Sports Authority

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.

The greatest coach in Sacramento history invented himself in 1944. He was 25 and serving in the Army Air Corps. He walked into a courthouse in Los Angeles, filled out a name-change petition, and with a judge’s permission, became Sherman Chavoor.

Gone forever was Izikiel Correa, the Portuguese kid from Hawaii. Gone was the link to Guilhermo Correa, his abusive father who worked cane fields around Hilo and loaded freighters on Oakland docks. Gone were insults, insecurities and poverty.

There was a real Sherman Chavoor. He was a UCLA football star in the 1930s, honored for courage and sportsmanship. He became a teacher, football coach and high school principal in Burbank. When Izzy chose an identity to steal, he chose well.

Ryan Nickel works with scientists who fight crime. He’s a crime-busting scientist himself, an expert in DNA analysis. But there’s a difference. Around the office, Nickel is known as the guy who runs marathons.

“We have a great team, but yeah, they don’t see me as a scientist,” he says. “They see me as a distance runner.”

The label carries an ironic touch. Nickel works for the Sacramento County district attorney’s crime lab, where the goal is to nail people after they go running.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote a book about the Kings. Now I can finally write an update.

The fact that my book survived a decade without becoming stale and outdated makes me happy, but I know the truth. Literary brilliance aside, the book stayed fresh because the Kings did absolutely nothing worth writing about between 2013 and 2022.

They moved into a new arena, played a bunch of games that ended in defeat, traded countless players whose names I can’t remember and fired many coaches. They shut down for the pandemic and skipped their rent payments for a few months. They missed the playoffs.