Ron Kantowski is a sports columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, covering a variety of topics and the Las Vegas sports scene.
rkantowski@reviewjournal.com … @ronkantowski on Twitter. 702-383-0352
If you tune into today’s Confederations Cup final on ESPN — and there’s a chance you might, with the basketball and hockey seasons finally having ended, the top seeds at Wimbledon getting bounced by the 116th seeds, and these interleague baseball games having become tedious — you will notice that one of the soccer teams is wearing jerseys with funky nicknames on back.
Amanda Bingson hammered out danger and hammered out warning. Then the former Silverado High and UNLV product hammered out a new American record in the women’s hammer throw, twirling and tossing the 8.82-pound ball and chain from a field just north of historic Drake Stadium to a field just south of Sioux Falls.
Gentlemen, start your steam shovels.
His name was Jim Spencer, and if you have an affinity for slick-fielding first basemen of the 1970s, then you might remember him.
At 3:57 p.m., a couple of minutes before the second game of a doubleheader against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, the Voice of So Many Summers tweeted “Hi everybody and a pleasant Wednesday evening to you, wherever you may be.” -#VinScully.
If one had to rank the Nevada Governor’s Cup in the pantheon of cups, or even in the cupboard of cups, one probably would put it somewhere after hockey’s Stanley Cup and somewhere before whatever protective device Yogi Berra wore while warming up Whitey Ford.
Bishop Gorman High School graduate and former Cornhusker quarterback David Humm was awarded an honorary Nebraska Blackshirt, usually reserved for only the best defensive players, from the Husker Greats Foundation.
If you are a longtime fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, then you remember the 1978 season, Wilbert Montgomery and Ron Jaworski and Harold Carmichael and Bill Bergey and Herm Edwards and that bunch. Those classic green and off-white uniforms with the stripes on the sleeves.
A Grand National stock-car race that was two weeks old, Acapulco cliff diving and arm wrestling championships from Petaluma, Calif. Maybe the Penn Relays. That pretty much was ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” as I remember it.
She grew up in those little fishing villages on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula — towns with names such as Homer and Seward and Soldotna. So when Swayze Valentine heard the roar of the mixed martial arts crowd in Anchorage one night, because MMA is everywhere except New York these days, she said it was just about the loudest thing she’d ever heard. If you don’t count a Kodiak bear with a toothache.
The 51s returned to Cashman Field to open a homestand against Tacoma on Monday, and it must have surprised fans watching for the first time this season to discover the broken glass had been removed from the infield. And that second base actually was a base, instead of a flattened beer can.
It had graced the east wall of our garage since 1993, had persevered longer than any weed-whacker I’d owned. But when my wife painted a couple of months ago, she took down the poster of the “Cowboy Goalie,” the one showing Clint Malarchuk in a black Resistol and a Las Vegas Thunder jersey holding a stop sign along with his big goalie’s stick.
Centennial High School, Class of 2013, had 11 valedictorians. Each gave a speech during commencement at the Thomas & Mack Center on Friday night.
When I was 12, I knew all the umpires. Shag Crawford. Emmett Ashford. Nestor Chylak. Satch Davidson. Augie Donatelli. Tom Gorman. Bill Haller. Chris Pelekoudas. Ron Luciano. Frank Pulli. Ed Runge. Marty Springstead. Harry Wendelstedt. Big Lee Weyer, who sometimes during a rain delay would join Jack Brickhouse in the broadcast booth and perform card tricks.
