Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 8/30-9/1/2011

8/30/1904:
The Olympic marathon in St. Louis ends in controversy. The course includes seven hills on unpaved roads, and the judges, doctors and journalists constantly raise dust by following the runners in automobiles. The temperature is 90, and the only water available is from a well located 12 miles from the stadium, where the race starts and ends. After 3 hours and 13 minutes, Fred Lorz of New York is declared the winner. Just before he's given the gold medal, however, it's discovered that he had run only 9 miles, hitched a ride in a car for 11 miles and then started running again. The real winner was American Thomas Hicks, who made it to the finish line after being administered an oral dose of strychnine sulfate along with several sips of brandy by his handlers during the race.

Birthdays:
Ted Williams b. 1918
Jean-Claude Killy b. 1943
Tug mcGraw b. 1944
Robert Parish b. 1953
Shaun Alexander b. 1977

Packers Fact:
The Packers led the NFL in interception returns for touchdowns in 2008. 6 of their 22 picks were brought back the distance.

8/31/1934:
College football's All-Star Game is staged for the first time. Pitting the best seniors from the previous year's college senior class against the defending NFL champion, it will be played annually at Soldier Field in Chicago until 1976. Tonight's game, held as part of the Chicago World's Fair, draws a crowd of 79,432 and ends in a 0-0 tie with the Chicago Bears. Night games are still a rarity in 1934. According to The New York Times, the stadium is "a picture of splendor, with 100 powerful lights casting upon the lightning-fast greensward, and the World's Fair lights of red, blue and green in the background." As each college player in introduced, he's followed onto the field by a single beam of light while a band plays the song from his alma mater.

Birthdays:
Jim Finks b. 1927
Jean Beliveau b. 1931
Frank Robinson b. 1935
Edwin Moses b. 1955
Hideo Nomo b. 1968

Packers Fact:
Mike Holmgren went 84-42 (a stellar winning percentage of .667, including postseason) as the Packers' coach from 1992 to 1998.

9/1/1991:
At 51, Harry Grant of Taylorsville, North Carolina, becomes the oldest winner of a NASCAR cup race, claiming victory in the Heinz 500 at Darlington Raceway. Amazingly, it's teh first of a record-tying four-straight victories for Gant. On September 7, he wins the Miller Genuine Draft 400 at the Richmond International Raceway. On September 15, he wins the Peak Antifreeze 500 at the Dover International Speedway. On September 22, he crashes on Lap 377 of the Goody's 500 at the Martinsville Speedway, but his team repairs the car and he proceeds to charge through the field to regain the lead.

Birthdays:
Rocky Marciano b. 1923
Guy Rodgers b. 1935
Tim Hardaway b. 1966
Cuttino Mobley b. 1974
Clinton Portis b. 1981

Packers Fact:
The Packers drafted quarterback Don Majkowski in the 10th round in 1987 out of Virginia. He played in Green Bay for six seasons.

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

—STEPHEN KING, American novelist

“The secret of happiness is not discovered in the absence of trials, but in the midst of them.”

—TED NACE, American writer

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blest.

—ALEXANDER POPE, English poet

ON AND THAT’S WHY THE NEW TESTAMENT
IS WRITTEN IN CHRISTIAN

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The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.

former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania), in “a lecture on Islam” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

ON AND THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES FOR
WRITING THIS SORT OF FILM DIALOGUE

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There are consequences for breaking the heart of a murderous bastard.

Bill (David Carradine), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

ON WE’RE NOT GETTING SOMETHING HERE

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Andrea de Cesaris—the man who has won more Grands Prix than anyone else without actually winning one of them.

racing commentator Murray Walker

KILLER THRILLER

At an academic conference in Buenos Aires concerned with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, German scholar Joachim Rotkopf is found stabbed to death in front of a mirror in his hotel room. Vogelstein, the story’s narrator, who has come to the conference hoping to meet Jorge Luis Borges, not only has his wish fulfilled but teams up with the great fictionist in order to solve the mystery. A truly clever and marvelously entertaining whodunit.

BORGES AND THE ETERNAL ORANGUTANS, by Luis Fernando Verissimo, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jule Costa (New Directions, 2005)

STRANGER THAN SHANGRI-LA

In his latest book after his bestselling Sex Lives of Cannibals and Getting Stoned with Savages, J. Maarten Troost takes us on a rollicking trek through the most populous and probably the most complex country on Earth. In Shanghai and Beijing, Tibet and the Gobi Desert, and many points in between, Troost gives us an enjoyable but grit-and-all look at this world-changing nation.

LOST ON PLANET CHINA: THE STRANGE AND TRUE STORY OF ONE MAN’S ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD’S MOST MYSTIFYING NATION OR HOW HE BECAME COMFORTABLE EATING LIVE SQUID, by J. Maarten Troost (Random House, 2008)

GIFT IDEA

In 1984 Peter Feldstein went to Oxford, Iowa, and photographed all 676 of the people who lived there. Twenty years later, he returned with writer Stephen G. Bloom and photographed everyone who had not moved away or died, which turned out to be a large percentage of the population. Bloom interviewed the subjects and was rewarded with their extraordinary and poignant life stories. The result is The Oxford Project, which The Atlantic Monthly calls “a hard-to-put-down coffee-table book, with big, striking then-and-now portraits, that pulls you deep into small-town America, with its almost excessive joys.”

THE OXFORD PROJECT, by Stephen G. Bloom and Peter Feldstein (Welcome Books, 2008)