| Astros move Triple A team to Oklahoma The Houston Astros will switch the team’s Triple A affiliate to Oklahoma City for the 2011 season. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Borthwick misses launch for Oktoberfest • Steve Borthwick goes to Munich Oktoberfest with team-mates• Saracens chief executive defends decision to skip ERC eventHeard the one about the international rugby player who snubbed the Heineken Cup launch to attend a beer festival in Munich? It may sound like a tale from the amateur era but European Rugby Cup organisers were distinctly unamused today after Saracens stuck two fingers up at tournament protocol by sending their captain, Steve Borthwick, on a team-bonding trip to the Oktoberfest instead.Saracens face a four-figure fine following Borthwick's non-appearance at the Millennium Stadium. The other 11 English, Welsh and Scottish teams complied with their promotional obligations but Edward Griffiths, the Saracens chief executive, said tonight that the club would defend their actions. He also recommended that top professional sides should put social activity higher up their list of priorities.Griffiths, speaking from Munich, confirmed that it had been his decision to send the former England captain on the day trip to Germany and argued that Borthwick's place was with his team. "This event was organised months ago and is all part of what we're trying to do at this club. If you want to beat the likes of Northampton and Leicester it's a game of inches and we're finding a few more inches here. We're trying to be a little bit different, which will always raise eyebrows, but maybe others should look at what we're doing."Saracens will be back at their St Albans training ground tomorrow lunchtime. Griffiths also said that ERC had sent out a list which did not require Borthwick's involvement in the on-stage part of the launch. The 6ft 6in lock was conspicuous by his absence from the official photocall, however, and Derek McGrath, ERC's chief executive, said it was "disappointing" that not every club had fulfilled their contractual requirements. Saracens did not advise ERC of Borthwick's unavailability until late last , after their 24-17 win over Northampton at Vicarage Road.Saracens will have to brace themselves for a fine in the region of £9,000 – "We knew what the potential outcome would be," said Griffiths. They will also argue that they have done more pre‑tournament marketing work than most in their efforts to publicise a fixture against Leinster at Wembley next month. They are unlikely to receive much sympathy from their rivals. London Irish sent their head coach, Toby Booth, and captain, Clarke Dermody, home early from Newcastle on Saturday night to assist their journey to the launch.It is not the first time a pre-tournament photocall has caused ructions. England and Wales opted to hold training sessions rather than attend the 2002 Six Nations Championship launch. But no one has ever offered a trip to the Oktoberfest as an excuse. Should Saracens lose to Leicester on Sunday, the performance-enhancing qualities of Bavarian lager may have to be re-examined.SaracensHeineken CupRugby unionRobert Kitsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Florida State romps over Sunshine State rival Miami Jimbo Fisher got his first celebratory water-cooler shower, shocked at how chilling it really was. On the other side of the field, Randy Shannon ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
No 2018 World Cup for Denver or U.S. The United States has withdrawn its bid to host the 2018 World Cup soccer tournament, ending Denver's hopes of being selected as a tournament site that year, and will concentrate on trying to land the 2022 tournament. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Frank Keating on the night Ali's legend was reborn Forty years ago today the star-packed celebrations prompted by Muhammad Ali beating Jerry Quarry were only just dying downForty years ago this very morning, we woke blearily from a feverish jam-packed party all‑nighter which had jubilantly swirled around a whole floor of the swish Regency Hyatt hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.In a way, 20th-century sport and celebrity culture were never the same again. It was the morning after the prodigal prodigy Muhammad Ali had contemptuously defeated the game white boxer Jerry Quarry in three rounds to mark his return to the ring after a ban of three and a half years for refusing conscription into the US army.What a swellegant elegant party it was. While just about the whole world and his wife were there in spirit, of course, the elite of the American civil rights movement was in rapturous attendance in actual animate fact – Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Ralph Abernathy, Mrs Coretta King, Arthur Ashe, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Andrew and Whitney Young and such harmonious top-team collectives, each member flamboyantly dressed to the nines, as the Temptations and the Supremes.Ali's biographer Thomas Hauser recalled all of three decades later that night of 26 October 1970 as "like something out of Gone with the Wind and probably the greatest collection of black power and black money ever assembled up to that time. They weren't boxing fans, they were idolaters." The New Yorker essayist George Plimpton also remembered that invasion of the Harlem peacocks in their enormous purple Cadillacs: "I'd never seen crowds as fancy, especially the men – felt hatbands and feathered capes, and the stilted shoes, the heels like polished ebony, and many smoking stuff in odd meerschaum pipes."It was half a dozen years since Ali had been listed 1-Y in the Army Draft Board's intelligence test, a level considered unfit for service; but in February 1966 he was suddenly reclassified as 1-A and told to be ready to be posted to the Vietnam conflict. The boxer applied at once for exemption on conscientious grounds as a minister of religion (Islam): "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."That single sentence reverberated around the world. But in much of the United States it was considered near treason. It took Ali's 43-month banishment from the ring – as the body bags continued to be flown home from Asia – for the popular sentiment to change, particularly among the young. Had the illiterate young boxer, after all, uttered a crucially salient sentence? Traitor was turning into a hero – and with nice irony it was Lester Maddox, the reactionary governor of Georgia, previously a club-swinging civil rights basher, now suddenly in need of some black votes, who broke ranks and allowed Ali's boxing comeback to be staged in Atlanta. Thus was set the scene for quite a party that October night.Who most smartly twigged the resonance of the party invitation was probably the square-shouldered flat‑nosed puncher Quarry, a competent but inconsistent operator, and one who could usually be relied upon to succumb when it mattered most. Which, of course, he did on this auspicious occasion. But what if Quarry's eyebrow had not been expertly scalpelled open by one of Ali's short corkscrewed right‑handers at the beginning of the third? Might the desperately ring-rusty, out-of-puff Ali have soon been flattened by the journeyman? Defeat by Quarry would have writ finis and kaput on any miraculous resurrection; the legend would have died, the fabled Second Coming script would have been torn up there and then, and Muhammad Ali would have been just a footnote in history.It was a quarter of a century until I was to see Ali again in Atlanta. Canonisation was total – but the saint who opened in 1996 the Atlanta Olympic Games was now a martyred, stumbling, dumb, half-tragic hero.October remains a potently seminal month for Ali idolaters. The two most far-famed laurel-decked contests – 1974's so-called Rumble in the Jungle and, a year later, The Thrilla in Manila – both took place in October. And that ostentatious Atlanta happening 40 years ago yesterday was halfway house between 29 October 1960, the day the loose-limbed, appealingly cocksure 18-year-old Olympic champion called Cassius Clay had won his first professional six-rounder in his Kentucky hometown, and all of 20 Octobers later at Las Vegas when a bewildered, broken-up and hurting Ali wretchedly ventured on a doleful attempt to regain his title against the apologetic new champion Larry Holmes. Not so much a contest, more an execution. Regicide, you might say.Ali hardly landed even a token blow and after 10 excruciating rounds his devoted trainer, Angelo Dundee, mercifully announced: "That's it, no more, it's the end of the ballgame."Muhammad AliBoxingFrank Keatingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |