Category: Sports

By Colleen O’Connor

If you didn’t watch the Olympics, you missed awesome talent, fierce competition, spontaneous joy and a history of new world records writ large. Not just excellence that dwarfed the past, but a whole new future.

A future I predicted in an April OB Rag column, titled, “It’s the Women, Stupid,” (a play on James Carville’s’ “it’s the economy stupid”) that will determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

That future was on full display in the Paris Olympics. Or as the NBC news headlines announced in bold print: “World beaters: Women athletes ruled the Olympics.”

Especially American women.

by Scott Hopkins / Peninsula Beacon / August 6, 2024

When Ryan Price saw Point Loma High’s head football coaching position was open he wasted no time in submitting his application. Principal David Jaffe selected him from a group of talented candidates to become just the fifth head coach in the school’s 99-year history.

During six years as head coach at University City High and his time as an assistant at La Jolla High, Price noticed qualities he admired in Pointer players.

“What I saw from afar is true,” Price said after a recent practice. “We have a bunch of scrappy, tough, really physical kids who are willing to work hard and have great attitudes. …”

Ethan “Duce” Gourson, a former infielder from Point Loma High School, has been selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates after his junior season at UCLA.

The Pirates selected the 6-foot tall, 200-pounder in the ninth round of the recent MLB draft, a result of the second baseman’s performance after three seasons in a Bruins jersey.

Gourson has batted .300 from the left side during his Bruins career, covering 168 games with 49 doubles, 21 home runs, 119 RBIs, and 117 walks. He was named a freshman All-American in 2022 and to the All-Pac-12 team in 2023 after a career-high .319 batting average and .515 slugging percentage.

By Steve Smith / 10News / July 9, 2024

The United States will send 12 athletes to the Paris Olympics as part of the team skateboarding team, and four of the skaters are from San Diego. Among those competing for the red, white, and blue is Point Loma High School graduate Tate Carew.

Like many kids, Carew grew up on a skateboard and knew at a young age that he was talented on four wheels.

By Mark Knudson / Mile High Sports / June 19, 2024

This much we know: Stan Kroenke likes to own things. And he likes to build big shiny new buildings, too. And he likes to put winning teams in multiple sports in those buildings. And he likes to do all this in multiple locations.

Stan Kroenke is not just a “Denver” guy as we all know. He owns championship winning teams in Los Angeles and across the pond in England, too.

What we don’t know for sure is why Stan Kroenke is reportedly set to become the “lead investor and limited partner” in the “redevelopment” of an almost 50 acre site in San Diego where plans are to build a big fancy new NBA/NHL ready arena.

by Ernie McCray

Jerry West’s passing
is very much on my mind.
The reason being he was a
true contemporary of mine
as we were born a month apart in 1938,
and our names, a couple of times,
were mentioned among
the top scorers
in the 1959-60
college basketball season,
both of us
basketball legends
at our respective universities
but my being in the spotlight in hoops
came to an abrupt end
while “Zeke from Cabin Creek”
took greatness to another level,
becoming the logo
that symbolizes the NBA.

by Ernie McCray

The other night
I saw a video
of a cheap shot
laid on Caitlin Clark
that was called a foul
but it seemed more like a mugging
to me,
way-way-way
unnecessary.

By Byron Morton aka Groucho Marx

The Rock n Roll half marathon ran past my house on Adams Avenue Sunday.

Not too many costumes this year.

by Ernie McCray

Bill Walton.
The Big Redhead.
Dear friend.
Gone.

And I will miss him immensely
for the sheer joy
he brought to my life,
beginning when I first saw him
on a basketball court
in high school,
never having seen
such dominance
in a basketball game,

By George Vargas / San Diego Union-Tribune / May27, 2024

Bill Walton’s passion for basketball was rivaled only by his passion for rock ‘n’ roll, in particular the music of the Grateful Dead. The San Diego-bred basketball icon — who died Monday at the age of 71 following a battle with cancer — saw the Dead perform more than 850 times, starting with a 1967 Mother’s Day show at San Diego State University’s Aztec Bowl.

“I loved the Dead right away, the first time I heard them,” Walton told this writer in a 1992 Union-Tribune interview. “I loved the speed, the dancing, the rhythm, the creativity. It’s just like being on a basketball team. Basketball, like good, creative, rock music, is never the same.” …

In recent decades Walton sat in as often as his schedule allowed with the Electric Waste Band, a leading Dead tribute band, at its weekly performances at Winstons in Ocean Beach.

It’s now obvious that Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito has been playing flag football in his court.

Two flags associated with Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ movement have been flown outside homes owned by Alito. And for the first flag, Alito punted the ball.

An upside-down American flag, which has come to be a symbol associated with Trump, was displayed outside Alito’s home in northern Virginia. A photo widely distributed this past week shows the flag flying on Jan. 17, 2021, just days after Trump’s insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Dozens of the pro-Trump rioters were carrying similarly inverted flags and chanting slogans like “Stop the Steal.”

And now a second flag of a type carried by those rioters was displayed outside Alito’s beach vacation home in New Jersey last summer. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag which is a white flag with a green pine tree was seen flying at the Alito beach home.