The beauty of polo is the synchronization of horse and rider, making it the fastest ball game in the world. With the horses topping 30 miles per hour, it is safe to say that the games at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club last Sunday afternoon were moving faster than the thick southbound traffic on nearby Highway 101 through Carpinteria.
Kirk Reynolds will not likely attain the prominence of the great quarterbacks groomed by Bill Walsh-namely, Joe Montana and Steve Young-but he was the last person to call the signals for the legendary football coach. It was a heady experience for Reynolds, a Goleta native who pursued a career in sports publicity after graduating from UCSB. He was the San Francisco 49ers’ director of public relations for six years.
Karch Kiraly has often been called the Michael Jordan of beach volleyball, but it might be more fitting to compare him to Hank Aaron. They both achieved magic career numbers: Kiraly’s 148 tournament championships and Aaron’s 755 home runs. They both performed with consistency, dignity, and longevity. To many baseball fans, Aaron’s number will be the most respected no matter how much it is inflated by Barry Bonds.
There were no corks popping at UCSB’s Caesar Uyesaka Stadium on Sunday after the Santa Barbara Foresters clinched the championship of the California Collegiate League. It was the 14th time the team won the league pennant, and it has a bigger prize in mind-a repeat victory in the National Baseball Congress World Series.
Like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, Todd Rogers has guided a raw understudy into high society-in this case, to a position of preeminence in American beach volleyball-but Rogers’s relationship with the younger man, Phil Dalhausser, is one of equality and exquisite balance.
Professional football has a new look in Los Angeles-it is the game of soccer, known as football throughout the world outside the U.S., and its human face is that of David Beckham, the English star whose impending debut with the L.A. Galaxy has prompted much hyperventilating by the media multitudes.
Mark Warkentin is a rare human being who might be able to hang with a pod of dolphins. He’d be the funny-looking one with the long, skinny flippers and the tiny snout.
Big-time baseball players have been known to come out of small towns in Oklahoma. Most notably, Mickey Mantle grew up in Commerce, a spot on the map in the northeast corner of the state.
The names Payton and Jordan go together like Sweetness and Air, which happen to be the nicknames of Chicago sports legends Walter Payton and Michael Jordan. But long before they made headlines, a lad named Payton Jordan from Pasadena was one of the fastest human beings you never heard of.
Austin Ford will be practicing moves on his board next month, as might be expected of a 15-year-old who lives in Santa Barbara near the beach and started surfing at the age of six. But there will be no waves for Ford to ride. He will be at Mount Hood, Oregon, sliding crazily on a snowboard atop a series of rails in an event known as the Bonfire Pipe to Pipe.
