So I was at the Black Eyed Peas concert in Atlantic City, Saturday, and should have been reporting from there with this chat, but a not so funny thing happened with my laptop when I turned it on in my hotel room after checking in. It went haywire. It’s an old one, no doubt, and a Dell, but it’s been a workhorse and traveled the world with me. But there was no resuscitating it this time, and the business center at the Trump Plaza leaves a lot to be desired, so I was forced to drive home Sunday so I could get my work done. I was ticked, because the location was super, as was the weather, but thank god this didn’t happen when I was somewhere like Guam. And now I’m finally forced to make the upgrade I should have made long ago.
As for the Peas, as LT told me, Howard Stern says that in every group there is a, err, well actually, I can’t say what Howard Stern’s theory is. But in the case of the Peas, it’s apl.de.ap. And then there’s Taboo. These two bit players get way too much air time during the show, but at least the packed Boardwalk Hall (95% of the crowd was white, by the way), enjoyed Fergie, or Fergilicious. My word, she’s the sexiest woman alive these days.
I’m not a big fan of the Peas, overall, and it’s not like their lyrics are McCartney and Lennon, or Holland-Dozier-Holland, but they’re entertaining, save for this stupid flying motorcycle deal with Taboo that makes no sense whatsoever.
By the way, if you go to AC, check out the Beach Bar across from Trump Plaza. Excellent people watching.
–Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com had a piece titled “Top 50 Sports Jerks,” an annual rite of his I’ve missed before.
“We are surrounded by jerks. Jerks in politics. Jerks in cars. Jerks on planes. Jerks at sea. Jerky actors who get all the jerky ladies. Jerky writers (hand raises furiously). Jerkity jerks that spill their jerky oil. The jerk that rolls his eyes when you order a venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon whit emocha with extra caramelized Halle Berry.
“But, most of all, there are jerks in sports. There are enough jerks in sports to start a new species of man: sportus homus jerkus.”
50. LeBron James
46. Pete Carroll
41. Ron Artest
40. A-Rod
39. Roger Clemens
35. John Calipari
34. Rick Pitino…too easy
30. Ty Cobb
25. John Rocker
20. Reggie Bush…almost single-handedly tarnished the USC football program.
19. Barry Bonds
18. John Daly…phony.
16. John McEnroe
12. Bobby Knight
10. Tiger Woods
9. Bob Irsay…a coward who moved the Colts under the cover of darkness
8. Ben Roethlisberger
7. Lawrence Phillips
6. Tim Donaghy
5. Lawrence Taylor
4. Tonya Harding
3. Pete Rose
2. Mike Vick
1. Brett Favre!
“He’s quite possibly the most egotistical and disingenuous athlete who ever lived and that’s saying something. And he’ll be back playing football again this year and on the jerk list next year.”
Personally, my top three would be No. 1 A-Rod, No. 2 Bonds, and No. 3 Isiah Thomas. Shocked that Freeman has A-Rod just No. 40. I mean if you are talking about Favre being egotistical and disingenuous, A-Rod wrote the book on this. It’s not even close.
–Should Tiger Woods really be a captain’s pick of Corey Pavin’s for the Ryder Cup? As I surmised last week, he no doubt will be, but shouldn’t if Tiger performed poorly at this weekend’s WGC event at Firestone, and this week’s PGA Championship.
So what did Tiger do at Firestone? He was next to last of 80 finishers (no cut in this event). 18 over par! As Tiger said afterwards, “I don’t see how it can be fun shooting 18 over, especially since my handicap is supposed to be zero.”
In fact Tiger was so bad, he ranked 80th of 80 players in fairways hit, 77th in greens in regulation and 69th in putts per round.
He could easily flame out at Whistling Straits in the PGA, too. Tiger needs a coach, though I was thinking about whether he should replace caddie Steve Williams, just to shake things up, but that’s probably best done at the end of the year.
[Hunter Mahan won the event, by the way, his second win of the year, and he’s now an automatic qualifier for the Ryder Cup.]
–A little birdie in the know told me the other day that Sergio Garcia travels with a harem. I don’t know why he’s still whining then.
–In a Golf Magazine poll of fans, the biggest problem for the PGA Tour is too many events with weak fields (agree), followed by players without personality (it’s not as bad as it was, say, ten years ago).
–We note the passing of a real hero, Reginald Levy, 88. He was captain of a hijacked Belgian airliner in 1972 when his actions helped Israeli commandos storm the plane and rescue all 100 passengers and crew members.
“Sabena Flight 571 from Brussels to Tel Aviv was 20 minutes out of Vienna on May 8, 1972, when four Arabs waving pistols rushed the cockpit. ‘As you can see,’ Captain Levy calmly told the 90 passengers, ‘we have friends aboard.’
“The ‘friends’ were members of Black September, a terrorist organization…responsible for the killing of 11 members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics four months after the hijacking.”
The hijackers (two men, two women) forced Levy to land at what is now Ben-Gurion International Airport, “where they threatened to blow up the plane unless 317 Palestinian guerrillas were released from Israeli prisons.”
Led by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (the legendary figure with the eye patch), Israeli commandos “crept under the parked plane, deflated the tires and disconnected hydraulic equipment.”
But after presenting their demands, with the Red Cross used as go betweens, the hijackers discovered they couldn’t take off again. “Captain Levy started a conversation to calm them down, and kept on chatting through the night. ‘I talked about everything under the sun,’ he said later, ‘from navigation to sex.’
“The next morning, to demonstrate their intentions, the hijackers sent Captain Levy to the terminal with a sample of the explosives they had on board.”
But Levy was able to give the Israelis all kinds of details about the hijackers and where things were positioned on the lane. Then Levy gave Dayan the most important intelligence. No seats blocked the emergency doors.
“Mr. Dayan promised to repair the plane and bring the Palestinian prisoners to the airport. Bogus prisoners were shown to the hijackers from a distance, and another plane was taken out to a runway, supposedly to fly them to Cairo.
“Twenty-one hours after Captain Levy’s plane had been hijacked, two trucks carrying 18 men in the white overalls of mechanics drove up to the jetliner. They milled about the plane, supposedly checking the tires and other equipment. Suddenly they tore open the emergency exits above the wings and opened fire inside the cabin.
“The fusillade from the men in overalls – in reality members of the elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal – ended within 90 seconds. The commandos were led by Ehud Barak…and among them was Benjamin Netanyahu.”
The two male hijackers were killed, and one of the two women was seriously injured, as were several passengers.
Days later, Prime Minister Golda Meir held a dinner for those involved in the rescue. She kissed Captain Levy and cried, “We love you.” What a moment that must have been.
–Incredibly, the New York Knicks have brought back the little imp, Isiah Thomas, as a consultant, though he will continue to coach the Florida International basketball team.
Thomas came in as Knicks’ president in December 2003 and the team immediately fell into the gutter as he engineered dreadful trades for the likes of Steve Francis, Eddy Curry and Stephon Marbury. The team never won a playoff game while he was around and when he appointed himself coach, the Knicks were 56-108. But if that wasn’t enough, he cost Madison Square Garden and owner James Dolan $11.6 million in a sexual harassment lawsuit. Yet it was Dolan that secretly rehired Thomas. [In his first year as coach of FIU, incidentally, Thomas was 7-25.]
“If someone walked up to you in a bar and treated you with the kind of disdain, the kind of naked contempt, that James Dolan showed you yesterday, there are just two ways you would possibly have reacted.
“If you are a woman, you would have thrown a drink in his face.
“If you are a man, you would have asked him to step outside.
“And there wouldn’t be another person anywhere in the saloon who would have denied you the right to act that way. That is what James Dolan did to Knicks fans yesterday. He spit in your eye. He slapped you in the face. He whistled at your girlfriend. He took the drink money you had on the bar and he slipped it in his pocket.
“He treated you like the worst kind of punk, because he knows he can get away with it. Because that has been the story of James Dolan’s tenure with the Knicks. There are no rules for him to play by, no sense of fair play. Fans are suckers, to be treated that way, to be scoffed at and sneered at. You think you matter?
“Unbelievable. What other sports team operates this way? Do you see the Giants bringing back Ray Handley to Jersey? You think you will spot Rich Kotite at any Jets halftime ceremonies?”
As Vaccaro notes, this is also the same Thomas who overdosed on sleeping pills and then tried to blame his 17-year-old daughter.
Knicks fans absolutely hate the guy, and for good reason, but he’s back!
“Isiah Thomas is no more than just a consultant to the Knicks than (president) Donnie Walsh has full autonomy over the team’s basketball operations.
“We just wish that the ‘brains’ – and we use the term loosely – behind this latest move would finally put an end to this charade and make it official.
“Jim Dolan should come clean and announce that Thomas is officially in charge of the Knicks again.
As for Donnie Walsh, the New York Post is reporting he told Thomas in a face-to-face meeting two weeks ago he did not want him working for the organization. But then Dolan and Thomas went around Walsh’s back.
Alas, I won’t bore you with the details but the NBA is investigating the consulting arrangement with a professional team when you’re already a college coach.
–Gotta love this description of the Rick Pitino extortion case, courtesy of Josh Abner and Jeremy Olshan of the New York Post.
WARNING: Children under 12 should turn off the computer and play outside for a while.
“That’s one quickie she’ll have years to think about.
“Crackpot sexpot Karen Cunagin Sypher was found guilty yesterday of demanding $10 million from former Knicks coach Rick Pitino in return for keeping mum about their ’15-second’ affair – and now faces up to 26 years in prison.”
Pitino wasn’t in the courtroom when the verdict was read, but, “in cringe-worthy testimony last week, Pitino told jurors their illicit fling in a Louisville Italian restaurant lasted just ’15 seconds.’….
“On the stand, Pitino told the jury he was at the end of the bar when she approached him with her cellphone, asking him to wish her son a happy birthday.
“He obliged. Then, she started flirting with him and rubbing his leg, he testified last week.
“At the end of the night, she suggested they move to a booth to finish their wine.
“ ‘She said to me that she is extremely fertile. She said her husband had looked at her four times and that she got pregnant,’ he said.
“Hearing this, Pitino said, he ‘immediately pulled out.’”
Well, it gets even more descriptive from there so we’ll move on.
Sypher’s sentence will probably be substantially reduced.
–As Joel Sherman of the New York Post points out, Alex Rodriguez has a 7-year, $181 million contract remaining with the Yankees following this season. Today, would you award the guy that kind of money based on his declining home run production?
A-Rod, who just missed getting seriously hurt by a batted ball in batting practice on Saturday, needs 163 homers to break Barry Bonds’ mark. Sherman notes, “Nine players in major league history have exceeded 163 from their age-35 season onward. But positions one and three on that list belong to Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro, whose late-career exploits are now soiled by ties to illegal performance enhancers.”
[Speaking of Bonds, his federal perjury trial is slated to begin next March…March Madness!]
–Speaking of 600 home runs, Jim Thome hit No. 578 on Sunday! Hall of Famer? Eh. I guess, assuming his name doesn’t come up…and notice how long it’s been since we had another big disclosure.
–Nice game by Toronto hurler Brandon Morrow on Sunday. Pitching no-hit ball against Tampa Bay for 8 2/3, Morrow gave up a bleeder through the infield to prevent him from making history, but he closed the deal on the one-hitter by fanning his 17th batter in a 1-0 contest. The day before, Toronto hit 8 home runs, the first team in baseball to do so in three years, as they pounded the Rays 17-11.
–The other day I mentioned Milt Wilcox and his role as a hurler on the 1984 Detroit Tigers. Johnny Mac then informed me that today, Wilcox owns Ultimate Air Dogs, where he and his son travel the country hosting dog jumping competitions. Heck, 3,000 showed up for one of his exhibitions the other week.
—Zenyatta improved her career mark to 18-0, winning a stakes race at Del Mar, Calif., by a neck in the second-closest finish of her career. It now looks like the 6-year-old mare could run two final times, including a Breeders’ Cup race in November, in an attempt to finish her career at 20-0, but a contest against Rachel Alexandra doesn’t appear likely.
–From AFP: “A groom accidentally killed three relatives at his wedding in Turkey when he fired into the air with an assault rifle in celebration. Eight other people were wounded….
“The groom unleashed a volley of rapid aerial shots with an AK-47 rifle to celebrate his nuptials, but quickly lost control of the weapon and accidentally raked the guests with bullets.”
That would kind of put a damper on the festivities, sports fans.
–And a Russian finalist in the Sauna World Championships died after collapsing with severe burns in the final stage of an event that required contestants to sit in a 110-degree Celsius room (230 Fahrenheit, really) as water was tossed onto a searing stove.
Authorities in the Finnish town of Heinola said the annual contest, which had more than 130 participants from 15 countries, will never be held again.
[Half a liter of water is added to the stove every 30 seconds, and the last person to remain in the sauna is the winner. Talk about a stupid idea.]
–I like this comment from Chuck Bartlebaugh of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (whatever it is, I want to work there).
“We have a whole generation of people thinking it’s OK to approach bears. In shark country, if you holler ‘shark,’ everyone gets out of the water. In the bear world, if you holler ‘bear,’ everybody runs into the woods.”
—Lance Armstrong is soooo screwed. When it’s more than just Floyd Landis confirming Armstrong was systematically doping, it’s over.
–I was glancing at the Yankees-Red Sox Sunday night game, just now (prior to watching “Mad Men”), and they showed Spike Lee in the stands. And Spike wasn’t on his iPhone or BlackBerry! He was actually watching the game! And so we give Spike Lee the “Bar Chat Real Fan of the Week Award.” Good for you, Spike.
—Bono is back…as is U2…as he’s recovered from serious back surgery and the band has restarted its tour. And in a nice touch, Bono and crew delivered pizzas to fans waiting in line for the first show in Turin, Italy this weekend.
Top 3 songs for the week 8/5/67: #1 “Light My Fire” (The Doors) #2 “I Was Made To Love Her” (Stevie Wonder) #3 “All You Need Is Love” (The Beatles)…and… #4 “Windy” (The Association…talk about an underrated group) #5 “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” (Procol Harum) #6 “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (Frankie Valli…I always think “The Deer Hunter” when I hear this tune…speaking of which, haven’t watched the flick in ages…need to) #7 “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (The Buckinghams) #8 “White Rabbit” (Jefferson Airplane) #9 “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (The Monkees) #10 “Little Bit O’ Soul” (The Music Explosion)
Golf Quiz Answer: Schools and alum with majors.
Univ. of Houston…6…Fuzzy Zoeller, Bill Rogers, John Mahaffey, Fred Couples, Steve Elkington, Dave Marr
Stanford Univ. …4…Tiger Woods, Tom Watson, Lawson Little, Bob Rosburg
Univ. of Texas…4…Ben Crenshaw, Justin Leonard, Tom Kite, Mark Brooks
Five schools have 3…Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, USC, Florida and Florida State.
Next Bar Chat, Thursday…clearing the table of some older items, including thoughts on Stan Musial following a terrific SI piece.
