Sweet revenge is mine

I had my Friday night lights moment without the lights.

I got a measure of revenge.

On Friday, September 3, I returned to the Dexter High School football field in Maine for the first time in 40 years – for the first time since I was the starting quarterback for the Foxcroft Academy Ponies against the Dexter Tigers, our arch rivals, in a game we lost 58-0.

That’s right, 58-0. Hammer vs. Nail.

How could I not forget that game? The Dexter Tigers were dedicating a brand new scoreboard that day and they were determined to make it look like pinball machine at our expense and humiliation.

Get this. They were leading 50-0 in the fourth quarter. They had their starters on the field and we were in punt formation near our own end zone. They lined up to block the punt. They blocked the punt. They recovered it in and ran it into the end zone for another touchdown. Then they went for a two-point conversion and got it.

They were piling it on like as if using a bulldozer to cover a grave.

I then dedicated myself to a lifetime of hatred for the Dexter Tigers. It’s like Red Sox fans hating the Yankees when they are in first place. Which seems like approximately forever.

I was back in Maine attending a family memorial last week. I saw the Maine high school football schedule in the Portland newspaper on Friday morning and saw that Foxcroft was scheduled to play Dexter in Dexter on Saturday afternoon, the next day. The same day that I needed to be in Boston to fly back to San Francisco.

However, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, I was in Dover-Foxcroft visiting a high school classmate, the lovely Kathy McCarthy Polk, when I learned that the game between Foxcroft and Dexter had been re-scheduled because of Hurricane Earl. It was moved up to Friday – at four o’clock.

Within an hour I had postponed a dinner date with my stepmother and sped across the county line to Dexter in my rental car. When I arrived, the same scoreboard that recorded my nightmare game was still standing and Dexter was driving for a touchdown near its shadow. The Tigers scored on the opening drive of the game and my pain returned.

Not for long. The Ponies proceeded to score 36 unanswered points. Foxcroft’s head coach is Danny White, the son of Jere White who replaced me at starting quarterback after that 58-0 loss in 1970. He, too, vividly remembers that game as does Rick “Cheese” Pembroke, who along with me, Mark “Bagga” Stevens and Mike “Ace” Thomas comprised Foxcroft’s Fearsome Foursome as freshmen football players in 1968 when the four of us all weighed less than 100 pounds. Now I’m guessing the four of us combined weigh at least 800 pounds.

Anyway, it was payback time. The Ponies eventually won 44-12. The only thing that would have made it better is if the numeral `1’ had wound up in front of the `44’ on the visitor’s side of the scoreboard.

It just goes to show you that what goes around comes around.

Foxcroft has now beaten Dexter in football 20 years in a row.

Karma.

Padres, Venable focused on big picture, not Sanchez

Jonathan Sanchez threw the first pitch of the game to the San Diego Padres on Friday night at AT&T Park and a funny thing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

Padres’ lead-off batter Jerry Hairston, Jr. did not charge the pitcher’s mound and the Padres’ bench did not empty and make a beeline for Sanchez. The Padres apparently did not put a bounty on Sanchez’s head.

Last Sunday, after his last start, Sanchez proclaimed that the second-place Giants would sweep the first-place Padres this weekend and not look back. In a way, the Giants left-hander called out the Padres and his words were passed the through the World Wide Leader in Sports (ESPN) and The Sports Leader (KNBR) all week. Fighting words, they reported and raged.

The Padres didn’t think so.

“The reason we are where we are right now is we’ve disregarded things like that,” Padres outfielder Will Venable of San Rafael told me in the Padres’ dugout before Friday night’s game.
Venable and his teammates understood that Sanchez said what he said in the heat of the moment minutes after an 8-7 loss to the Braves in Atlanta where Sanchez was rocked for four runs and five hits in just four innings and let his team down. Sanchez tried to pick them up.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have command of his pitches during the game or his common sense after it and he picked on the Padres.

The Padres didn’t mind. They never expected to be in first place at this time when the season started. How could they be mad?

It’s not like Sanchez went Brandon Phillips on them and called them all a bunch of over active vaginas.

The Padres seem like a bunch of nice guys, led by Venable. Let me tell you a story about him.

When I was laid off at the Marin Independent Journal last year after 22 years as its sports columnist, I sent Will an email. We had lunch a few weeks before the news so I wrote him to tell him I wouldn’t see him at AT&T Park when the Padres came in during the 2009 season as I had hoped.

Venable, who was back east visiting his girlfriend at the time, replied to my email with a long heartfelt note. He expressed his sorrow about the news about being laid off and recalled all the years he had enjoyed reading me in the IJ. It was genuine and sincere and I will never forget his note. He didn’t have to do that. He was becoming a big leaguer and he had plenty of other priorities in his life than to sit down and compose a long email reflecting on his appreciation of my career.

Simply a class act. It meant the world to me.

Thus, I have followed Venable’s career and he’s had a lot of highs and lows. He’s hit 10 home runs and leads the Padres with 20 stolen bases but he’s been inconsistent and injured and that’s kept him from being an everyday player. But he’s got a great dad – former major leaguer Max Venable – to advise him and keep things in perspective.

Will Venable has a good head on his shoulders. And so do his teammates.

Otherwise, Jonathan Sanchez would have been laid out Friday night.

Magical time for Giants in dog-eat-dog world

These are the dog days of August?

Game time temperature at AT&T Park on Wednesday night was 59 degrees?

Tim Lincecum is having a bad year and the Giants are in second place?

The only team above them in the standings are the San Diego Padres?!

Lucky dogs, these Giants.

In a summer void of hot summer nights and Tiger Woods’ under-par rounds, the Giants are still surviving and in fact thriving. The ballpark was nearly filled to capacity during a week night game against a fifth-place team. The Chicago Cubs are suddenly the most uninteresting team in the world yet Giants fans are packing them in.

What gives? Things with the Giants are weirder than the Giants fan standing in front of me in the AT&T Park press box with a beard and pony tail beneath an orange-and-black wig that makes him look like a skunk on Halloween.

Lincecum is not pitching up to the standards yet the Giants starting pitching is so solid that Little Timmy may be the third best guy in the rotation right now.

The Giants have the worst batting average in the National League with runners in a scoring position and yet they are ninth in the league in runs scored and RBIs.

And now trading for Mike Fortenot ranks as big news. Brian Sabean is not idiot. He picked up Pat Burrell as a .202 hitter in June and he’s hitting over .350 in August and playing hero. Sabean signed Aubrey Huff as a free agent in the offseason and he’s leading the Giants in home runs and RBIs. And Sabean played his cards right with the maturation and promotion of Buster Posey.

The Giants are winning with pitching and defense and just enough offense.

Lucky dogs.

England is a mad, mad, mad soccer world

I always have heard how England is a soccer mad country and now I know.

They’re just plain mad over here.

My teenage son’s soccer team toured the UK this month and I was along for the ride. We arrived in London the day of the World Cup final and watched the match in a sports bar in the hotel where we were staying. Though our players and their entourage had little, if any, sleep for 24 straight hours, we outlasted the local soccer fans who had gathered in the same space with us.

Perhaps they retired early because they were mad at the English referee, Howard Webb, who flashed more cards in the Spain-Holland finale than a kindergarten teacher during a math lesson.

As much as we hear about “football” over here and they snide about our version of “soccer,” it was revealing to see how our soccer players were so much more into the match than their football fans, though, in fairness, I would imagine an English crowd in a local pub would have been a more representative sampling of fanaticism.

Two days later, our U19 boys soccer team played the first of four friendly matches – the first against a group of 16-to-17-year-olds attending a soccer academy. Their lives consisted of going to school than playing soccer after it. Some of the players arrived for the match in dress shirts and ties.

Basically, they were puzzled as to how an American team would show up to play them.

“Why are you in England?” a young chap asked afterward, “when the girls in California are twice as hot.”

The game’s referee and parents I spoke with were intrigued by “football” in the United States and the American’s run in the World Cup. And they had various opinions about the state of England’s soccer in world play. Most of them disliked the Steinbrenner-like approach the English Premier League teams are taking to sign free agent players from other countries to huge contacts. The theory in England is this practice has stunted the growth of England’s best and brightest young players in a country where clearly football is king, witness the number of billboards in London featuring their football players.

My son’s soccer team played a men’s team in its second friendly. It had two players who were 35 years old and another that was 29. This was the friendliest of the friendly matches as there was no fish and chippie-ness between the Americans and English.

That wasn’t the case in the next friendly. Tottenham is one of the English Premier League teams and each one of them has developmental teams. My son’s team played Tottenham’s 17-18-year-old development team, a predominantly black team. These kids all aspire to play professional soccer. The players on my son’s team all aspire to have a good time.

After battling the talented Tottenham team to a 0-0 tie after the first of three 30-minute halves, Tottenham raised its intensity. One of its players took out one of our best defenders with a hard tackle that drew a yellow card. Another of our top defenders limped off the field with an injury a few minutes later and the game wound up being an 8-0 rout.

The final friendly was against a club team that was age equivalent. But their home “pitch” had natural grass with a roofed grandstand. They were serious about defending their turf and they were out to bag an American. The play was physical and our team was depleted by mounting injuries (my son pulled a hamstring) and it got ugly in the second half of a 4-0 loss but there were no international incidents.

Though many people in England seem to resent America, they all are fascinated by it and would love to visit the USA. And there also seems to be a growing respect for American “soccer” and our players came away with a greater appreciation of English “football.”

We’re just not as mad about it as they are.

The pinnacle of the sensationalizing of sports

Just got back from the Big Island of Hawaii.

It may be the only place in the world where LeBron James wasn’t visiting last week, though my teenage son swears he saw Terrell Owens driving a red Mustang convertible in Waikoloa.

I got up at 3:30 a.m. in Hawaii to watch a World Cup soccer match between Argentina and Germany. More guys took dives than scored goals. It’s like whenever a soccer player in the World Cup makes body contact with an opposing team, he reacts as if he’s been hit by a Toyota without brakes.

It was in paradise that I came to this conclusion. The sensationalizing of sports has reached its pinnacle, whether it’s a soccer player flopping or NBA free agency news non-stopping.

I mean I can’t tell the difference between Entertainment Tonight and ESPN anymore. Breaking news. Gushing anchors. Exclusive exclusives.

As you know, LeBron the King of the World is going to make his exclusive long-awaited announcement on ESPN Thursday night after seemingly making more visits than Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. I’m sure Shelley Smith is going to be there, standing outside the studio as LeBron drives in, giving us the play-by-play of the wheels of his SUV going round and round. ESPN lens will show us a close-up of LeBron through two or three windows crossing the hallway with an entourage of people who are there simply to suck up to him like a vacuum cleaner on a carpet of marbles.

The Beatles-like tour of LeBron will end in in of all places Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich? Is LeBron going to launch a new Subway sandwich and call it a Greenwich? Or Green Rich?

This is how stupid and ridiculous the LeBron Free Agent Tour has gotten. The other day on ESPN, news scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen announcing that LeBron planned to “visit Cleveland.”

Visit Cleveland?! He’s played there for the past eight years and lived in Ohio all his life! The King Visits Cleveland? That’s like saying Santa Claus visits the North Pole.

Last week I drove all the way to Hilo to see a natural phenomenon. Lava exploding on a ridge, so bright it cast an orange glow on the clouds above.

Then I came back to the condo and saw LeBron on TV. ESPN was watching his every move as if he is a natural phenomenon.

Well, the volcano of hype and anticipation is going to erupt on Thursday night in prime time when LeBron announces to the world what his next move is going to be. Miami? Chicago? New York? New Jersey? Los Angeles? The Freaking Moon?

I hope he decides to go back to Cleveland. Otherwise, he’ll wind up with his multi-million dollar buddies in Miami or Chicago or New York trying to stack a roster to jump start the LeBron Championship Tour.

Then what will the King say of his stay in Cleveland?

Just visiting.

52-inch, 62-pound, 8-year-old girl wins 100th Dipsea

The 100th Running of the Dipsea was one for the ages. Extreme ages.

It was won by 52-inch, 62-pound, 8-year-old fourth grader, Reilly Johnson of Mill Valley, who beat a 68-year-old grandmother of four, Melody-Ann Schultz of Ross, to become the youngest runner ever to win the Dipsea, topping then 9-year-old Megan McGowan in 1991.

The Tam Valley School student and the three-time Dipsea champion left downtown Mill Valley in the same group – with a 25-minute head start over scratch runners – and after 7.51 miles on the Dipsea trail Johnson won the time-handicapped race to Stinson Beach by seven seconds.

“I just think it’s wonderful,” Schultz said.

And to think that “Reilly In Wonderland’s” race almost ended in a tie.

“If I did catch her at the last minute, I would have grabbed her hand and we would have gone over the line together,” Schultz said. “That was my thoughts.”
Johnson was leading Schultz going into the Swoop, about two miles from the finish line. But she tripped and thought she put her possible victory in serious jeopardy.

“She said, `Oh, no.’ and I stopped and I pick her up. I couldn’t not stop. She was right in my way,” Schultz said. “I said, `C’mon darling. Get up!”

The little pixie and the Dipsea queen ran neck-and-neck down Steep Ravine but, going up Insult Hill, Johnson passed Schultz for the last time.

“She was like a gazelle … zoom!” Schultz said. “I ran so relaxed. I just ran within myself. I think I pushed her.”

Roy Rivers, the 53-year-old 2009 Dipsea champion from Mill Valley, finished third and was more surprised than disappointed.

“I ran exactly what I thought I would do,” Rivers said. “I just never thought an eight-year-old would run that fast.”

Johnson, who finished 199th in 2009, ran 15 minutes faster this year. Her clock time was 49:16, adjusted after the 25-minute head start. In her first Dipsea in 2008 at the age of six, Johnson became the youngest Dipsea runner to qualify for the Invitational Section as her father, Hal, sacrificed his own Invitational status to run with her and help shepherd her through shortcuts.

“When she started training, the original goal was to get her a black shirt (awarded to the top 35 finishers in the race) and then she trained and trained and trained,” Hal Johnson said. “Then we started doing times on the course and her times were so fast that we thought she could win this. We knew that as a family but then other people in the (running) community were seeing her times and then we started putting it all together.”

Johnson, who did her third grade history report at Tam Valley on the Dipsea, was so excited about the race on Saturday night that she had a hard time sleeping.

“I kept thinking, `I might win it. I might win it,’ ” the 8-year-old said.

Fortunately, her mother, Wendy, managed to convince her daughter to take a nap on Saturday afternoon so she wasn’t too tired from her anxiety attack on Saturday night.

“Only Brian Pilcher (the 2009 Dipsea winner) accurately predicted her winning,” Wendy Johnson said. “I am in awe.”

So was Johnson’s father. She beat him by 63 places.

The 8-year-old and 68-year-old helped the Tamalpa Runners win the team/club trophy for the umpteenth time, withstanding a strong challenge from the newly-formed Pelican Inn Club. Alex Varner, a 24-year-old scratch runner from San Rafael, finished fourth overall and won the best-time trophy for the second consecutive year. Chris Lundy of Sausalito recorded the fastest time by a female placing 11th overall. John Lawson, 15, of Forest Knolls was the first male high school finisher and 18-year-old Jacqueline of Petaluma was the first female high school runner to finish.

Jim Joyce is a hero, not a villain

You make the call.

I did. I thought Jim Joyce got it right today.

I thought the umpire made the right call with two outs in the ninth inning in Detroit. I thought the runner, Jason Donald, beat the ground ball he hit that was thrown to pitcher Armando Galarraga at first base in time.

In real time. I thought he was safe, too.

But this is a YouTube world filled with second guessers who have the benefit of slow-motion replay and too much free time on their hands and no balls who simply revel in criticizing and hating somebody.

OK. I get it. An umpire blew a call. It happens. It was a game nobody outside of Detroit or Cleveland gave a damn about until this mistake cost Galarraga a perfect game.

Yet Jim Joyce is perceived as a villain. Aren’t all umpires who blow calls?

Pardon me for saying this but I think Jim Joyce is a hero. It is perceived that umpires are never wrong. Well, they’re human like you and me. Joyce saw the slow-motion replay – like you and me – and came to the same conclusion like you and me. Donald was out. It was easy to see. In slow-motion. Over and over and over again. And over and over some more.

It was a bang-bang play in real time. Joyce was put in a position to make a split-second call as the ball beat the runner to the bag by a split second. It’s a 50/50 call. OK, maybe 55-45, but certainly no worse than 60-40.

But the second-guessers act like it was 100 percent an out and Joyce, a 23-year veteran umpire in the big leagues, is 100 percent an idiot.

C’mon. Watch it like I did for the very first time, without knowledge that a perfect game was on the line, and make the call.

The shame of all this is the focus is all wrong. On the day one of the greatest players in the history of the game retires – Ken Griffey Jr. – people are lining up to rip an umpire. That’s more wrong than the call itself.

Instead, Joyce is bound to become a national punchline in a running joke. I’m just waiting to read that Jim Joyce was on steroids and therefore Galarraga should get credit for a perfect game in the record books … with an asterisk.

What I’m going to remember about Galarraga’s near perfect game is not that Jim Joyce made a bad call to rob the Tigers pitcher of a perfect game but the way Joyce handled it. Honestly. He realized that he made an honest mistake when he saw the replay like the rest of us then apologized to Galarraga and Tigers manager Jim Leyland.

Jim Joyce is more than an umpire. He’s a man who admits mistakes and that’s not easy.

He’s a hero in real time.