Sports Authority

Some NBA teams don’t worry about balancing the books. Their owners swim in deep green seas of personal wealth. They treat league membership as an extension of their entitlement, a bragging right with benefits of ballooning equity.

The Kings are different. Their owners are rich, relatively speaking, but can’t matchup against billionaires. A welterweight bank account is a big disadvantage in a game played by heavyweights.

My friend Bill Conlin would fill the room with unprintable words if he could hear what I’m about to say. But Bill is resting at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery and not likely to notice.

Bill was a baseball guy. The demise of baseball in Sacramento saddened him. He died two years before the River Cats arrived and never had the pleasure of wrapping his hands around a cold beer at Raley Field or Sutter Health Park. As a newspaper sports editor, he covered the burials of two Solons iterations, in 1961 and 1976.

So I hope Bill’s spirit forgives me for saying it’s a good thing Sacramento isn’t a baseball town these days. Because baseball is dying.

As an old sportswriter whose tastes favor unfashionable games such as boxing, horseracing and indoor track meets, I was suspicious when I heard people talk about pickleball.

What’s that? I figured pickleball involved cucumbers and suburban backyard parties and lazy summer afternoons. A silly fad.

Then I began to get emails from pickleball devotees inviting me to play. The emails bubbled with enthusiasm and fellowship. The authors insisted I’d love their little game. I normally respond right away to emails. These I deleted.

There are many reasons why the Kings are arguably the worst team in professional sports. Coaches always get blamed, but they’re just part of the problem.

Thirty men have coached the Kings since 1948. Only two can be considered heroic—Les Harrison, who founded the team and won its only championship, and Rick Adelman, the best skipper in the Sacramento era.

Other Kings coaches have floated between mediocre, pretty awful and just bad. Only a few fit the definition of totally horrible. But if a scientific connection between coaching and victory existed in the NBA, surely the Kings would have stumbled across it by now. They would have something better to show than seven decades of failure.

On wintery Friday nights when the town is quiet and my friends have gone home, I sometimes treat myself to harness races at Cal Expo. This ritual is not driven by a gambling passion—outside the track, I never bet on anything—but because I find the races peaceful and nostalgic.

If you grew up in Sacramento, horse racing has always been around, a low-profile piece of the sports landscape, faithfully delivering entertainment and fellowship and cold beer and hot dogs. It’s a living museum piece woven into local history.

When Leland Stanford sought photographic proof that racehorses launch themselves into the air as they gallop, he brought his experiment to Union Park, a 19th century track in Midtown. Joe DiMaggio liked to sit in Cal Expo’s dull, gray press box for State Fair thoroughbred races because nobody bothered him there.

It’s getting tough to hold an election without someone claiming the results are rigged or crooked or somehow fixed. But there’s an easy way for Sacramento citizens to tell whether elections are less than honest. Keep an eye on the athletes.

In our modern culture, no collection of humans knows more about cheating than athletes. Name a sport and you’ll find a cheater.

If county and state election officials start to hire athletes—or former athletes or coaches or trainers—and put them anywhere near the polling, counting and certification process, look out. Where athletes go, cheating follows.