He’s Not Game for World Cup at Any Time
After giving the World Cup a look, Art Spander of the Oakland Tribune says he remains unimpressed by the global pastime:
“Guilty, your honor. I watched soccer at 2 o’clock. In the morning. Revoke my U.S. citizenship. Make me eat steak-and-kidney pie for a week.
“[Soccer is] a sport in which everything takes place between 11:30 p.m. and 4 a.m. To borrow from Mr. Dickens, the worst of times.
“Yawn. I’ll never complain about a three-hour baseball game again.”
More Spander: After the U.S. team’s 3-2 upset of Portugal, “the Portuguese prime minister urged the country not to lose faith in the team. Of course it should. Losing to a group of kids from a nation that doesn’t know a corner kick from a corner grocery should be a punishable offense.”
Trivia time: Who are the only two players to have hit home runs, at the major league level, before turning 20 and after turning 40?
Taking the green: Thieves dressed in Irish team uniforms made off with the equivalent of $1,800 in cash from a pizza shop in Ibaraki, Japan, before Wednesday’s World Cup game between Ireland and Germany.
Police said the men, who numbered about 20, “looked like foreigners.”
Leprechauns, perhaps?
Camera shy: Hundreds of soccer fans who took a day off to watch the World Cup in a tent in Malta’s capital of Valletta fled when a cameraman showed up, fearing employers would spot them on TV.
Scalpers’ nightmare: Police officers who work outside Cleveland’s Jacobs Field owe the city council a debt of gratitude for scrapping a law that once made it illegal to sell sports tickets for less than face value, says Chris Tomasson of the Akron Beacon Journal: “Imagine if the law were still on the books. ‘Hey, buddy, we heard you just sold all of Section 577 for 20 bucks. Hands behind your back.’
“There would be huge traffic jams caused by all the police vans needed to haul away the scalpers.... With the Indians having gone south in the standings, the [scalpers], who used to make hundreds of dollars a game, are making less than the nearby panhandlers.”
Flying hazard: Vijay Singh grew up next to a golf course in Fiji, but getting there was an adventure.
He could either take the long way, three miles around Nandi Airport. Or he could figure out when the planes were arriving and sprint across the runway between landings, clubs slung over his shoulder.
“Every hour there would be a flight or two, and you learned the busy time,” he said.
Trivia answer: Ty Cobb and Rusty Staub.
And finally: Bill Lyon of the Philadelphia Inquirer says boxing is hitting below the belt with tonight’s Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson heavyweight bout:
“Fifty-four ninety-five. That’s the current market for sleaze.
“For $54.95, the eager entrepreneurs will feed into your TV set the closest thing sports has these days to pornography. Mike Tyson.
“Tyson is virtually certain to do something vile, vulgar or cannibalistic, and the promoters know that for the perverted pleasure of watching this, you will happily permit them to stick the nozzle in your wallet and siphon off $54.95.
“It is nights like these that boxing becomes an open sewer.”
