Sports Authority

Kevin Johnson was elected mayor twice without talking about basketball. An NBA All-Star for the Phoenix Suns, Johnson downplayed his sports legacy on the campaign trail.

He wanted to be known as a business and education leader from Oak Park. He saw himself as a local success story and visionary, not an old jock.

This year’s mayoral election brings another Kevin with basketball history. The candidate is Kevin McCarty, state assemblymember and former city councilmember.

Generations of families loved Land Park Plunge and Riverside Baths. They celebrated the pool’s opening every April, rode bikes, walked or took the No. 2 bus down Riverside Boulevard.

They splashed in “artesian” waters on summer days. They swam on moonlit nights. Admission was 25 cents, kids a dime.

Then Land Park Plunge and its diving boards, patios and dressing rooms disappeared, dropped from conversations, expunged from memories, an embarrassment best forgotten.

Today nothing memorializes the significance of a once-grand community sports and recreation center. Let’s pretend this never happened. But it did happen.

Time to bet $50 on a harness horse named Roscoe P Coletrain. He’s no sure thing. Just a beautiful name.

I rarely bet horses on name alone, and almost never risk $50. I’m a $20 bettor, long shots. Anything over $20 depresses me when luck fails. Roscoe P Coletrain inspires dumb certainty.

The drive to Cal Expo is a reminder of how tough it is to make an old-fashioned, in-person wager on a harness horse. Trouble starts with finding the racetrack. I’ve watched races at Cal Expo for almost 50 years, navigated the parking lot hundreds of times.

The first thing to remember about the Kings is basic math. One plus zero doesn’t equal two when the numbers involve good NBA seasons.

Kings fans should be forgiven when they assume the team’s 2022-23 success automatically means the new campaign will produce greater glories.

I’ve heard people who should know better—pundits who follow the NBA for a living—predict last season’s surprise third-place finish, 48-34 record and sudden respect for a doormat squad ensures continued progress in 2023-24. Don’t believe it.

Earlier this year, when kick boxing ate pro wrestling for breakfast, I wondered what Red Bastien would make of the meal.

Bastien was the last promoter to book monthly wrestling shows at Memorial Auditorium. He was also a champion pro wrestler. He could hold his own against Rocky “Soulman” Johnson, Kinji Shibuya, Pepper Martin and Pat Patterson, but not all at once.
Pro wrestling was a weekly, biweekly or monthly attraction at Memorial Auditorium since before World War II. The mayhem ended in 1986, when the building closed for 10 years while authorities contemplated seismic repairs.

Barstow is not a beautiful place to die. But that’s what happened to Lew Moreing.

Moreing was a celebrity in Sacramento, a pivotal figure in the city’s baseball history. I thought about him the other day when I realized he’d disappeared from the consciousness of local sports fans and everyone else.

Nobody attending a River Cats game today would recognize his name, or know what he did to save baseball in Sacramento.

Moreing died at home in Barstow, a Mojave Desert railroad town, in 1935. He had a heart attack. His wife Edith checked on him one May morning. She found him barely alive. She called a doctor, but help arrived too late.