Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 01/21/2008

1/21/1968:
The Western Conference scores three fourth-quarter touchdowns to beat the East, 38-20, in the Pro Bowl at Los Angeles. Gale Sayers, Bill Brown and Richie Pettibon (on a 70-yard interception return) all score in the decisive surge for the West. Sayers is named the outstanding offensive performer of the game for the second year in a row. He'll win the award again in 1970 before a series of knee injuries forces his early retirement.

Birthdays:
Jack Nicklaus b. 1940
Johnny Oates b. 1946
Hakeem Olajuwon b. 1963
Detlef Schrempf v. 1963
Rusty Greer b. 1969


1979:
The Dallas Cowboys lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 35-31, in Super Box XIII. The play that turned the game occurred in the second half when the Dallas tight end Jackie Smith dropped a pass in the end zone, and the Cowboys settled for a field goal instead of a touchdown.

"Roger Staubach threw to Jackie Smith, who was wide open. However, the ball was low and slightly behind Smith. Staubach says he threw it too softly, and that that's why Smith dropped it. "He was so open I could have punted it to him," said Staubach." -Dan Jenkins, January 29, 1979

Packers Fact:
Brett Favre entered the 2006 season with a string of 12 consecutive seasons with 20 or more touchdown passes. That was the longest such streak in NFL history.

INTO AFRICA

The Poisonwood Bible is one of those novels you enter and then inhabit for the duration. When you finish it, you feel you’ve really been somewhere. Here we travel to the Belgian Congo as it moves through numerous historical crises to eventually become Zaire. Into this world with its very different culture and climate comes Nathan Price of Bethlehem, Georgia, a self-anointed Baptist missionary who brings his wife and four daughters to a place he is completely unable to understand. The women tell the tale, each one brilliantly realized in the way she writes about what she is witnessing. Jane Smiley, in Washington Post Book World, called The Poisonwood Bible “ambitious, successful and beautiful,” and indeed it is.

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperTorch, 2003)