I owe Gari-Anne Patzwald an apology and a mention in my column. Gari-Anne is the only person who answered one of the trivia questions I asked in my May 5 column.
Here?s the one she nailed: What do Byron “Whizzer” White, Bill Bradley, Alan Page, Jim Bunning, Ken Dryden, Roger Bannister and Jack Kemp have in common?
All of the above are former pro athletes who went into politics.
I didn?t receive an email response to any of the others. Here are the answers:
n Carl Crawford, Eric Young, Eddie Collins and Otis Nixon are the only players in major league history with six steals in one game.
n Barry Bonds, Willie Mays and Walter Johnson are the only players to win a second MVP more than 10 years after winning the first.
n Prior to Jay Cutler, the last star quarterback traded before his 30th birthday was Jeff George. (And yes, every Bears fan I know is going to get an annoying text message about this every time Cutler gets intercepted trying to thread the needle to Devin Hester or knocks one of his lesser receivers unconscious with one of his patented cannonshots.)
n Warren Moon was the first NFL quarterback to be inducted into the hall of fame.
n Brett Hull won goal scoring titles in 1990, 1991 and 1992.
n On March 24, 1936, Mud Bruneteau scored the winning goal in the longest overtime game in NHL history. Keith Primeau accomplished the modern era equivalent on May 4, 2000. (Mud Bruneteau also holds the record for ?only person in recorded history with the first name ?Mud.??)
n Red Auerbach chose Charlie Share ahead of Bob Cousy in the 1950 NBA draft. This would have been one of the biggest draft mistakes ever made, except for the fact Cousy landed with the Celtics a year later?but only through a dispersal draft after the Chicago Stags folded. Cousy slipped to third, with Don Rehfeldt also chosen ahead of him.
n In 1951, the Indianapolis Olympians beat the Rochester Royals 75-73 in a marathon NBA game. (Bill Simmons has some excellent thoughts on this here: http://tr.im/sdq0.)
That?s it for the trivia answers. I?ll come up with some more trivia questions down the road, and I hope to get more than one response.
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One other leftover thought from that column: Twitter. I know, I know. Twitter is one of those things people either find confusing or would rather ignore. So ignore away, if you like.
But I did meet my goal of gaining 100 followers (and yes, I am counting ?TweetaCow? and ?VegasDining? even though the operators of those pages couldn?t pass a Turing test if their lives depended on it.) And, as promised, now that I have 100 followers, I will be reporting live from all the events I?m assigned to cover. That might not include much for the rest of the summer, but it will include many, many football games this fall.
As I wrote a month ago, if you want to find out what is going on in Tabor sports as fast as I?m finding out what is going on in Tabor sports, ?follow? me on Twitter. I?ll be doing the same thing for the high school teams I follow. If you know how to use RSS feeds, you don?t even need a Twitter account to follow me. My username is andrewottoson. It?s the first thing listed if you google my name.
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A thought left over from two weeks ago: If Landon Donovan represented any other CONCACAF country, the the goal he scored at 2:01 p.m. June 28 would have been enough to doom a generation of male children to a life of ?so were you also named after the soccer player??
If Landon Donovan represented any other country in the world, his left-footed finish to a 2-on-2 break in the 24th minute might have some day been commemorated with a postage stamp or a civic holiday. Fat chance of anything like that happening here.
No, as far as I can tell, the event has already been completely forgotten. It?s a shame, because it was really a fantastic goal scored in one of the most compelling soccer games in the United States national team?s recent history.
Adding insult, none of the usual explanations of our national disdain for soccer even apply. In case you missed it, Brazil won the wildly entertaining Confederations Cup final 3-2.
I?ll leave it to you to look it up on the Internet if you really want to know what the CONCACAF has to do with the Confederations Cup.
(But pardon me while I pause for cynical laughter.)
