Category: Sports

Opening week is upon us and the Padres ownership debacle has already done a lot to dampen the spirits of local baseball fans even before the first pitch has been thrown. With Jeff Moorad unlikely to ever take over the majority share of the team from John Moores, many fans rightly feel they have been bamboozled once again–left to sit in a park that their tax dollars built and pay through the nose for bad baseball and overpriced beer while the swooning friars stumble uncertainly around the bases toward yet another losing season. If you watch the Vegas line, the Padres are picked to finish last in the National League West with only 70 wins. Oh, the horror!

But, of course, that is the destiny of the Padres fan: losing. As I only half-jokingly tell my friends, I have taught my son to love baseball and love the Padres so he knows from a young age the first noble truth: life is suffering.

U.S. Supreme Court move backs game warden power over OB Pier fisherman

By Denny Walsh / Sacramento Bee / March 6, 2012

The claim of an unconstitutional search by a San Diego fisherman who got caught with an out-of-season lobster was rebuffed Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In denying review, the high court let stand a California Supreme Court opinion in June that people who hunt and fish have fewer of the privacy rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

The state high court granted game wardens the authority to stop, question and search citizens without a warrant or even without probable cause to believe a law has been broken.

All the warden needs, the California court ruled, is knowledge that a person is or has been fishing or hunting.

by Tony Manolatos / San Diego Rostra / November 7, 2011

I published a blog post [editor: see below] Friday that questioned Mark Fabiani’s criticism of Mayor Jerry Sanders’ Convention Center expansion plan. Fabiani, who serves as special counsel to the San Diego Chargers and is the team’s point man on stadium talks, sent me a response on Saturday. Here it is:

Editor: A former SDSU running back who played for the Bengals was shot and killed over the weekend by Kern County Sheriff deputies during an suspicious altercation that raises a number of questions.

David “Deacon” Turner was a star running back at Shafter High School, Bakersfield College and the San Diego State University before he played three seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals from 1978 to 1980.

Yes, it is true. Baseball great David Wells has been hired as a pitching coach for Point Loma High School and its baseball team. The former Padre and Yankee player, PLHS Class of 1982, was a big star while at our local high school, and named as the CIF Player of the Year.

Soccer is the great global game: the closest thing we have to a connective cultural tissue that binds our species across national and cultural borders. But only in a world so upside down could “the Beautiful Game” be run by an organization as corrupt as FIFA [international federation of football (soccer) association] and by a man as rotten to the core as FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Only Sepp Blatter, whose reputation for degeneracy approaches legend, hire a war criminal like Henry Kissinger to head “a committee of wise persons” aimed at “rooting out corruption” in his organization. And only these two twinning avatars of amorality would use “the Beautiful Game” as an instrument of Islamophobia.

I was just thinking about all the nice moments I’ve enjoyed in life and a little time I spent in Tucson last week ranks up there among the mellower of the refreshing respites from the troubles of the world I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in.

First of all I was in my hometown and that’s always enjoyable, not to mention that I was there for a very special event, wearing the lofty title of “guest speaker,” which I took to mean I was to have a good time so that’s what I did. Why not, I was around some of my favorite people: a bunch of folks wearing sunny smiles…

Thoughts Stimulated by a Historic High School Basketball Game

I was just looking through my scrapbooks and I came across two pictures of me playing high school basketball 55 years ago.

In one I was going in for an easy basket, a lay up, with my left arm shielding my defender from the play. In the other I’m springing high to win the opening tip of the same game, the first game in Pueblo High’s history. Their school building was still under construction, a few months shy of being done. We were housed in my school, Tucson High, the oldest public school in the state of Arizona.

Editor: Below you will find a piece by David Sirota about recent investigative efforts by Lowell Bergman, local boy, former 60 Minutes producer, and one of our heroes for helping to inspire the original OB Rag from the pages of the San Diego Street Journal.

By David Sirota / TruthDig / April 8, 2011

Lowell Bergman is the rare skunk who regularly finds his way into the power elite’s garden parties. As tobacco executives celebrated huge revenues in the 1990s, he was the journalist whose reporting about cancer and nicotine addiction stopped the festivities.

A little while ago I read a book by longtime Tucson Citizen sportswriter, Steve Rivera: The University of Arizona Basketball Vault, the History of the Wildcats.

What a nice trip down memory lane the book was for me as I’ve followed Wildcat basketball since the 40’s. And, never in my wildest dreams, did I ever think the program would evolve to what it is today although the school had a couple of pretty good teams in my childhood.

I have been a football fan for as long as I can remember. As a child I used to watch…

Hey, guys, I guess you’ll have to “Bear Down” without me. I was looking forward to ambling – or whatever you call the way we 70 plus year old dudes walk now – out to mid court with you at the halftime of the U of A/Washington game while thousands of Wildcat fans look at us, going “You guys played basketball?”

Well, I intended to be there but I lost my wife a few months ago and I find that my energy ebbs and flows. …But, wow, has it really been fifty years since we were tearing it up back in old Bear Down Gym….