Winter chill leaves lots of elbow room at park

There's a line of dialogue from "Three Days of the Condor" that has stuck with me for some reason. It's when Robert Redford tells Faye Dunaway the pictures she takes remind him of November.

"You take pictures of empty streets and trees with no leaves on them," the brooding Condor said to an equally brooding Kathy Hale.

The Condor was brooding because every one of his CIA pals had been gunned down after he went out the back door for a Subway sandwich. Kathy Hale was brooding because she had been kidnapped by the Condor and she had this fictional boyfriend in Vermont. And also because this was 1975, when major motion pictures featured lots of brooding.

Anyway, November arrived two months late to Sunset Park on Monday.

When the weather is pleasant, Sunset Park is a 323-acre playground, a Texas-sized beehive of sports activity: Basketball, sand volleyball, softball, tennis, Frisbee golf, a track for fitness, a lagoon for feeding ducks and also for racing radio-controlled hydroplanes.

The weather was not pleasant Monday. The weather was freakin' cold.

It was 27 degrees when I arrived a little past 11 a.m. There were four cars in the parking lot by the basketball courts, each empty. Perhaps their alternators had frozen.

The basketball courts were empty. The sand volleyball courts were empty. Nobody was playing softball, or tennis, or Frisbee golf, or getting fit on the track, or doing Aflac impressions at the lagoon, by the ducks.

Empty streets (and parking lots and pathways). Lots of trees with no leaves. It all so looked forlorn.

This was Faye Dunaway's kind of day.

I was standing on the basketball courts. Fallen leaves rustled around the top of the key on Court 1. I wanted to sit down, couldn't risk it. I had on layers of clothing, thick layers that made me look like Ralphie's brother in "A Christmas Story."

I was afraid that if I sat down, I would not be able to get back up. And when the weather thawed on Thursday, and they were choosing up sides again, that's where they would find me.

It sure didn't seem like Las Vegas. It seemed like Chicago, except the sun was out, and all the baskets still had their nets.

Finally, in the distance: the sound of a basketball being dribbled. It was Nilo Caparida, a 31-year-old bartender at The Mirage via the Philippines. He was shooting baskets, by himself. He said his brother and cousin were in the car but they were headed for Whitney Ranch, that somebody had access to a gym over there.

It wasn't long before his brother and cousin were shooting baskets, too. They said the wind had stopped blowing; that it wasn't all that bad. My guess: the guy with the gym key did not come through.

Over at the lagoon, I stopped to pull up my scarf. Two ducks with green heads swam toward me. They must have thought I had sunflower seeds. Then 17 ducks with black heads swam toward me, too. They started honking and making a helluva racket. It was sort of creepy. I felt like Tippi Hedren in that phone booth.

I got out of there, fast.

I spotted another human life form, silhouetted, gyrating and twirling about like Randall "Tex" Cobb during the "Uncommon Valor" credits. This life form was gyrating and twirling about where one wide expanse of yellow-dead grass converged with another wide expanse of yellow-dead grass.

When I got closer, I noticed this was a young man of slender build. He had one of those scraggly alternative rock beards, like the lead singer from Radiohead, a silver stud in his chin cleft. He was throwing a Frisbee.

Justin Anderson, 25, was practicing for the big Frisbee golf tournament at Sunset Park in February. He said it is called "The Gentleman's Club Challenge," and I instantly made a mental note of this on my mental list of "Things to Do."

When Anderson said the tournament title had nothing to do with strippers, I told him I'd have to think about it.

He said he grew up in Dallas, where it sometimes snows, and he works for a firm that prints credit cards and he's been working 13- to 16-hour days. (What fiscal cliff?) So when the boss told him he could go home early, Anderson did, and he jammed 15 Frisbees into his Frisbee golf bag and headed to the park, because these Frisbee golfers from Sweden that are coming are pretty tough in cold weather.

Anderson said a guy had set a world record by tossing a Frisbee 836 feet in the salt flats near Primm last summer. He was warming up by flicking 400-foot tosses down the wide expanse of yellow-dead grass. The last one came perilously close to a black Labrador retriever that was walking its owner.

I made one last loop of the lagoon, to see if the penguins had arrived.

In the parking lot beyond the flotsam end, a car pulled up, and then a second car. As I continued walking toward the cars, there was the sound of ignition and a hasty getaway. Perhaps from a distance I looked like a cop.

But it was much too cold to score in the parking lot or, for that matter, anywhere else in Sunset Park.

It was 30 degrees when I began walking back to my truck. The breeze felt like an icy dagger. A mallard with a purple head swooped overhead on a kamikaze mission, in search of sunflower seeds.

It seemed I was now alone in the park, but it felt like Max von Sydow was out there somewhere.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.