Wednesday, July 13, 2005 | 10:22 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
A few seconds after his impromptu press conference broke up in the lobby of the MGM Grand Monday afternoon, Bernard Hopkins extended a hand so that Oscar De La Hoya could join him on a makeshift platform.
The four boxing fans and about 100 curious onlookers who had gathered to see Hopkins receive the red carpet treatment prior to making the 21st defense of his middleweight title Saturday against talented but relatively unknown Jermain Taylor of the not-so-fighting city of Little Rock, Ark., began to buzz and snap photos as the flashes of their cameras turned the lobby of the palatial hotel-resort into a constellation.
"We ain't fightin'," Hopkins chortled as De La Hoya held up his index finger in Hopkins' direction.
That's too bad for those of us who just can't get into one of those so-called NBA summer league marquee matchups between the wannabe Nets and never-will-be Knicks over at Cox Pavilion, and were looking for something sports related about which to get excited this week.
No slight to Taylor, a budding talent who probably doesn't have the big-fight experience to take Hopkins' title (although he may inherit it someday), but a Hopkins-De La Hoya rematch would go a long way to curing the summertime sports blues we've been enduring.
Their megafight here last September was intriguing until Hopkins stuffed a wicked body blow into De La Hoya's midriff during the ninth round and sent everybody home. But with The Executioner crossing off the days on his retirement calendar and The Golden Boy's face looking rounder than a cantaloupe, Orion the Hunter probably couldn't line up the stars to get these two back together in a timely fashion.
Besides, what once were rivals are now business cronies as De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions is co-promoting Hopkins' title defense against Taylor.
While boxing is a sport rife with strange bedfellows, this might be the most unexpected partnership since Apollo Creed agreed to become Rocky Balboa's trainer for the Clubber Lang fight.
With future games against the likes of Wisconsin, Hawaii, Arizona and Washington State, there's nothing wrong with the direction that athletic director Mike Hamrick is taking the UNLV football schedule.
But to paraphrase what Bill Rutherford told Joel Goodson in "Risky Business," it's not quite Cary Groth work now, is it?
Groth is the athletic director at Nevada-Reno and she's cooking up a dandy nonconference football schedule for the Wolf Pack, which will play Nebraska in 2007 (by then, the Huskers might even be able to handle Iowa State) and Florida State in 2008. Groth is also talking to Notre Dame about adding it to the UNR schedule in the next 4-6 years.
Joe Bryant, better known as "Jelly Bean" when he played for the Sixers and "Dad" to Kobe, has taken a job as an assistant with the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks.
The 16 fans of the barely alive ABA's Las Vegas team may recall that Bryant spent a day or two here last winter as the Rattlers' head coach.
According to a press release that went out last Friday, the Las Vegas 51s were 7-3 over their past 10 games. That sounds pretty good until you do the math and consider that before they went 7-3 over their past 10 games, the 51s were 31-45 over their first 76 games.
More recently, the 51s were 6-22 for the month of June. Not even Karl Rove could spin that.
But attendance is up and beer is still a buck on Thursday. So who cares if the 51s can't hit the cutoff man?
I knew a guy who paid a buck for a bleacher seat at Wrigley Field and saw Milt Pappas pitch a no-hitter against the Padres.
A week ago last Friday, I paid $7 for an upper deck seat at Kaufman Stadium and watched the Royals bat out of order in the first inning against the Angels.
Oh well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I think the last team to bat out of order in an organized baseball game was the Bad News Bears when Buttermaker forgot to tell Ogilvie he was dropping him to sixth in the order.
As my brother-in-law said, if you're strolling from the on-deck circle to the batter's box and they're not showing your picture on the scoreboard, that's a pretty good indication that it's not your turn to hit.
Actually, it was a clerical error -- Royals manager Buddy Bell turned in the wrong lineup card to the umpires -- that resulted in KC batting out of order.
Anybody who thinks female race car driver Danica Patrick's 15 minutes of fame are almost up wasn't at Kansas Speedway Fourth of July weekend when the lines at her souvenir trailer stretched almost to Topeka.
Meanwhile, the guys manning the booth of Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon and his high-profile Andretti-Green racing teammates -- which was right next door to Patrick's -- were working a crossword puzzle.
Patrick once again proved she could race with the boys at Kansas when she became the first woman in a major racing series to qualify on the pole. But her team missed on her car's setup and Patrick, a 23-year-old rookie, had to settle for ninth place in the race.
No doubt, it wasn't the finish for which she and the publicity-starved IRL had hoped. But it was still one place better than her teammate Buddy Rice, who, I might add, won the 2004 Indy 500.
I'm one of the few race fans who prefers Indy cars to stock cars for various reasons, not the least of which is that the car, team and driver that most deserves to win usually does so in the IRL and Champ Car and even in Formula One, at least on the occasions when more than six cars start the race.
That's not always the case in NASCAR.
When I turned on Sunday's NASCAR race near Chicago, Matt Kenseth was leading. When I fell asleep during the middle of the race, Matt Kenseth was leading. When I woke up, Matt Kenseth was leading. In fact, Matt Kenseth led 176 of the 267 laps.
But he didn't lead the last one, because when NASCAR threw the yellow flag when somebody threw an invisible hot dog wrapper on the track, it allowed Dale Earnhardt Jr. to catch up and beat Kenseth out of the pits for the final sprint to the finish.
It's almost getting to where leading the most laps in a NASCAR race means about as much as the Clippers having a 15-point lead at halftime.
Now that Steffi Graf is back playing tennis (albeit a one-off match with the Houston Wranglers of the World Team Tennis league) one of the big Strip hotels needs to get her and hubby Andre Agassi together for one of those exhibition matches we used to do around here.
Heck, if they're willing to do it for a TV commercial, why wouldn't Steffi and Andre be willing to play best-of-3 sets in front of their adoring fans, whose ticket money could then be turned over to one of their many charities or honorable causes?
My other big tennis idea is to talk Anna Kournikova into hitting a few cans of balls against the wall at Sunset Park and charging admission.
College Sports TV, the Mountain West Conference's new broadcast partner, is televising next week's MWC football media day from San Diego, marking a first for the conference. But "Mountain West Football Media Blitz" will not be available in Las Vegas, because CSTV is not available in Las Vegas.
That's too bad, because then local fans could see for themselves what a waste of time and money that football media day is, especially when it's in July.
You'd really have to be a hardcore UNLV fan -- or related to one of the coaches -- to recall the opening game of the 1980-81 basketball season at the old Las Vegas Convention Center pitting the Rebels against a tiny NAIA school from New Mexico.
It was a closer game than anybody expected until the final five minutes or so, when the Rebels finally pulled away to an 83-70 victory against Western New Mexico.
One of the coaches in that game -- the one with hair -- is the reason you're reading this.
His name was Dick Drangmeister, and during his 23-year career as an NAIA and NCAA Division II coach his teams won 369 games and six conference championships, which meant nothing to him. What meant everything to him is that his players graduate and go on to lead productive lives, and most of them did.
He was a demanding coach, a man's man. But if you gave him an inch, he'd give you a mile. Or two.
Last Friday, Coach Drag -- my uncle -- died following a bout with cancer. I am proud to dedicate this column to his memory.
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