NFL Quiz: Who were the first five to have 100 receptions in a season, including in the AFL? [Hints: Sterling Sharpe was the 6th to do so. The years the first five caught 100 were 1961, 1964, 1984, 1990, 1991, and, one team is represented twice.] Answer below.
By now you’ve all seen the picture of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, sitting on the sofa with the giant bear skin, so bruins could be center stage in the final push to November. After all, geopolitically it’s all about the Russian Bear, too, but I digress.
The other day the Anchorage Daily News’ Craig Medred took issue with a Washington Post piece I myself had referenced titled “Most times, in Alaska, the bear eats you.”
“Number one: Most times, in Alaska, bears and humans coexist without any thought to that old cliché that cautions ‘sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.’ Generally, people and bears meet, look at each other, mutually go ‘uh-oh,’ and then retreat, or flee, in opposite directions. This happens thousands, possibly tens of thousands of times per year in this state.”
[Medred is a paid flack for the bear lobby…but we’ll let him continue to build his case.]
“Despite a widespread, paranoid belief that grizzlies are big, brown, hairy people-eaters, they are not. A whole business has been built around people viewing huge, wild grizzly bears along the Katmai Coast. It would have been gone long ago if the threat of those bears eating people was significant.
“Number two: When bears do attack…they almost never eat anyone. They apparently don’t consider us very good prey. Bears bite people, and then they flee. Most bears are like heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, not Kiwi cannibals. Sometimes the injuries from bear bites are severe, but the flesh is usually still all there.”
Well, yeah, technically. But if your face is hanging by a thread down below your neck, that kinds of sucks, know what I’m sayin’?
“Some years back I was attacked by a grizzly bear,” notes Medred. “It had my ankle in its mouth when I shot it. It was biting, not eating….
“Most times, in Alaska the people eat the bear, or at least kill it.
“Not counting bears shot in defense of life and property or run down by cars in this state every year, humans kill 1,000 to 1,500 grizzly bears and about twice as many as black bears. Most of the grizzlies become rugs or trophy mounts. Few people eat grizzly flesh; it’s pretty rancid. But a good share of the 2,500 to 3,000 black bears reported taken by hunters each year are eaten as food.
“Given these numbers, the odds are at least 100 times greater that people will get the bear than that the bear will get them.”
Well, yeah, but that still makes for a hefty death toll if you follow this logic.
Medred, though, in conferring with a former U.S. Geological Survey biologist who tracks bear maulings, says there are only 10 to 20 per year in Alaska, with a peak of 26 in the late 1990s.
And get this. Medred writes that most Alaskan full grown grizzlies weigh only around 300 pounds, vs. the 400 to 600 pounds for the American West version.
However, “Coastal Alaska bears are different. They are so much larger than Interior bears that Alaska bears were long divided into two categories – grizzlies and coastal brown bears. That was until taxonomists finally figured out that a coastal brown bear is just a really well fed grizzly. The bears are now referred to in many circles as brown/grizzly bears.”
And get this, “Along the Katmai coast, big bears will indeed get to 1,200 pounds, maybe even more. Locally, here on the island coast, a 900-pounder would be considered a big boy…. [goodness gracious!]
“Those huge coastal grizzlies are animals that get that way by stuffing themselves with [heart-healthy] salmon. It would be an overstatement to describe these bears as ‘fat and happy’ for most of the summer, but at least they don’t come running from miles away as Interior and Arctic bears sometimes will, to check you out as a potential meal.
“Let’s not forget, Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers engaging in his bear-fondling goofiness with the Katmai bears without a problem. He didn’t get killed and, oddly enough, eaten until he ran into an unruly October bear – a 28-year-old bear with broken teeth; a big, old bear needing calories to maintain its overgrown, 1,000-pound body size, a bear that scientists might describe as ‘food stressed.’”
The rosters are set with U.S. captain Paul Azinger’s four captain’s picks. So, sans Tiger, the Americans are going with……
Among those Azinger bypassed are Rocco Mediate, Woody Austin and Zach Johnson. Among the Europeans bypassed by Faldo, who only had two captain’s picks, were Darren Clarke, who started playing well recently, and Ryder Cup stalwart Colin Montgomerie.
The Ryder Cup is Sept. 19-21 at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky. Europe will retain it.
A month ago, Chris Lamb had a piece in the Sunday New York Times on a former Yankee, Jake Powell, who uttered a racist slur back in 1938. I held up on doing something on this until I could look through my baseball books and I just got around to it. It seems Lamb missed a key point.
Powell played on and off in the big leagues from 1930-45, with his best season being 1935 when he drove in 98 and hit .312 for the Washington Senators. But it was during a July 29, 1938, pre-game interview at Comiskey Park in Chicago that WGN Radio announcer Bob Elson asked Powell, now a Yankees outfielder, what he did during the off-season in Dayton, Ohio. Powell replied he was a policeman and then, using a racial slur, “replied that he cracked blacks over the head with his nightstick,” as Chris Lamb writes.
“Hundreds of outraged listeners called the station. Others called the Chicago office of the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Before the next day’s game, a delegation of black leaders presented a petition to umpires demanding that Powell be barred from baseball for life.”
Seeing as Jackie Robinson wouldn’t break the color barrier until 1947, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Landis only suspended Powell for 10 days, but nonetheless it was the first time a player had been suspended at all for a racist comment.
Powell was never a popular player with his teammates and in 1936 he deliberately collided with Hank Greenberg, who was Jewish, breaking Greenberg’s wrist and ending his season after 12 games. That same year, the Senators then traded Powell to the Yankees for another racist, Ben Chapman.
Chapman had an excellent career from 1930-46, hitting .302 with 977 RBI and 1,958 hits. But he is equally remembered for his race-baiting of Jackie Robinson when Robinson first came up to the big leagues and Chapman was managing the Philadelphia Phillies.
As related in the book “Baseball Anecdotes” by Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulf, when Robinson’s Dodgers were slated to meet the Phillies, Philadelphia owner Bob Carpenter tried to talk Brooklyn’s Branch Rickey from playing Robinson. Carpenter threatened to pull his club off the field. That’s when Rickey said he’d gladly take a forfeit and Carpenter backed off his threat.
Manager Chapman, however, had his Phils ride Robinson unmercifully, which Rickey later said ended up uniting Brooklyn behind Jackie. But in reading through various books, those pitching for Chapman at the time never said the manager told them to throw at Robinson and in the book “Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers, 1947-59” by Larry Moffi & Jonathan Kronstadt, the authors write the following:
“On the field, Robinson’s passion inspired his teammates and the opposition to play with a competitiveness that made baseball in the late 1940s and 1950s one of the most exciting eras ever. Ben Chapman, a southerner, vowed he would not give Robinson an inch, that his Phillies would ride him the way they rode any other player, that they would dust him off the way Chapman had been dusted off as a rookie, and that he was certain that Robinson would not want it any other way.” [Dusting off is different from throwing at a guy.]
“ ‘If Robinson has the stuff,’ Chapman declared, ‘he will be accepted in baseball the same as the Sullivans, the Lombardies, the Schultzes, the Grodzickies. All that I expect him to do is prove it. Baseball is big enough for everybody who has the stuff, but let’s not carry anyone around on a cushion.’ Robinson, as his career attests, concurred.
“ ‘Of course there are still some players and umpires who resent me and the others of my race, and who don’t give us a fair break,’ Robinson said in 1949. ‘But for everyone like that there are many more like Eddie Stanky of the Giants, who tries to beat you, tries to take you out of the play, and yet expects you to do the same thing to him.’”
“And Robinson did. In (an exhibition game in 1956), Robinson knocked down Giants second baseman Davey Williams on a play at first base. ‘It wasn’t Williams I was after. It was (Giants pitcher Sal) Maglie. He had been throwing at us and someone on our bench, looking at me, said, ‘We got to do something about it.’ Well, whenever there’s something like that to be done the players expect me to do it. I went up to the batter’s circle and our batboy said, ‘Let someone else do it for a change.’ I didn’t agree with him.
“ ‘I dropped a bunt down the first base line, figuring Maglie would come over to field it. He didn’t. Williams covered first and I got him. If Maglie had covered first base, I would have done my best to drive him into right field.’”
Well, the above is my way of saying I note Ben Chapman’s reputation of being a “virulent racist,” as every single mention of the guy puts it, but from the sources I glanced at, I’m just not sure the characterization really fits because back then there were hundreds in the game who probably deserved the same label. Chapman’s above statement makes perfect sense to me, and those whose view of baseball is only the current one can’t begin to imagine what the sport was really like, witness Robinson’s own tough actions.
But lest you think I’m letting Ben Chapman off the hook, he was, no doubt, an a-hole. Okrent and Wulf relate this other tale.
“The hot-headed, vituperative Chapman was nearly a sociopath; his assaults on Robinson from his manager’s perch in the Phillies dugout were utterly in character, the racism only adding a dimension to a nastiness that had long been in his makeup.
“This violent, untrammeled combativeness was, apparently, precisely the quality which made Herb Pennock, the old Yankees pitcher who was Philadelphia’s general manager, give him the manager’s job. Pennock and Chapman had gotten to know each other when the older man was coaching, and Chapman playing the outfield for the Red Sox in the late 1930s.
“The most memorable encounter the two men had in Boston was, however, hardly the sort of meeting of minds that would lead one to think Chapman was managerial material. In the 1938 season, Chapman came to the plate with two men on; Pennock relayed the bunt sign from manager Joe Cronin. On the first pitch, the runners broke and Chapman’s mighty swing produced a loud foul. Again, on the second pitch, the same result. Finally, with two strikes on him, Chapman hit into a double play.
“Furious, Pennock accosted him as the teams changed sides, wanting to know if Chapman had missed the sign. Chapman acknowledged that he had, indeed, gotten the sign, which only infuriated Pennock more. He demanded to know why Chapman had ignored it.
“The player glared at his coach. ‘Because,’ he said evenly, ‘I don’t bunt.’ He was traded to Cleveland at season’s end.”
But back to Jake Powell, I feel like Chris Lamb missed an important tidbit that I found in Okrent and Wulf’s book.
Following Powell’s 10-game suspension, there was still talk of a boycott by blacks of all Yankee games.
“When Powell returned to New York, he went up to the top of Harlem, alone and after dark. Working southward, he stopped in every saloon he came across, introducing himself as Jake Powell, apologizing for his foolish words, and buying everyone a round of drinks. It was a strange form of penance, but it took guts and helped the storm subside.”
I don’t know about you but that’s a story that Lamb should have included. Nevertheless, it didn’t end well for Jake Powell. He had his demons. In 1948, three years after his playing career was over, he was arrested for passing bad checks in Washington, D.C. “In full view of the officers at the police station, Powell shot himself twice – first in the chest, then in the head.”
–We note the passing of the great singer-songwriter Jerry Reed, 71, who died from emphysema. Reed gained widespread fame for his role in a slew of films with Burt Reynolds, including three “Smokey and the Bandit” flicks, but this was a guy who wrote for the likes of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Brenda Lee and others.
Reed also had three #1 hits of his own on the country charts, 1971’s “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” (which crossed over to #9 on the Billboard pop list), “Lord, Mr. Ford,” and 1982’s “She Got The Goldmine (I Got The Shaft)”.
Reed was born in 1937, in Atlanta, into a family of cotton farmers. He started playing guitar early and by 18 had a recording contract with Capitol Records. His own tunes didn’t fare well, though, but others such as Gene Vincent and Brenda Lee adopted some of his songs that would hit the charts. Reed later won a Grammy for “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” and picked up two others for duets with Chet Atkins.
Reed was best known in the music industry as “Guitar Man” and was in great demand as a session player and in 1970, the year everything came together for him, Reed was the Country Music Association’s “Instrumentalist of the Year.” That was the same time he became a regular on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS-TV and in ’71 toured with Campbell. By ‘73 he was all over the place…Hee Haw, Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson and an NBC-TV show, Music Country, U.S.A.
It was in 1974 that he first hooked up with Burt Reynolds, then Hollywood’s hottest star, for the film “W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings.” Next came the Reynolds movie “Gator” and the following year the first of the “Smokey and the Bandit” pictures.
So we quaff an adult beverage in honor of a true original…the great Jerry Reed.
–In winning Monday’s Deutsche Bank tourney, part of the FedEx Cup, Vijay Singh took home his 34th PGA Tour title, 3rd in 5 weeks, and 22nd (of 34 total) since turning 40. That’s remarkable.
3. Ohio State
6. Missouri……ding ding ding!!!
20. Wake Forest!!!!!
Meanwhile, Rutgers bit the big one, losing at home, for crissakes, to Fresno State.
And I just have to note that the other night I caught the first half of Tennessee-UCLA and the horrible performance of Bruins’ quarterback Kevin Craft, who threw four interceptions in the first 30 minutes. No need to watch the rest of this one, I thought. Well, for the record, Craft proceeded to go 18 of 25 for 193 yards and no INTs in the second half and rallied UCLA to a 27-24 overtime victory.
Finally, Phil W. attended the Appalachian State-LSU game in Baton Rouge the other day. Due to Gustav, the time of the contest was moved up to 10:00 a.m., not exactly conducive to tailgating. But Phil had terrific things to say about the overall atmosphere at the school, having arrived the day before, and now I’m hungry for fried gator at The Chimes restaurant next to campus. Phil also recommends a dive restaurant in Tuscaloosa called Dreamland. Road trip!
–Mark R. was disgusted by my pick of the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl, wondering why I hadn’t selected the Steelers. Of course I had to remind him I hate the Pats, too, but didn’t want to jinx Pittsburgh. I’m not sure if he bought my reverse hex excuse.
–By now you’ve all probably heard of the death of Don LaFontaine, Mr. Voiceover, who made more than 5,000 trailers in his 33-year career for top studios and television networks. Thankfully, he left us the 2006 GEICO commercial where he parodied himself. Working out of a home studio, he averaged seven to 10 voiceovers a day. “In a world where….”
–At a track meet in Lausanne, Switzerland, Jamaica’s Asafa Powell ran the second-fastest 100 time ever, 9.72, after Usain Bolt’s record 9.69 in Beijing. Bolt then ran the 200 in 19.63 at the same meet after doing his record 19.30 at the Olympics.
Powell, who finished 5th in Beijing to go with a 5th in 2004 in Athens in the 100, vows he’ll be back for London in 2012. “I’ve got no idea why I’m always winning on the circuit but then finishing fifth at the Olympics,” he told the BBC. Ah, Asafa? Could it be you choke?
–Jacksonville Jaguars offensive tackle Richard Collier was shot and critically wounded while waiting in a car with a former teammate for two women they had met at a nightclub who were then dropping off their car at home. And what time was it? Try 2:45 a.m. In the last two years the Jags have had 11 players arrested.
–We’re kind of excited in this part of New Jersey (northern) because the New York Jets have just opened a phenomenal training facility about 15 minutes from the offices of Bar Chat, which means starting next summer I’ll be able to get out to training camp for a story or two.
This is a $75 million campus with a soaring indoor facility with a full field that allows for punting and field goals, auditoriums, classrooms, two cafeterias, and at least three full fields outdoors. You can imagine it’s a real shot in the arm for the local real estate market, too, since these highly paid athletes will want to live nearby. [Coach Eric Mangini already purchased a $4 million home about ten minutes away, for example. Then again he better win or he’ll be movin’ on out.]
–John McCain may have made a big mistake in not naming the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore as his running mate.
Come to think of it, Cantore and Dr. Steve Lyons, hurricane expert, would have made a great third party ticket. “Charisma and Competence amidst stormy seas.”
–Tiger Woods announced Bristol Palin is carrying his second child and………… ……….oops, sorry, got this wrong. Tiger said wife Elin is pregnant with their second. The Woods family has no relationship whatsoever to the Palins.
Top 3 songs for the week 9/2/78: #1 “Grease” (Frankie Valli) #2 “Three Times A Lady” (Commodores) #3 “Boogie Oogie Oogie” (A Taste of Honey)…and…#4 “Hot Blooded” (Foreigner) #5 “Hopelessly Devoted To You” (Olivia Newton-John) #6 “Miss You” (The Rolling Stones) #7 “Kiss You All Over” (Exile) #8 “An Everlasting Love” (Andy Gibb) #9 “Magnet And Steel” (Walter Egan) #10 “Shame” (Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King)
1990 – Jerry Rice, San Francisco…100
