Sports Authority

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.

There’s one rule in professional sports honored by every player, coach and team owner. The rule is this: Never blame the fans.

In private, free to speak their minds under the sanctity of the locker room, players, coaches and owners joke contemptuously about fans. But such words must never be spoken in public.

There comes a time when rules should be broken. It’s time to hold Kings fans accountable for enabling an awful team. It’s time to blame the fans.

Every now and then someone who knows my history as a sportswriter asks if I can recommend a good sports bar. It’s a fair question. I love bars and am flattered when people remember amusing stories I wrote about the Kings when I covered the team 30 years ago.

But I’m not much help when it comes to modern sports bars. Public House Downtown at 16th and L streets is bright and friendly and has countless beer handles. Ink Eats and Drinks at 28th and N is excellent for lunch with a ballgame on TV because the bartenders know to keep the sound turned to zero. Nobody in a bar should be forced to hear sports announcers.

Sacramento is preoccupied with whales. It’s an unhealthy obsession for a city without an ocean.

Ten years ago, Chris Lehane, adviser to Mayor Kevin Johnson, introduced the concept of whales to Sacramento. Lehane wasn’t speaking about waterborne mammals, which on rare occasions have detoured from migratory routes and toured the Sacramento River. He was talking about wealthy sports investors who swim in dollars—gamblers willing to bet on Sacramento.