Category: Sports

R.E. off to a Bee-less future

R.E. GraswichI really ought to turn in my cub reporter press pass. Last week I heard from no fewer than three reputable sources that R.E. Graswich was to be among those people taking the buyout offer at Fort McClatchy. But I never got around to posting about it.

Bob himself beat me to it, reporting the news at the end of his column yesterday.

He goes a long way back in this town’s inky history, starting at the Rancho Cordova Grapevine (where he got some notice as a teenager for covering tough news stories). At the Bee, he covered prep sports, ran the prep sports coverage, covered the Kings for a few years and finally ended up turning his bar-cruising and Hawaiian shirt-wearing ways into a career as the short item talk-of-the-town writer.

Continue reading “R.E. off to a Bee-less future”

L.A. Times takes another shot

Last week, two swipes at Sacramento from the teetering L.A. Times. Today, another. In Bill Dwyre’s column about Florida’s routing of THE Ohio State University last night for the ridiculous no-playoff championship, he manages to mock our admittedly pathetic local Hornets in defending Boise State’s claim on No. 1:

[…] There ought to be a Sacramento State Rule in college football, as in, no team that plays Sacramento State can end up No. 1.

Hmmm. Maybe that rule makes some sense. Boise State didn’t even have to break a sweat, kicking Hornet tail 45-0 in the season opener for both teams. The Hornets lost six more, but I don’t think you can quite call them the closest thing to a gimme in Division I football. After all, they did beat perennial power houses Eastern Washington, Weber State, Northern Colorado and Idaho State. So there.

L.A. vs. Sacramento, L.A. rules edition

From the L.A. Times:

The love affair between Phil Jackson and the state capital continued Thursday.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he said, opening his arms figuratively with an apparent compliment for Arco Arena. […] “It’s just one of the very few places where you have to walk across the court to get to a locker room that’s a dungeon.”

There’s more, and the LAT seems to like it just a little too much. In fact, they took a dig in another section, too:

Sacramento is a suburb of Los Angeles. Nothing drives home that point more than a walk through Terminal A at Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport at the start of the workweek, where you can see a host of L.A. lawmakers — and lobbyists, political lawyers, labor leaders and corporate executives — waiting for their short hops to the Capitol. […]

California’s capital city may be where all the state’s movers and shakers mingle, but L.A. still rules.

Yeah, just ask ’em. Here’s the rest.

Weird things are afoot at the CPK

BibbyKnocked off early at the widget factory yesterday and took the family to Barnes & Noble at Market Square. Gotta love that kid’s section–plenty of fun for the kids, but with only 2 exits it’s super easy to monitor. Afterward, while eating some really authentic Chinese food from a little restaurant I usually just refer to as “Orange Chicken” who walks in to the humble Market Square but NBA superstar Mike Bibby. He did some holiday shopping at B&N, graciously signing a few autographs for his adoring fans, before dining at California Pizza Kitchen. Gods among men. I tried to give him a what’s up nod but believe it or not he was talking on a cellular phone the whole time!

Continue reading “Weird things are afoot at the CPK”

ABA fever coming to town

The Sacramento Business Journal reports that the Fresno Heatwave of the American Basketball Association is relocating to Sacramento “for its basketball enthusiasts.”

The two leagues (NBA & ABA) are as different as McDonald’s and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, he added. But former NBA players are coaches, owners and players within the ABA. Former NBA star Dennis Rodman plays for the Hollywood Fame, which Sacramento goes up against Dec. 4 at home.

Interesting simile. Let’s see, both leagues use a ball, a hoop, with 5 players playing against 5 players trying to score more points than the other…

Tickets cost $10 to $12. The ABA markets itself to the urban and Hispanic market, Newman said. The league expects to have 75 teams next season.

Is “urban” now an ethnic category? What’s going on here? Do the Kings market themselves to the suburban market? Or the foothill market?

Sacramentans in the news

Why does it take me like a week to find out that the UCLA taser student was from Sacramento? Is it because I don’t pay any attention to anything going on outside Nor Cal anymore, even when it has a local angle? Yes, it’s definitely because of that. And because of my YouTube non-participation.

Young mister Tabatabainejad is probably not going to have the same kind of winter as the other Sacramentan I wanted to mention, Demarcus Nelson, who seems poised for a breakout year for some school called Duke. (I think it’s a junior college in the midwest or something.) This is the sort of thing that gets me excited to watch some college hoops.

David Stern, the world is watching

I found an interesting editorial addressed to David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, regarding his taking over of Sacramento’s arena negotiations:

Nov. 19 – Dear David Stern: Thanks for deciding to be a lead negotiator for the National Basketball Association in efforts to build a new arena in Sacramento. The last arena proposal — Measures Q and R on the November ballot — was so strange that not even the Sacramento Kings ended up supporting it. Even you wondered why anyone would vote Yes. You sensed the pickle Sacramento is in. A respected outside influence sure would be helpful, maybe even necessary, to figure out a solution.

It’s an interesting, and might I say, refreshing take on the future of Sacramento’s arena issue.  Whether David Stern was brought in to try to get a deal done, or if he’s simply coming to town to eventually say that a deal can’t be done, time will tell.  However, the final thought of the article is what I found most compelling:

…The Sacramento arena problem is a symptom of a broader problem with the NBA. Medium-sized markets like ours need huge government subsidies to deal with financial inequities within the league. The league’s business model is screwed up more than Sacramento’s priorities are.

This community won’t and can’t paper over the NBA’s problem with gobs of new taxes. It can work with just about anyone for a worthy civic goal. Keep that in mind. And welcome to town.

Sacramento’s local issue might have great implications for professional basketball in the United States. Indeed, whether the Kings stay in this town is not just a measure of Sacramento, but also a measure of the NBA.

Did the Maloofs take a dive?

Interesting article in The Bee today, wondering if the pro-Arena campaign was supposed to lose:

The big question floating around town Wednesday was whether Joe and Gavin Maloof’s actions in the campaign simply reflected their volatility and lack of political savvy, or whether they systematically sabotaged the campaign because they prefer that a new arena be built next to Arco in North Natomas or want to move the team to another city.

Veteran political consultant David Townsend said he thinks the sabotage was deliberate.

“I know a professional campaign when I see it, and this is a professional campaign,” Townsend said. “This is not all by happenstance. … This was an orchestrated, well-thought-out campaign to tube Q&R.”

Whether Ross was behind it or the Maloofs were simply clients out of control, he doesn’t know. Ross has not returned Bee phone calls about the campaign.

That would be on interesting explanation for the idiocy of that burger commercial.

Sandy Smoley’s arena post-mortem

TZ of Sactown Royalty is making all us bloggers look bad by getting like, interviews and stuff. Using the phone even! He’s got some quotes from Sandy Smoley, Chairwoman of the Yes on Q & R campaign.

On the incredible margin of defeat:
“80-20 is huge. That was startling to me, the magnitude. … But if people don’t understand a measure, they vote no. … With the Maloofs pulling out, it was way overwhelming.”

That’s one way to put it, Sandy. Another way to put it is that when people don’t want their taxes raised, they vote no on raising their taxes. Yet another way to put it is that the voters understood your idea plenty, and just decided they didn’t like it.

I’ll go ahead and give Smoley credit, she probably means that the voters didn’t understand it because it was poorly written and not well thought out. The Maloofs pulling out did make it harder to understand what was going on–hard to understand why the stewards of our public trust would leave so much out and still expect a yes vote.

Post-debacle announcement tonight

TZ of the irreplaceable Sactown Royalty (and sometime Ragger) says to expect a major announcement from proponents of the widely-assumed-DOA arena ballot measures tonight, presumably as the votes are being counted. With special guest Roger Dickinson on the fiddle? (Wait a minute, who would vandalize the article about Nero? Why would facts be in dispute? Are there Roman fire deniers out there that I don’t know about?)