Did you know that Abe Lincoln was a freestyle wrestler? He wasn’t the only president who wrestled. Andrew Jackson wrestled. Why do you think they called him Old Hickory?
Ron Kantowski
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
I received an email Tuesday night saying there would be a funeral Friday in Albuquerque, N.M., for Derek Sanchez. Rosary at 9:30 a.m., service at 10 at Risen Savior Catholic Community church, burial to follow at Gate of Heaven cemetery, next to the church, on Wyoming Boulevard Northeast.
It was to college basketball cheering sections what the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Colossus of Rhodes were to classic antiquity; what Big Bertha was to metal drivers; what Superman’s bare hands were to steel and the course of mighty rivers.
One of the cool things about old ballparks is many don’t have bullpens. So when a special pitcher — i.e., one who can throw a baseball through a proverbial brick wall — is scheduled to take the mound, you often can work your way down there, close to the pseudo bullpens along the outfield foul lines, to watch him warm up.
En route to the biennial UNLV Athletic Apparel Sale on Saturday morning, I couldn’t help but notice the giant billboard blocking out the sun in the manner of a solar eclipse.
It had been a good half-hour since the dedication of the Boys & Girls Club of Henderson’s new Natalie Gulbis unit at the Apache Pines affordable housing community in far west Las Vegas late Tuesday afternoon.
A few days ago, I met a polite 11-year-old boy with a round face and rosy cheeks who wears glasses, giving him sort of a Ralphie Parker in “Christmas Story” look, and he was excited — not because he soon would be getting a Red Ryder BB gun, but because he recently had become Twitter pals with Brandon Phillips.
It was a Monday morning in April in New Mexico exactly 30 years ago, discounting intervening leap years, and the skies over the Four Corners were turning gray and menacing. A stinging chill was in the air. You could tell it was going to snow.
It was a little past 11 a.m. in the paddock at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday when I met Joe Shover, a government contractor from Washington, D.C., and his pal Tony Bigford, a tool specialist at the Boeing Company of Seattle.
If you are headed out to the SummitRacing.com Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway this weekend, the first voice you probably will hear will be a security guard’s, saying you can’t park there without the proper credential.
Well, now it’s official: The big kid with the wide shoulders who supposedly had one foot out the door now has both feet out the door.
When I last dropped in on the UNLV baseball team, on March 11, it was coming off a three-game sweep of mighty Stanford.
It was a beautiful Thursday afternoon, warm and sunny and idyllic, and the UNLV men’s tennis team was knocking the fuzz off the bright yellow-green ball against UNR.
When I see this season’s Florida Gulf Coast basketball team, I see the Jacksonville basketball team of 1969-70. They even play in the same conference, something called the Atlantic Sun. Twenty bucks and the home edition of “Jeopardy!” if you can name all 10 members.
Pierre Jackson, formerly of Desert Pines High School, now of the Baylor Bears, won the Big 12 basketball scoring title this season with an average of 19.8 points per game.
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