The cash machines in Moscow weigh 200 pounds, so it takes a big man to haul one out of a store. On March 5, such a man did, in fact, make off with such a machine containing approximately 25,000 rubles, which sounds like more than the $838 (U.S.) to which it is equivalent.

So, if you knew that the miscreant was an athlete, what sort of athlete do you suppose he’d be?

A jockey? Not likely. A cross-county skier, perhaps? A diver? Naaah.

The fellow who hauled the cash machine off on his shoulders told police he was a professional sumo wrestler.

Apparently fearless, they arrested him anyway. 

To read more, click here.

Oh (Man), Canada

“Oh, Canada! Glorious and Free!”

How often did that anthem ring out over the hills and valleys and rinks and runs of Vancouver?

Why, 14 times, as it turned out, and that was enough for some legislators in Ottawa to start wondering if the line “True patriot love in all they sons’ command” was sexist.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced an offer to listen to Canadians regarding whether the line should be changed, and, nearly as one, the citizens said, “No!” Except for the ones who said “Non!”

And so if Canada wins a bunch more gold medals at the Summer Games in London or perhaps the next Winter Games in Russia, “sons” will endure…even if the medal winners are daughters.

Read more here.

Madness (Is All in the Mind) by Madness (from Madness, Sire Records, 1979)

Madness, of course, is not all in the mind. It’s also in television promos, in office pools, internet brackets, peppered liberally throughout legal documents prepared by copyright lawyers for network executives…in other words, it’s just in the air. Madness is internal, yes, but it is certainly external as well. But who would expect a simple, soccer-loving ska band from Camden Town to know that?

Ckaszite Pochemy by Unknown Artist (from Songs of Old Russia, Columbia River Entertainment Group, 1998)

I don’t know what Ckaszite Pochemy means in Russian, but I’m hoping it means “Can You Believe That A Sumo Wrestler Would Be Strong Enough Yet Stupid Enough to Pull an ATM Machine Out of the Ground Just for $838?”

Come Join the Band (Stanford University Fight Song) by The USC Trojan Marching Band (from Fight Songs, Delta, 1989)

Some might take this as an endorsement of the Stanford women’s basketball team, but it’s not. It’s our annual gift to basketball analyst Michelle Smith.

O Canada by The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (from Complete National Anthems of the World)

For those upset that the words of this wonderful anthem will not be changed in the interest of gender neutrality, here’s a version that can’t offend because it’s strictly instrumental. 

Taxi Driver Theme (from Cinema Century, Silva Treasury, 1996)

Robert De Niro will star in a movie as legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi? Nice. How about John Goodman as Bill Parcels? Ed Harris as Tom Landry? Burt Reynolds as Mike Ditka? Eddie Murphy as Don Shula? The possibilities are positively scintillating.

Dizzy Dean (Oh! Dizzy Dean) by J.P. McDermott & Western Bop (from Diamond Cuts: Top of the Sixth, Hungry for Music, 2003)

If the culture lasts long enough, there will someday be a cornball song in tribute to every Major Leaguer who ever played. I can’t wait for the musical tributes to Stan Papi and Archimedes Pozo.

This week, Andy Powell, a flanker for the rugby team that represented Wales at the Six Nations Championship in Cardiff last month, found out what celebrating after a match would cost him.

Early in the tournament, Wales came back to best Scotland, 31-24, thereby triggering a celebration that eventually found Andy Powell driving a golf cart down the highway while drunk. Powell was dropped from the team for the remainder of the event, and on Tuesday the other shoe dropped, as he was fined 1000 pounds and banned from driving a golf cart, or anything else with wheels and a motor, for 15 months.

Said Powell’s attorney, “He is regretful that any young boy who may see him as a hero might think this behavior is acceptable.”

To read more about Powell’s wild ride click here.

Human Curling

Rounders begat baseball.

Maybe rugby begat American football.

And now curling has begotten HUMAN curling, a game in which people in rolling swivel chairs wobble down a gymnasium floor toward a target, only to get knocked away by other people in rolling swivel chairs who’ve been cleverly spun their way by the opposing team.

An organization called “Obscure Games Pittsburgh” is responsible for this competition, which really isn’t much of an actual competition, because among the group’s traditions is an iron determination not to keep score.

The Pittsburghers refer to themselves as “a confederation of miscreants and rubes.” The extent to which they have really irritated people who care about actual curling is yet to be determined.

To read more and see a photo of “human curling,” click here.

Down, Down the Field by The All American Marching Band (from Fight On: The Greatest College Fight Songs, Laserlight, 1993)

Down, down the “field”? Shouldn’t it be down, down the “court”?

My Cart by Gus Van Sant (from 18 Songs About Golf, Pop Secret, 1997)

Holy mackerel. We’ve been using the musical holes-in-one from this record for years, but only now do I realize that Gus Van Sant is the guy who directed Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, among other films. He’s also directed music videos for David Bowie, Elton John, Chris Isaak and many others. It’ll now be a lot easier not to erroneously lump him in with the Lynyrd Skynyrd Van Zants. Plus, his music is a lot better than theirs ever was.

Cool Water by Sons of the Pioneers (from Songs of the West Box Set, Rhino, 1993)

No, no…you need frozen water for hockey, in Texas or anywhere, for that matter. Silly cowboys.

Swivel Chair by Nothing Painted Blue (from Emotional Discipline, Scat Records, 1997)
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When the Human Curling League forms and that no doubt soon-to-be-lucrative league goes looking for a signature song, they need look no further than this one, which was written by the redoubtable Franklin Bruno.

Most people who pay even a little attention to baseball know that the place where relief pitchers wait for the opportunity to enter the game is the bullpen.

Sometimes these pitchers warm up in the bullpen. Sometimes they flirt with the women who lean over the wall that separates the bullpen from the bleachers or the grandstand. Mostly, according to former Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, they spit and laugh at stupid jokes.

But if everybody knows that the place where these pitchers languish and long for inclusion in the game is called the bullpen, how many know why this is so?

I have been reading The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad, by Robert Elias, and Mr. Elias has offered an explanation for the designation. Mr. Elias has turned up the fact that according to Michael Bryson, who apparently knows about such things and wrote The Twenty-Four-Inch Home Run, “the term ‘bullpen’ likely arose during America’s Indian-fighting days. A bullpen was a square log military enclosure, used to contain captured Indians. The word carried over into colloquial speech as a place of confinement and was applied to pitchers, who were restricted to their warm-up space until needed.”

This is at least as credible as the explanation I once made up, which is that the bullpen was so designated because it has always been a place where those who were “confined” slung around a lot of bull to amuse each other and avoid falling asleep.

Saturday on “Only A Game” I will take up this matter with Robert Elias. I’m sure we’ll also have an opportunity to discuss some of the more significant theories in The Empire Strikes Out, such as the one that links baseball to such activities as “spreading…the American atmosphere to Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe,” and convincing Canada and Cuba that they ought to accept statehood.

First, understand that a “special press up,” also known as an “air” press up, is a push-up during which one’s feet don’t touch the floor.

Next, consider how difficult it must be to perform 20 consecutive special press ups.

Now you can perhaps understand how Romanian Giuliano Stroe has achieved the distinction of world’s strongest 5 year old, since young Giuliano recently turned that particular trick, shattering the previous record for special press ups, which was 12.

His dad has been taking Giuliano to the gym since shortly after the lad’s birth, but he seems to have a sense of perspective about his son’s achievement. “If he gets tired or bored,” said Giuliano’s dad, “we go and play.”

To read more about Giuliano and to see a video of him in action, click here.

Shirt-Free Sledding

A topless sled race scheduled to occur in Germany almost didn’t happen when the venue’s mayor, Mirko Ernst, opined that “the good name of Oberwiesenthal is at stake.” Obviously safety wasn’t the worry, since the competitors were required to wear helmets and shoes. The more streamlined participants wore not much else.

The mayor’s concern notwithstanding, 30 male and female competitors raced along a 100-meter track in the snow. More than 14,000 spectators also showed up, and though nearly all of them kept their clothes one, one 70-year-old gentleman decided to get into the spirit of the competition, stripped to his long johns, and went rocketing down the hill, reportedly to the day’s loudest and longest round applause.

To read more, click here.

Trophies from the Doc Wayne Athletic League are proudly displayed at the Walden Street School in Concord, MA.

Every Tuesday night during basketball season, Lou Bergholz puts on a funny hat — so that the kids will recognize him — and walks the sidelines of the armory in Concord. Bergholz is a curriculum consultant for the Doc Wayne Athletic League and his favorite part of his job is how normal it all seems.

“We’ve invited people to come,” Bergholz says, “and I don’t think you’d know this is anything other than really average high school basketball.”

But there are differences. Some players can’t dribble, while others shoot perfect lay-ups. Some have learning disabilities, others are serving sentences handed down by the juvenile justice system.

Sixty percent of the players are wards of the state, 80 percent are survivors of physical or sexual abuse, and all are in residential treatment with the goal of becoming healthy enough to do things that most teenagers take for granted: live at home, go to school, and play on a sports team.

“If you take even 30 seconds to think about what you think you might know about these kids, the whole landscape opens up because every single one of these kids has a story,” Bergholz says. “And a story that will make you ill.”

Round-Ball Therapy…

For one hour a week, these kids, who spend most of their days working through what they call their “stuff,” are asked to just play basketball. But, make no mistake, playing in the Doc Wayne league is therapy — therapy delivered in just six to eight minutes a week.

The league teaches players life skills through common sports sayings. A coach might remind his charges to “play to the whistle” when they are down 10 points with just a minute to play, with the hopes they will remember that phrase when they’re having trouble with a quiz at school.

Combine that idea with exercise, and you have a formula that works. Or at least it works for Annika, a 14-year-old, heavily pierced, faux-hawk-wearing student of Concord’s Walden Street School.

“Before I was kinda angry,” Annika says. “But coming onto the court, it releases everything. It gives me an adrenaline rush and endorphins, I guess they’re just everywhere.”

Ask most of the kids in Doc Wayne why they participate, and they will tell you they just want to have fun. But Annika has something bigger in mind.

“I think my main goal is to learn to leave everything else behind,” Annika says. “We’re supposed to keep our head in the game, not supposed to bring all our problems with us, so I guess it just teaches me to go with the flow.”

…That Works

That is the kind of talk Susan Wayne likes to hear. She started the league in 2002 in honor of her late brother, a pediatric surgeon called “Doc.” Today about 400 youths, male and female, play basketball, soccer, softball, and flag football across different seasons.

“It’s a beautiful thing to see,” Wayne says. “A number of people who’ve I’ve invited will stand there sort-of crying. The kids aren’t crying, they’re having a great time. But we’re standing there crying.”

Last year, Wayne commissioned Wendy D’Andrea, a fellow at the Justice Resource Institute’s Trauma Center, to study the league. Compared to their classmates, the results indicated that Doc Wayne participants showed significantly fewer internalizing symptoms, like depression and anxiety, fewer externalizing symptoms, like talking out in class and starting fights, and required fewer restraints.

D’Andrea says it is rare to find troubled-youth therapies that really work and are quantifiable with statistics.

The Score Matters Little

This season, the lowest scoring game was 4-2 after 40 minutes. Blowouts of 30-2 are relatively common. But the league’s success isn’t measured by numbers on the scoreboard.

Craig Babineau, the league’s athletic administrator, points to one court where a Walden Warrior, a shorter brunette named Vanessa, is in constant motion.

Babineau says when he first came to the school, Vanessa was so fiery that she would immediately escalate to physical confrontation if someone taunted her on the basketball court.

Today, as 17-year-old Vanessa addresses her team at the end of the game, you would never know they’d lost.

“Girls, you make me so proud,” Vanessa says. “You guys are amazing.”

Vanessa reminds everyone to go to school and to “suck it up when you’re about to flip out.” Playing in the league is a privilege, Vanessa says, and she sees it as her job to make sure everyone makes it to their next game.

“I say that a lot to people,” Vanessa says. “I say it to myself. When I get upset I’m like, ‘No, we have a game on Tuesday. I need to control myself.’ ”

Maggie

Maggie is a 15-year-old who does not look much like a basketball player, but she is introduced as a Doc Wayne superstar. And that is exactly what she is — in every way that matters in this league.

After more than two years living at Germaine-Lawrence, a school that caters to girls battling behaviors from cutting to fire-setting, Maggie has been accepted to a group home. She credits Doc Wayne for much of her success.

“We are able to really express ourselves in an athletic way instead of being criticized,” Maggie says. “Yeah, maybe some people don’t have the most athletic ability, but they get better because the teammates that they have and the coaches and the referees all really size them up and say, ‘You can do this if you put your heart to it.’ ”

Maggie says she was a couch potato when she first started playing, and now she is proud to call herself an athlete. Minutes after losing in the semifinals to the undefeated Cottage Hill Mustangs, Maggie is still grinning from ear to ear. Her coach, Betty, is still singing the team’s praises.

“I think you guys ended this season awesome,” the coach says. “You guys definitely played to the whistle, and you guys should be very proud of yourselves.”

The Germaine-Lawrence Pumas ended their basketball season in fourth place. Maggie is in the process of moving into the group home.

For the rest of the girls in the Doc Wayne league, flag football season is right around the corner.

Click here for more information on the Doc Wayne Athletic League

Hockey on the Moon (The Cold War) by The Zambonis (from 100% Hockey…and Other Stuff, Tarquin Records, 1995)

The gregarious Mike Eruzione, a member of the 1980 Gold Medal winning US hockey team, is twice mentioned in the lyrics to this most excellent song. It would be a worthy research project to see which, if any, of his teammates are also mentioned in popular song.

Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster by Akira Ifukube (from The Monster Movie Music Album, Silva Screen Records, 1998)

This music choice again betrays my misspent youth watching Creature Double Feature on the weekends. Ah, to once again be young and innocent and reveling in the wanton destruction of shabby cities and really dumb armies. 

Where Did You Get Those Pants by Brandon Ayre (from The Golf Album, 18 Songs, 2001)

We used this once out of a story about golf. It’s nice that the song is up for double duty after the Norwegian Curling team went for one of Loudmouth Golf’s more garish concoctions. If you haven’t seen their website, you should.
http://www.loudmouthgolf.com/

University of Arkansas Fight Song by The USC Trojan Marching Band (from Fight Songs, Delta, 1989) 

What, you thought I would select the Western Texas Junior College Fight Song?

Let’s Just Get Naked by Joan Osborne (from Relish, Island/mercury, 1995) 

Ok.

In the wake of Valentine’s Day, Jeff Ondash embraced a new world hugging record.

Ondash, who goes by the name Teddy McHuggin, clutched, grabbed or surrounded with his arms seven thousand seven hundred seventy seven people in twenty four hours. As he did so, his daughter, Carlie, counted the hugs, thereby establishing a new record for embarrassment inflicted on a child by a parent…or so it would seem to me.

Anyway, Ondash, aka McHuggin, achieved his record in Las Vegas while wearing a NASCAR-style driver’s suit covered with hugging logos, whatever they might be, and wore a wrestling-style championship belt, which is pretty much all he needed to do to merit mention on a program ostensibly concerned with sports.

Read more and see photos of McHuggin in action here.

Curling Fashion Sense

An unlikely connection between golf and curling was established at the Vancouver Olympics when the members of the men’s curling team from Norway revealed the inspiration for and source of their new uniform pants.

The curlers purchased their training trousers from Loudmouth Golf, the same company that supplies golf John Daly with the garish pants he favors. The Norwegians have been curling and sweeping in pants that feature a blue, grey, white, and red diamond pattern. Nor is this the first time those nutty Norwegians have pulled off some sort of spectacular sartorial stunt. At a tournament last winter, they all wore pink belts. 

Whoa, Nellie. Or, whoa, Norway.

Said one of the Norwegian curlers, “There are no rules against the pants, but there may be after this.”

To see the pants and read more, click here.

She had heard on the radio that pitchers and catchers were reporting to their spring training camps in Florida and Arizona, and this news caused her to feel “life is good.” It also caused her to check the Red Sox schedule for Opening Day, which is where her delight turned to dismay.

“Opening Day is at night?” she asked rhetorically. She went on to determine that her home team wouldn’t play an actual day game until two weeks after the season began.

“Opening Day should be bright and sunny with the promise of things to come,” she wrote. “It should be a day you miss school and work, and people are envious of you. And not only is Opening Day at night, it’s on a Sunday night, so young children, who want to watch the game, will either be in bed or they’ll be exhausted at school the next day.”

Ms. Frost ended her e-mail with “Way to ruin a good thing, Major League Baseball.”

Do you, too, yearn for a time when Opening Day actually occurred in the sunlight?

Or did you long ago surrender whatever romantic, pastoral notions you might have had about The Great American Pastime to the acceptance that maximizing profits would trump tradition?

We invite you to join the discussion of this particular loss of Americana.