Columnist Ron Kantowski: Moore fails pop quiz on PR

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 9:20 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

Short of handing out hotel management brochures on the practice tee, golf wunderkind Ryan Moore did about all he could to be true to his school during last weekend's Masters, proudly wearing his UNLV golf cap and UNLV golf shirt while pounding the fairways and tiptoeing around the greens at staid Augusta National.

He didn't play too badly, either, finishing at 1-under for the tournament, tying for 13th place against the world's foremost touring pros and earning a return invitation to next year's Masters.

But when CBS' Jim Nantz presented Moore with the perfect lie to once and for all end the perception that UNLV is a place where NBA draft choices go to party until the Clippers call their name, he smacked it into a fairway bunker.

It had to be unsettling when Moore, the tournament's highest finishing amateur, found himself sitting alongside champion Tiger Woods and Hootie Johnson, the curmudgeonly president of Augusta National, in hallowed Butler's Cabin for the winner's interviews. It's never easy to be relaxed and spontaneous around a guy named Hootie, especially when 35.9 million Americans are watching on TV.

When Nantz asked Moore about his future, he said he was mostly worried about getting back to class Tuesday morning. As they used to say on Family Feud, "good answer, good answer."

But when Nantz asked what class he had to get back for, Moore mumbled something about it having been so long since he had been to class that he forgot.

Give him an "A" for honesty, but Moore could have said "double advanced trigonometry" or "quantum rocket science" and probably gotten away with it.

Oh well, not to worry Dr. Harter. By that time Moore had removed his Rebels cap and neither he nor Nantz mentioned UNLV by name. Perhaps the rest of the nation thinks they were talking about Wake Forest.

For most golf fans, the highlight of the 2005 Masters will be Tiger Woods' geometry-defying chip on No. 16 that zigged and zagged and somehow found its way to the lip of the cup, hesitated as if to say "watch this" and dropped in. It looked like something you'd see in "Tin Cup" or "Happy Gilmore" or one of those other goofy movies about golf.

But for me, the defining moment of the 2005 Masters will be the reaction of those two big guys behind the ropes who watched Woods' shot drop within view of the TV cameras. First they jumped up and down. Then they slapped palms, Then they hugged. Then they wrestled each other to the ground like a couple of grizzly bears fighting over a salmon.

These guys would have had trouble spelling "etiquette," much less practice it.

Good for them.

Years from now, I wonder if those two guys will become pseudo-celebrities, like those two knuckleheads who jumped out of the stands at Fulton County Stadium to run around the bases with Hank Aaron after he hit No. 715.

In auto racing, where head and neck injuries are often catastrophic, they've developed head and neck restraints that are attached to a driver's helmet and have greatly diminished the severity of those injuries.

In football, where head and neck injuries are less prevalent but still happen all too frequently, it's amazing that somebody hasn't developed a pad or some other device that would protect the exposed part of the neck.

If somebody had, perhaps the Los Angeles Avengers' Al Lucas wouldn't have had to die as a result of what appeared to be ordinary contact during an Arena Football League game Sunday.

Since they began tracking catastrophic sports injuries in 1931, there have been 1,642 players killed on the football field. None, as far as I know, were named Earnhardt, which probably explains why neck pads are only optional.

It's about time that Kurt Busch heeds Alice Cooper's advice: No More Mister Nice Guy.

The reigning NASCAR Nextel Cup champion from Las Vegas has been on his best behavior since running afoul of stock car fans a couple of years ago for trading paint with Jimmy Spencer, a washed-up has-been. Everybody in the stands already knew that, but for some reason they took exception to Busch saying it on TV.

Since then, Busch has been a model citizen, saying and doing all the right things in an attempt to get back in the fans' good graces. It's not working. On Sunday, when Jeff Gordon, who used to be NASCAR Public Enemy No. 1, punted Busch into the wall, the fans at Martinsville Speedway cheered as if the Marshall Tucker Band was reuniting.

Afterward, Gordon semi-apologized and Busch semi-accepted. Then Busch went to church incognito, where the Reverend Smith recognized him and punched him in the nose.

Every time management at Las Vegas Motor Speedway paints the bleachers a different color and jacks up the price on tickets somebody calls Ralph Nader to complain. So it's only fitting that when LVMS cuts its patrons some slack that somebody should point it out.

In a development that most would consider more shocking than Ken Schrader finishing in the top 10, LVMS, in cooperation with its concessionaire, Levy Restaurants, has lowered the price on virtually everything that will clog your arteries at the Bullring, home of its NASCAR Dodge Weekly Racing Series.

Fans attending the races will find a new $2 menu featuring hot dogs, nachos, popcorn and peanuts. Admission prices also have been reduced.

Now the speedway has to figure out what to do with all those pigs that have sprouted wings.

Reasonably priced peanuts and crackerjack must also explain part of the Las Vegas Wranglers' allure, because it couldn't have been the quality of the hockey that kept fans coming back to the Orleans Arena this year.

The Wranglers closed the season Saturday night with a sellout crowd of 7,773 and finished sixth in the 28-team ECHL in attendance with an average head count of 5,194. The hockey capital of Florida led the ECHL in attendance for the sixth consecutive season by drawing 6,207 per game.

The Wranglers finished 31-33-8 and missed the playoffs, proving once and for all that at the minor league level (oh, I almost forgot -- there is no major league level in hockey anymore) a cheap beer is much more valuable than a potent power play.

He wasn't quite good enough to do Charlie Cavagnaro's job at UNLV, so it makes you wonder what Colorado, which has more problems that Michael Jackson and Tom DeLay combined, saw in Mike Bohn.

Bohn, one of three finalists for the UNLV athletic director's job that went to Mike Hamrick two years ago, will assume the difficult task of cleaning up the scandal-ridden Buffaloes athletic program, having agreed to leave San Diego State to become Colorado's new warden -- er, A.D.

Bohn, who graduated from Boulder High, seems like a nice guy, although that isn't one of the prerequisites for curing what ails Colorado. In fact, there are those in the San Diego media who thought Bohn's credentials as an athletic administrator were more overrated than Breakfast With Shamu at SeaWorld.

He is known as Tim Wakefield's personal catcher but the way he keeps hitting the long ball, there are a lot of baseball fans in Boston who might prefer that Doug Mirabelli become Terry Francona's personal catcher.

Mirabelli, a 34-year-old graduate of Las Vegas' Valley High School, has prolonged his major league career by proving more adept at catching Wakefield's knuckleballs than regular Red Sox backstop Jason Varitek. But Mirabelli also hit another home run against the Yankees on Monday, improving his long ball ratio in the 3 1/2 seasons he has spent in Boston to 1 in every 19.7 at-bats.

By comparison, Barry Bonds has a home-run ratio of 1 in every 12.9 at-bats. Babe Ruth's was 1 in 11.7. But they weren't paid like knuckleball catchers.

Can somebody please explain why it's against the rules for Bob Knight to wear an auto parts patch on his sweater during the NCAA tournament but that it's perfectly OK for his protege, Duke's Mike Krzyzewksi, to hawk credit cards on the official Nevada-Reno athletics Web site?

I guess the NCAA manual and American Express have a lot in common. It's getting to where you can't leave home without either one.

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