Eye Openers: Hosting Games not priceless for Chicago
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By Don Doxsie | Saturday, May 31, 2008 |
The city of Chicago will find out Wednesday if it is one of the finalists for the 2016 Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee will trim the list of possible sites down to either four or five candidates, and the Windy City is regarded as a slam dunk to be among them.
Chicago officials said that is when they’ll need to seriously start anteing up to try and become the IOC choice. Up to this point, they’ve spent only $9.2 million in their quest to bring the Games to town. The price tag goes way up now.
While the prospect of having the Olympics in Chicago is very exciting to those of us sitting out here a few hours away, I’m guessing it doesn’t stir quite the same level of exhilaration for the folks who live in the city. At some point, they’re going to be asked to foot the bill.
And it’s going to be a really big bill.
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Doesn’t it seem as if we’ve been hearing about Chicago’s Olympic quest for about a decade now? We’re still going to have to wait another 16 months — until Oct. 2, 2009 — to get the final verdict.
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Things must be a little slow in the sports information office at the University of St. Thomas these days.
Former Quad-Citian Gene McGivern, who serves as the SID at the St. Paul, Minn., school, found time to calculate how both Augustana and St. Ambrose could have claimed to be the national champion of college basketball last season.
Kansas won the championship, but the last game the Jayhawks lost was to Kansas State, which lost to Missouri, which lost to Michigan State, which lost a preseason exhibition game to Grand Valley State, which lost to Division II national champ Winona State, which lost to St. Thomas, which lost to Buena Vista, which lost to Loras, which lost to Clarke, which lost to St, Ambrose.
And, of course, St. Ambrose was defeated in its annual grudge match with Augustana.
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After Cubs left fielder Alfonso Soriano lost a fly ball in the sun in the ninth inning to singlehandedly lose a game at Pittsburgh last Sunday, there were reports of some Wrigley Field bleacherites roughing him up verbally when the Cubs returned home the next day.
There also were reports — which were vehemently denied — that the ballclub ordered security people to silence some of the more vile fans.
They needn’t have worried. Soriano silenced them, getting two hits Tuesday, driving in the winning run in the 10th inning Wednesday and collecting his third straight two-hit game and driving in two eighth-inning runs Thursday.
Late-game hitting heroics aside, some of us wholeheartedly agree with broadcaster Bob Brenly’s suggestion that the Cubs use a defensive replacement for Fonzie when they have the lead in the late innings of close games.
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Almost as feeble as Soriano’s attempt to catch that fly ball Sunday in Pittsburgh was the official scoring on the play. It was a ruled base hit despite the fact that it hit Soriano’s glove.
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Lest you think Iowa is the only college football program having extensive problems with player misbehavior, consider the plight of Washington State. It’s having trouble with kids even before they arrive on campus.
WSU reluctantly had to sever ties with its marquee quarterback recruit for next fall, Calvin Schmidtke, in spite of the fact that the kid threw 37 touchdown passes for his high school team last fall. That wasn’t his most amazing statistic. He also received 11 separate citations from various law enforcement agencies over the past 18 months.
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At first glance, the Chicago Bulls’ choice to bring back Doug Collins for another stint as head coach is sort of, well … intriguing. Recycling coaches is all the rage in the NBA anyway.
Collins is an astute student of the game and a class act. But he also is known to be demanding, intolerant of mistakes and a stickler for detail. He’s sort of an older version of Scott Skiles, who didn’t exactly bring out the best in this group of players before being fired in December.
Don Doxsie can be contacted at (563) 383-2280 or ddoxsie@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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