Kris Bryant, from Bonanza High and the University of San Diego, batted five times in his Northwest League debut for the Class A Boise Hawks on July 23. He struck out all five times. But Bryant, 21, didn’t stay in a rut for long.
Sports Columns
He used to knock guys on their asses. That’s what Scott Martin told me the other day. He was pushing a glop of pizza fries around his plate at the old fashioned soda fountain at historic Huntridge Drug Store on East Charleston.
NASCAR will run its annual race at hallowed Indianapolis Motor Speedway today. Whereas the Brickyard 400 once was the biggest of deals, it’s not such a big deal anymore.
I have a colleague in the writing business named Tim, who once had mentioned that his mother had gotten remarried — to a famous sports writer. He probably told me it was Ira Berkow of the New York Times (and other literary places), but I must have been on the phone or on deadline. I had sort of forgotten it.
Now that they have run the table again, in a different format with a playoff bracket and everything, it’s almost too easy to compare the NBA Summer League’s Golden State Warriors with author Roger Kahn’s “Boys of Summer.”
It is Friday afternoon and Jimmy Vasser, the former race-car driver, is waiting on a Cobb salad at the Canyon Gate Country Club grill. In the distance are tranquil lagoons, the No. 2 tee box and the house in which Vasser has sort of lived the past 16 years, because race-car people tend to crisscross the globe and so they are not home a lot.
He was standing against the wall of the gymnasium at Doolittle Community Center on Friday morning, waiting to get on the court. It must have been a flashback of sorts for C.J. Watson, who first started doing that when he was in second grade.
The ballplayer stood in the middle of the dusty diamond. He stood tall, taller than the other ballplayers, because the ballplayer in the middle of the diamond was 54, and the other ballplayers were 12-year-olds.
Kid from hardscrabble neighborhood goes to hardscrabble high school. Kid gets taken under wing by hardscrabble guidance counselor, or other authority figure. Kid goes on to become NBA prospect.
It was a little past 1 p.m., not that time really matters here. The sound of poker chips idly being rubbed together was in the air, in the manner the sound of locusts on a deserted stretch of Texas highway is in the air.
When he was a small fry growing up in the Los Angeles suburbs, Greg Hill remembers balancing atop his first racing bike, a candy-apple red Schwinn Apple Krate — the one with shock absorbers and a gear shift — and a mailbox. And then wobbling along, in the lowest of gears, until the next mailbox.
When I heard that Gary Player was going to pose naked for ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue, the first thing that came to mind was those cardboard boxes with pinholes the smart kids made in third grade so they could safely view a solar eclipse.
If you ask me, Kowalski from the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” is the greatest race-car driver of all time. Kurt Busch of Las Vegas is second.
When I was of Little League age, I owned a book called “Strange But True Baseball Stories.” It was written by Furman Bisher, the longtime sports columnist of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It had a painting on the cover of two Yankees, pursuing what I imagined to be a pop fly. One of the Yanks was topsy-turvy, standing on his head and shoulders.
Because of the heat and because it was only a “friendly,” as they call exhibition games in soccer, I did not go to the match between the two Mexican sides the other night.