They issued one of those excessive heat warnings Friday, advising of temperatures that could reach 110 degrees.
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
Acting UNLV President Neal Smatresk, a selfless, intelligent, determined, logical sort of guy, will use all of those traits to search for a new athletic director now that Mike Hamrick is returning to the same position at Marshall, his alma mater.
They had a news conference at Planet Hollywood on Tuesday to film an upcoming episode of “Shaq VS,” the new program in which NBA center Shaquille O’Neal spends his offseason challenging other professional athletes in their own sports. The opposition in this specific challenge is Oscar De La Hoya. It was announced beforehand that De La Hoya is “semi-retired,” meaning whoever wrote that line didn’t see the guy’s last fight. There is nothing semi about it, if he wants to live a long, healthy life. News conference is too strong a description for what occurred Tuesday. Far too official. It was more circus without elephants but plenty of clowns.
Fear is being replaced by hope for the recovery of sophomore Rebel linebacker Bryce Saldi following a skateboarding accident.
Take the negative stereotypes you have heard or read or witnessed about a college athlete, put them in a coffee grinder and turn it on. UNLV Rebel Rodelin Anthony doesn’t fit any, right down to the classical music he meditates to minutes before kickoff.
I suppose if they really were going for a reference that would honor the vast history of Las Vegas, the local United Football League team could have settled on the nickname Nomads.
Gary Shaw is certain of it. He thinks boxing still has it over mixed martial arts in one specific way. He has no doubt that when a megafight occurs, when a Manny Pacquiao steps into a ring and faces a Ricky Hatton, when so many movie stars show up that Denzel Washington is relegated to the 15th row, when the lights are blinding and the buzz deafening, the advantage still falls to boxing.
You still see it in movies. How boxing once was. How it truly mattered to all those watching. How the action inside the ring was thought far more exciting than whatever celebrity might be attending outside it.
See. This is what sport needs more of, and I’m not talking about some golf fan playing a flatulence machine along a fairway to make it sound as if Tiger Woods cut a big one while waiting to hit a shot over the weekend.
There was never some grand plan. She never really thought about it. She didn’t line up her body with a set of dots one day decades ago and point her toes toward the target and straighten her back and lift her chin and smell pizza and hear the ringing of video games and realize her slippery shoes were probably made ugly so nobody would steal them and think it would all lead to becoming one of the best female bowlers in history.
It’s weird. The Dodgers today own the best record in baseball. They also have the second-best team ERA and average nearly five runs per game. They have a seven-game lead in the average National League West two days before August, which I suppose could be an edge comparable to beginning a 100-yard dash 15 feet from the finish line.
Columnist Ed Graney writes an open letter to the acting president at UNLV, offering advice on the qualities he should seek in a new athletic director.