Lead dog eats, leaves no scraps
Martin Buser completed the first half of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race “almost eight hours” ahead of his nearest competitor, Lance Mackey, and got a gourmet meal for his efforts.
The four-time champion and his wife, Kathy Chapoton, ate roast duck salad and rib-eye steak in Anvik, Alaska, on Friday as the first musher to reach the Yukon.
He also received a gold pan piled with $3,500 in dollar bills, which sat beside the plates.
Mackey, whose time in Anvik briefly overlapped Buser’s break, didn’t seem too concerned about losing the money to his fellow four-time champ, but he sure would have liked some of that food.
“Hey, did you at least leave a dirty plate to lick or something?” Mackey told Buser. “I’m really hungry.”Street cred
A stretch of road on the eastern side of Copperas Cove, Texas, about 70 miles north of Austin, has been named Robert Griffin III Boulevard after the Washington Redskins quarterback who is from the town.
His hometown should have attempted to get Cowboys Stadium called that instead, since Griffin raced through Dallas’ defense over and over again when the Redskins visited.
Big in ‘Bama
Brad Dickson of The Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald, on an asteroid the size of a football field passing by the earth: “I’d like to clear up some confusion. This is not part of Alabama’s official kickoff to the spring football season.” Reloaded
West Virginia has armed Jonathan Kimble once again.
The graduate student beat out three other finalists to be the Mountaineers’ musket-toting mascot despite Kimble getting reprimanded in December for using the musket to kill a black bear.
Kimble has since agreed to stop hunting with the musket, but, even though only gunpowder is loaded into the weapon at West Virginia games, the Mountaineers might hope seeing him on the sideline with the weapon will get their opponents to surrender.
Bear with them
Brace for it, Cubs fans: Chicago might be bringing in a mascot, too.
In an effort to make Wrigley Field more kid-friendly, the Cubs have teamed with Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management to conduct a survey to grow “the next generation” of fans.
Among the kid-friendly topics fans were asked about were batting cages and radar gun zones, kids apps for smartphones and tablets, a kids section, a new Cubs song and “interaction with a mascot.”
The idea of a mascot brought pitcher Jeff Samardzija back to his days as a minor league pitcher at Class A Daytona, where he said fans, players and vendors abused the Cubs mascot on a near daily basis.
“That didn’t go over too well,” Samardzija said.
But would it work at Wrigley?
“Probably not,” he replied.
“People aren’t going to go to Wrigley Field and want to see a mascot.”
Unless it’s on bat night.
On second thought, maybe the Cubs need to hire Jonathan Kimble.
Quote of the day
“If you’re going to win 1,000 games you’ve got to have a lot of good coaches and a lot of great players. It also means I’m getting old.” Arkansas baseball Coach Dave Van Horn, who picked up his 1,000th career victory Saturday
Sports, Pages 26 on 03/10/2013