Los Angeles, April 8, 1996
Vol. 08, No. 02

Dear Reader:

No thanks, I'll stick to chess club . . . Nearly 40% of the country's varsity high school football players were injured during the 1995 season according to a recent survey conducted by the National Athletic Trainers Association. Overall, the study estimates there were 506,452 high school football injuries nationwide, including 41,134 injuries classified as "neurotrauma." While the large majority of injuries (408,509) were classified as "minor" (requiring removal from game or practice but player returns to activity within seven days), There were still 42,312 "major" injuries (those requiring removal from a game or practice without return to activity within 21 days. In all, 7,130 injuries required surgery.

The Women's Professional Fastpitch (WPF) softball league is scheduled to start its six-city league play in 1997 according to the Winter 1996 edition of WPF's newsletter Diamond View. The six cities slated to host league play are Akron, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Minneapolis, in the Midwest, and Ontario, Palmdale and Sacramento, California, in the West. According to league President Mitzi Swentzell, WPF sought out growing cities with populations of more than 250,000 who have an attitude of "strong support of softball and women's sports in general." Cities also were chosen because of their geographic proximity to each other. To control travel costs, WPF plans to have most, if not all, team travel take place by bus. A 72-game regular season will begin in June 1997.

ADD Fastpitch . . . No sports league is without its share of colorful names, and the WPF doesn't disappoint. Our favorites are Akron shortstop Tiff Tootle, Ontario outfielder Dorsey Steamer, and perfectly-named pitchers Debbie Doom, of Ontario, and Sacramento's Amy Windmiller.

Anything to help the Olympic Movement . . . The good folks at BMW, official sponsor of the 1996 Olympic Games, are doing their part to help America's Olympians past and present. The luxury auto manufacturer has established a special purchase program for members of U.S. Olympians. No doubt those athletes now struggling for places on this year's Olympic team will be comforted by the fact that BMW is offering them $3,000 off the purchase of a new 850Ci, base price $91,000, if they make the team.

Reno's National Bowling Stadium (NBS) was named "Person of the Year" for 1995 by Bowler's Journal International. The new 80-lane 330,000-square-foot facility is the first inanimate object to win the award. Although the stadium itself was unable to comment, Reg Pearson, director of the NBS, was quoted as saying "we're damn proud."

Rumor has it that Brunswick Headpin of the Del Rio Lanes in Cicero, Illinois was bowled over by the decision. Headpin, who is the long-standing holder of the U.S. national bowling pin longevity record at 215,637 games, was widely thought to be the premier inanimate object in the game. Indulge us. It's April.

Believe it or not . . . At the conclusion of the 1995-96 NCAA ice hockey season the only unbeaten and ranked college hockey team in the United States came from a state not noted for its winter wonders. Division II-National Champion University of Alabama-Huntsville finished with a record of 26-0-3.

What do they feed those guys? . . . About this time last year, Sportsletter paid kudos to Grinnell College hoopster Steve Diekman for setting a new NCAA Division III record of 14 three-pointers in a single game. In what looks to be a school tradition, that record was tied this season by Grinnell's Ed Brands during a 60-point performance against Ripon College on February 24. Moreover, Brands easily out-shot everybody in all divisions, men and women. The sharpshooter knocked down 150 threes in 23 games while leading all divisions in scoring average at 33.7 points per game. His closest competition came from Brenna Werner of Division III Whittier, who made 123 treys in 25 games. Next was Darren McClinton of James Madison, who notched 122 in 30 games.

Looks like the whole Grinnell team can shoot the trey. Grinnell set a new Division III record of 30 three-pointers in a game against Colorado College, on November 17. That's 90 points folks!

Is there a fact checker in the house? . . . A recent New York Times article on Atlanta Olympic boss, Billy Payne, included a listing of America's highest paid heads of non-profit organizations. Included on the list is Harvey Schiller, who is listed as Executive Director of the United States Olympic Committee. Actually, Schiller left that job in October, 1994 to take a job at Turner Sports.

ADD Fact Check . . . The World Wide Web site for Sports Illustrated for Kids lets kids learn about the various Olympic sports. Our favorite is curling, in which the object is to "push a 4212-pound stone across the ice." That's one big rock.

ADD Fact Check . . . The December 1995 issue of SporTime, the publication of the General Association of International Sports Federations, identifies a photograph of International Olympic Committee IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch on page 15 as "IOC President João Havelange." Havelange, in fact, is the president of FIFA, the international governing body for soccer.

LAST ADD Fact Check . . . The April 1996 issue of World Boxing lists South African fighter Ginger Tshabalala as the WBA's ninth-ranked light heavyweight in the world. Unfortunately, Tshabalala was killed in a robbery in October, 1995.

Hey as long we're being pedantic . . . We've noticed an increasing use of the word "Factoid" in sports publications. Apparently most sportswriters interpret "Factoid" to mean "a brief usually trivial news item." This is acceptable current usage. However, according to the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition, the term first appeared in the dictionary in the early 1970s and originally meant "an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print."

Gives new meaning to the term national champion . . . George Mason University (GMU) took this year's NCAA Division I men's track and field title ending Arkansas' 12-year reign. Calling GMU's individual event point scorers All-Americans, though, might be a little misleading since they are all from other countries. GMU captured the crown with athletes from Jamaica, Uganda, Somalia and Hungary. A lone U.S. athlete ran one leg of the 1600-meter relay.

ADD Track and Field . . . Seems Los Angeles is the college shot-putting capital of the United States. Three SoCal schools swept both men's and women's shot put events at the recent Division I, Division II and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) indoor track and field championships. UCLA's Jonathan Ogden and Valeyta Althouse took Division I honors, Cal State LA's Tambi Wenj and Petra Juraskova won Division II titles and Rene Bustamante and Dagmar Flynt of suburban Azusa Pacific claimed the NAIA crowns.

Strike two . . . Major League Baseball's labor difficulties have affected a lot more than ballpark attendance. According to Team Licensing Business, North American sales of MLB-licensed products have fallen from $2.5 billion in 1993 to an estimated 2.0 billion in 1995. Meanwhile, sales of NFL- and NBA-licensed products have outdistanced baseball products over the same period. NFL-licensees produced an estimated $3.15 billion in sales for 1995, while NBA-licensees took in an estimated $2.65 billion last year.

ADD Sales . . . Baseball's product sales have slowed overseas as well. Growth in international retail sales of MLB-licensed products averaged an hefty 147% in 1992 and 1993. In 1994 and 1995, sales growth averaged only 5.4%.

A little in-house research gives us a new spin on the famed UCLA-USC rivalry. The two schools hold the same number of official NCAA championships, 73. When it comes to the unofficial records, the Men and Women of Troy gain an advantage with 89 titles to UCLA's 88. Most of Southern Cal's titles, though, were won long ago. Since 1969-70, the Trojans have claimed 20 national titles, the same number as the University of Texas-El Paso. The Bruins, however, lay claim to 44 national championships over the same period. And by the way, Stanford sits right in the middle, claiming 33 titles since 1969-70.

Fists of flurry . . . According to CompuBox, Inc., the largest recorded number of punches thrown in a fight is 3,020 during the December 1993 Zack Padilla vs. Ray Oliveira 12-round bout. That averages to 1.4 punches per second throughout the entire fight. Padilla, who won the contest, threw a record 1,596 punches, including a one-round high of 207.

ADD Boxing . . . The Dubious Distinction Award goes to Trevor Berbick whose four-punch performance in round one of his June, 1988 fight against Carl Williams registers as the lowest recorded one-round punch output. Further dubious honors go to Nicky Walker who was on the receiving end of the greatest recorded number of punches in a single round. Walker took a hefty 93 shots from Mike McCallum in the fifth and, to no surprise, final round of their October 1991 fight.

Despite some recent bad press resulting from Joan Ryan's book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, the sport of gymnastics continues to grow. USA Gymnastics projects an increase in total revenues of some $1.5 million dollars for 1996, with a total expense budget of $13.5 million. Those revenues will result in an extra $458,423 for the development of athlete programs. USA Gymnastics' biggest single expense, however, is insurance. According to the federation's controller, John Hewitt, the organization spends roughly $3,000,000 a year in insurance premiums for its athletes and events.

Those of you who couldn't get enough of Ken Burns' 18-hour documentary, Baseball, should be glad to know that on New Year's Eve Japanese television broadcast a 12-hour special on Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo. Who sponsored the show, No-Doze?

The wide world of sport . . . Taipei and India don't often come to mind as international sports powers, but weightlifting women from both countries seem to be shrugging off that image quite nicely. The women's weightlifting teams from Taipei and India placed second and third behind China at the 1995 World Weightlifting Championships in Guangzhou, China.

ADD, Weightlifting . . .Feast your eyes on Lili, the mascot of the 1995 World Weightlifting Championships, held in November 1995.

The AAF Paul Ziffren Sports Resource Center

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Copyright, 1997 Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. All rights reserved.