Ron Kantowski on the people, places and things that made his world of sports a wee bit wider in 2007:

Tuesday, Dec. 25, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

PEOPLE

Italee Lucas, Jan. 15

It was late in the first quarter when the ball found its way to No. 50 of the Centennial High girls basketball team as it has for the better part of the past three years: As if it were made of metal and Italee Lucas had magnets in her palms.

Cupping the ball with her left hand, she used her right to slap it, the way the playaz in the schoolyards back East do when they're about to do something special. Even if they don't exactly know what that something special is going to be.

When basketball ceases being a team sport and morphs into a jazz recital, people stop keeping score. So with Centennial already coasting toward another 40-point victory, Lucas slapped the ball, as if to say to the spectators who already had lost interest, "Hey, you might want to watch this."

Then she became Herbie Hancock.

Diego Corrales 1977-2007, May 9

Hey, Chico, we were just talkin' about you.

It was a Saturday night and I was commiserating with my pay-per-view guests that the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight wasn't nearly as dramatic as its buildup when my wife chimed in.

"Too bad it couldn't have been like those welterweights," she said.

That's what my wife calls all the nonheavyweight boxing weight classes. But she was referring to your lightweight title bout against Jose Luis Castillo, the 2005 fight of the year, which was so bloody and so brutal that Quentin Tarantino should have directed it.

Five months later, when the two of you decided to do it again, Castillo couldn't make weight. You did. You could have pulled out of the fight. But you said no, boxing fans had paid good money to see a fight and you were going to give them one.

In the fourth round, Castillo put all that weight behind a left hook that caught you flush on the chin. After you were counted out, I remember the blank expression on your face. And I remember you looking toward the press section and mouthing the words "What happened?" as if we could somehow fill you in on the 10 seconds of your life that had come up missing.

It's the same reaction I had when the guy on the 11 o'clock news said you had crashed your motorcycle Monday night (May 10).

Mountain West hoops fans, March 10

They hail from dots on the map both big and small, from rugged outposts that once were military installations (Fort Collins and Laramie) to bustling cities named for Spanish dukes (Albuquerque) and Catholic saints (San Diego).

They come from far and wide, from dusty Texas cow pastures where they keep them doggies movin' to California beach towns where the only fragrance in the air is the scent of a warm sea breeze.

They are doctors and lawyers and, if you hang around the New Mexico cheering section long enough, you just might find an Indian chief, too.

They are ranchers and farmers, public accountants and private businesspeople, current-day major generals and Latter-day Saints.

They are Mountain West Conference basketball fans, driven to Las Vegas by a shared belief and a denominator more common than a painted face in the student section - that when the indifference of February yields to the Madness of March, there's only one place to satisfy an underlying need to be true to your school.

And it ain't Denver.

The Kruger family, March 22

UNLV and Oregon will square off Friday (March 23) as the Edward Jones Dome will serve as the setting for yet another father and child reunion featuring the Krugers.

Their names are Lon, Barb, Kevin and Angie. They might as well be Ward, June, Wally and Beaver.

They are the quintessential American family - yes sir, no sir, thank you, Ma'am. If not for Lon's profession, which keeps the family crisscrossing the country, you would expect to find them living in a home with a picket fence at Pine Street and Maple Drive in Mayfield. In black and white, of course.

On a conference call with reporters this week - and I swear I'm not making this up - Kevin said he went out to his folks' home the other night to play with the family dog.

Then he and "Lumpy" Rutherford stopped for a soda.

The Sin City Skulls, Oct. 30

AC/DC's "Hells Bells" is still ringing off the walls of the gymnasium when C.J. Arinwine, a former Marine and captain of the Sin City Skulls quad rugby team, gathers the ball into his lap and begins circling the top of the key in his $5,000 heavily armored chariot, the one with its wheels tilted inward and what appear to be trash can lids protecting the spokes. The gymnasium lights are shining on his shaved head and call attention to huge beads of sweat on his brow, the kind that used to drip off Wilt Chamberlain's and Bill Russell's goatees when they locked arms jockeying for rebounding position.

In front of Arinwine, seven other athletes furiously work the wheels of their wheelchairs. Four Nova Scotia Spokebusters station themselves in the three-second lane on the basketball court, forming a blockade that would have impressed the Spartans at Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

The three Sin City Skulls not in possession of the ball are trying to blow those Spokebusters right out of the water. They attempt to do this by locking wheels with their opponents and rolling them out of the way. Or by smashing into them, which, as I will discover during the next two hours, is the preferred method.

PLACES

Crown & Anchor pub, Jan. 19

Whereas with David Beckham you get style and champagne, with Ricky Hatton you get substance and a knuckle sandwich. That's the impression I got talking to their countrymen.

Having had all my questions answered, I excused myself to use the loo while they asked for the check.

When I returned, they had scribbled a message in my notebook.

"WHO WON THE RYDER CUP?" it said.

We laughed, but not nearly as hard as when the bartender handed them a check for $98.

"That's it?" I asked about the bar tab. "I thought you guys said you were from England."

Cruising altitude, March 26

It's early on a Saturday evening and a young woman from Boise sitting between a couple of sports writers on the return flight from St. Louis to Las Vegas via Salt Lake City wants to know what it's like to cover the NCAA Midwest Regional.

She seems awfully chatty and she's got a lot of carry-on stuff and baby seats are falling out of the overhead compartments. So my first inclination is to tell her that I'm really not a sports writer, I just play one on TV.

But she's the type who won't take no for an answer. She's already on her second can of Heineken and I know that at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, there's simply no way out of this.

McAfee Coliseum, Oakland, Nov. 17

I am standing behind the Oakland Raiders' bench at McAfee Coliseum before their recent game against the Houston Texans when 105 behemoths and Tim Dwight rumble past me with their chin straps fastened really tight.

The ground shakes under their collective mass. Having watched the 1989 World Series on TV, at least I hope their collective mass is what's causing the ground to shake.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a Raiders fan who seems especially eccentric, although at field level, all Raiders fans seem eccentric. He's standing at the entrance to the tunnel from where the behemoths and Dwight have just emerged.

He is wearing a No. 57 Raiders jersey with "Violator" stitched onto the nameplate and full face paint, like Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss, with spikes coming out of his shoulder pads.

Only instead of a bass guitar, he's swinging some sort of prehistoric weapon.

Flagstaff, Ariz., Dec. 11

The air smells good here. Clean. And pungent. Ponderosa pine at 7,000 feet above sea level emits a sweet fragrance, like when you hang one of those cardboard Christmas tree air fresheners from the rearview mirror of an old Buick. Only it lasts well beyond the next oil change.

This is a place you might go to get out of the heat, to get your head together, to write a book. But you'd better finish the chapter before the next Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train rumbles through town and the clickety-clack, clickety-clack of the steel wheels lulls you right to sleep.

Spend an afternoon here and it's easy to understand why Flagstaff was listed No. 2 among Men's Journal magazine's Best Places to Live. Spend an evening here and you'll see a million stars in the deep, dark sky.

Next to natural beauty, Flagstaff's most abundant resource is its motels. You can't really see them from the interstate, but trust me, they're there. They're there because Disneyland is only a day's drive west, the Grand Canyon an hour to the north, if you hustle. If you're headed east, enjoy Amarillo.

Or spend another day in Flagstaff.

Turn 3, April 6

Turn 3 is the nastiest corner on the Vegas Grand Prix downtown circuit - not because it's all that tricky to negotiate, but because the Adult Superstore and 24-Hour Arcade sits smack dab at the apex.

I wonder whether this is what city and race officials had in mind when they spoke of how the event would call attention to Las Vegas' glamorous image.

Or maybe it was the South Main Street short chute they had in mind. After the bump-and-grind at bookstore corner, the cars will pass two bail bond joints, a rooming house that used to be a jail, a Greyhound bus station, a combination liquor store and market, two dozen news racks chock-full of pamphlets featuring naked women and an under-repair domicile that is being converted into a halfway home for the homeless, but, back in the day, was known as the Victory brothel.

THINGS

Owyhee High girls' hoops team, Feb. 26

It is 743 miles from Owyhee to Las Vegas. It is so far that the crow that flies between faraway places had to stop twice for gas and directions. It is so far that the wheels on the Braves' bus that usually go round, round, round were square by the time they got here. It is so far that half of Owyhee's players live in another time zone, on the Idaho side of the border.

It's conceivable that if you are a parent of one of the Braves, and preferred the interstate highway system over dusty two-lane roads where buzzards circle for roadkill, your sojourn to Las Vegas would have taken you across parts of four states - Idaho, Utah, Arizona and, finally, after 11 hours, Nevada.

When I asked Gwen Ann Thacker, the Owyhee principal, if there was a McDonald's in Owyhee, she looked at me as if I were from Neptune.

This was Owyhee's second state title. The last time it won, in 1999, coach Carol Couchum's daughters played on the team.

But afterward, Couchum seemed more proud that 12 of the 16 Shoshone Paiutes who formed Owyhee's last senior class are now studying in college.

A basketball coach who has her priorities in order. Sometimes you've got to drive a long way to find that.

The Tennis Channel Open, March 1

How cold and blustery was it at the Polar Bear - er, Tennis Channel?

It was so cold and blustery that M. Freeze - as in Mister - was given a bye to the quarterfinals.

It was so cold and blustery that the press tent was lifted from its moorings and blew across the desert before it crashed to Earth, crushing three Munchkins and the Wicked Nastase of the East.

It was so cold and blustery that Court 10, which flanks Durango Drive, which flanks the open desert, which, at least this week, flanks Antarctica, was renamed "Ice Station Zebra."

If there is a lesson to be learned from the first two Tennis Channel Opens, it is this: If you go out early in the week, there's a good chance you will freeze your McEnroe off before the first tiebreaker.

The Sweet 16, March 24

And so this is where the magic ends.

This is where Madness turns to sadness.

This is where the Lord of the Rims or the Knights of the Roundball Table or that crusty old court jester Billy Packer have decreed this magical, mystical postseason tour the Rebels have embarked on must cease and desist.

The Oregon Ducks might have had a little to do with it, too.

Dressage, April 18

I have never seen dressage in person, or, for that matter, on "Wide World of Sports." But I always have been fascinated by the word. Dressage. It sounds like an all-in-one junior prom kit for guys who can't get a job at the malt shop.

A dress and corsage, all rolled into one. A dressage.

Actually, that's just the K-tel definition. Webster's describes it as "exhibition riding or horsemanship in which the horse is controlled in certain difficult steps and gaits by very slight movements of the rider."

That last part is where dressage and horse racing, a sport to which I, or at least my wallet, have been exposed, differ. While I have seen Angel Cordero Jr. climb aboard a 20-1 long shot and exhibit some serious riding and horsemanship, there's nothing slight about the movement of his hand - that would be the one with the whip - when his mount hits the quarter pole.

Roller derby on Fremont Street, Aug. 14

The game I watched on Fremont Street featured teams called the T's and A's. At least half the players had body piercings and/or colorful tattoos.

A few were decent skaters, some were average and others skated like Adrian on her first date with Rocky. But when they lost their balance and went flying into the crowd, guys guzzling beer from plastic footballs would help them back up, being careful not to touch their T's and A's.

At least some of the time.

The above are excerpts from Ron Kantowski's 2007 columns. He can be reached at 259-4088 or at ron@lasvegassun.com.