Sports Authority

I went to Cal Expo a few weeks before the State Fair opened to see how the new football stadium was coming along.

You know the stadium, the one that’s supposed to replace the racetrack where thoroughbreds and harness horses ran until Cal Expo kicked them out last year.

The stadium where Sacramento State University will play when it leaps into the football stratosphere by joining the Mid-American Conference.

The stadium where titans such as Mississippi Valley State will battle the Hornets for national championships.

I fell for Ed Kripp when I learned he buried his favorite racehorse at Buffalo Park, the stadium Kripp built for his baseball team.
The horse was entombed at Broadway and Riverside Boulevard, 6 feet under home plate. Or under first base. Or centerfield. As I wrote in 2023, the truth is unclear.
Kripp was not an average sportsman. He was a high roller who ran gambling parlors in cigar shops and a Downtown dance hall called Dreamland.

For seven decades, Sacramento State University wandered through the academy’s lost forest, praying higher education gods would take the school seriously.

Now there’s a leader with a new approach. President J. Luke Wood is turning Sac State’s weaknesses into strength, jujutsu style.

Wood backflips his critics. If the academic world thinks the Hornets are a circus, Wood provides the clown show.

Even vagrant musicians get pretentious when they plug in for more than one night. They declare any extended stay a “residency.”

Residencies are popular with entertainers who play Las Vegas. But as the Vegas A’s stumble into the second of three seasons at West Sacramento, nobody calls the interlude a residency.

I’ve heard “couch surfing” and “camping” to describe the A’s. But residency? When it comes to West Sac and the A’s, show biz pretensions can’t get to first base.

Major League Baseball sees the badlands between Oakland and Southern Nevada as a practical joke. In sports lore, old time baseball players were notorious pranksters. Just for laughs, they set shoes on fire. They called it a hot foot.

I’ve been tracking down the greatest single athletic performance in Sacramento history. The honor goes to Charlie Loeb. Nobody else comes close.

Loeb achieved a local sporting record that can’t be beat. He did it at Fourth and K streets in front of children, drunks, community leaders, pickpockets and cops.

Like any great athlete, Loeb had fans who loved him and detractors who hated him.

One group of detractors were church women. They were disgusted by Charlie. Another local group, the Capital Klan No. 126, Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, denounced Charlie.

I got an email from someone who thinks I’m too critical of the Kings. A reader named Debbie Sharp writes, “You must thrive on negativity! Some of us are hardcore Kings fans! Apparently not you.”

I’ve heard these complaints since 1984 when I went to Kansas City to investigate Kings fans who were about to lose their basketball team.

I found a Missouri Kings fan club and talked to eight or nine people upset about the franchise moving to Sacramento.