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.
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
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.
Every time Inbee Park hits ’em stiff all weekend and curls in another birdie putt and is handed yet another giant check and golden cup, another young woman who played golf at Bishop Gorman named Angelica Wright tells her friends and the co-workers who care that she beat Inbee Park.
These are some of the elements I think of when I think of an ideal Fourth of July celebration. Or, as often is the case, an ideal Third of July celebration, because most people have the Fourth off, and if they celebrate on the Third, then they have a day to recuperate:
A kid from Canada, a kid who goes on to star at UNLV, is taken with the first pick in his pro draft. By Cleveland.
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.
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.
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