They always want to know. The coach. The player. The fan. The usher. The janitor. The opponent.
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Ed Graney
Ed Graney is a sports columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, covering a variety of topics and the Las Vegas sports scene.
egraney@reviewjournal.com … @edgraney on Twitter. 702-383-4618
Mark McGwire says he doesn’t know exactly what he took, that he can’t remember the names of the steroids he poured into his body over the course of a decade. He doesn’t believe they helped him become a home run king. He doesn’t view performance-enhancing drugs as a reason for his gargantuan blasts.
I received a message Wednesday that our mailboxes at the newspaper might change. I don’t think this means they will shrink any, which is a good thing.
PROVO, Utah — On this side of the court, it is just the first of 16 conference games, just one defeat to an opponent that loses at home about as often as Tre’Von Willis thinks pass first, dribble second.
Listen closely. You can hear it. It has happened each time UNLV’s basketball team lost a game the last few years.
They weren’t great odds for a fair fight. It was always 2-on-1. It was always two brothers ganging up on another. The matchup wasn’t always the same, though. It sort of depended on the day.
Call it what you want. A promise. A decision. A commitment.
Mike Leach is one part of the cycle. He is an eccentric part, mind you. He isn’t going to win any awards for conventional methods, and that was true long before he banished a player with a concussion to an electrical closet or garage or media room or whatever secluded place Adam James supposedly spent several hours.
I’m not sure who thought this one up. Uncle Roger. Papa Floyd. Little Floyd. The manager. The promoter. The publicist. The bodyguard. The chauffeur. One of the other countless enablers whose purpose we’ve never been able to figure out.
Three years makes perfect sense. It shouldn’t be any longer to start. Not in this economic climate. Not when your athletic department was just burned by a football coach who won 16 games over five seasons and is paying him $254,000 to coach a sixth year for a different program.
You can define most college football bowl games by the roller coaster of your choice. Teams either arrive at the top of the first drop or have already plummeted to its base.
Dave Rice was mowing the lawn out back when the phone rang, because when you are a college basketball coach with hundreds of young players set to arrive for a summer camp the following week, you do the yard work whenever a minute allows.
The majority opinion is that Jim Livengood won a race in which he finished second, something that might be impossible to verify and yet certainly plausible when you consider how his new boss introduced him Thursday.