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Robyn Norwood on female jockey Chantal Sutherland and the Breeder's Cup

Our Robyn Norwood, a veteran sports writer, spent some time at the Santa Anita Park horse racing track in Southern California for this story on Chantal Sutherland, who hopes to be the first female jockey to win the Breeders' Cup Classic coming up n Louisville, Ky., this weekend. From Robyn's story:

In a small annex to the jockeys' room at Santa Anita Park near Los Angeles last week, Chantal Sutherland sat in front of her stall on a stool that once belonged to Julie Krone.

Around her were not-so-subtle signs that the four jockeys in the room were different from the ones next door. Makeup bags surrounded the sink, and above the stalls were the neatly stacked towels Sutherland chooses because she knows they won't end up in the men's stalls: They're pink.

On Saturday at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., Sutherland will attempt to become the first woman to win the $5 million Breeders' Cup Classic. Not even Krone -- the first female jockey to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes in 1993 -- could accomplish that feat, although she did win the 2003 Juvenile Fillies on Halfbridled.

"The longer I've been a rider, the more experience I have, I realize how amazing she was to do what she did," Sutherland said.

 

Jamie Reno weighs in on the Aubrey Sacco story

This is unusual for us. Two of our members have now written about the same topic - the sad story of Aubrey Sacco, who has gone missing in Nepal, and the efforts of her family - including brother Morgan Sacco, a San Diego State University soccer player - to find her. Robyn Norwood wrote about it a couple of weeks ago for USA Today. Now we have Jamie Reno's take on it for ESPNW:

SAN DIEGO -- Aubrey Sacco, an accomplished athlete, scholar, musician and artist, is the brightest star in her family's universe.

"Aubrey lights up a room when she enters it," said her younger brother, Morgan Sacco. "She's an effervescent person, full of life, and she totally loves glitter -- it reflects her personality."

But a year and a half ago, the "Glitter Girl," as her family and friends call her, mysteriously disappeared.

Aubrey, then 23, was nearing the end of a five-month journey of self-discovery through India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 2009, with a double major in art and psychology. She taught yoga, studied meditation and volunteered to teach children in one of the region's poorest schools on this trip.

Aubrey, who'd been everywhere from Costa Rica to Greece to Thailand, took a 45-hour train trip to Katmandu, Nepal, followed by a 10-hour bus trip to Syabrubesi to get to the western tip of Nepal's Langtang National Park. But she may have made a big, perhaps even fatal, mistake when she left her laptop and other items at a hotel and headed out on the popular Langtang Trek trail alone. It was the end of the trekking season and very few other backpackers were in the area.

That was in April 2010.

 

Robyn Norwood, and college sports programs too big to be disciplined

Our Robyn Norwood had a centerpiece story in USA Today the other day examining college sports programs like the University of Southern California and Ohio State, and the inherent problems the NCAA faces in trying to discipline. First among them: Their size makes them somewhat impervious to getting a spanking. From her story:  

How do such powerhouse football programs ultimately fare after major NCAA sanctions? Are some simply too big to fail?

Recent cases suggest that. The Miami Hurricanes, hit with NCAA penalties for lack of institutional control in 1995, won the 2001 national title. And Alabama, sanctioned in 2002, won it in 2009.

USC — penalized because the NCAA concluded former running back Reggie Bush and his family received improper benefits from prospective agents — remains publicly cautious about its prospects on the field.

The Trojans' defiance of what the school considered excessive NCAA penalties is shifting toward acceptance. As J.K. McKay, senior associate athletic director and a son of the late Trojans coach John McKay, told boosters in a gathering attended by a Los Angeles Times reporter: "This is USC. We're going to be fine."

Others — including Larry Coker, coach of the 2001 Miami team and now of the fledgling program at the University of Texas at San Antonio — echo that sentiment about Ohio State.

"With Ohio State, I think you'll see the same thing, because so many good players in the state want to play at the school," says Coker, an assistant coach in Columbus earlier in his career. "When I was recruiting there for Ohio State, a mother once told me: 'Coach, my son was born to be a Buckeye.'"

Vacated victories don't mean vacated futures.

Robyn Norwood on a baseball Hall of Famer's fight with cancer

Robyn Norwood has a nice update in USA Today on Tony Gwynn, the ever-smiling baseball Hall of Famer, and the cancer that, for time, robbed him of that famous grin. From her piece:

LONG BEACH — Tony Gwynn couldn't smile. The idea that the Hall of Fame outfielder who spent 20 years in a San Diego Padres uniform needed smile therapy was like saying the eight-time batting champion couldn't slap a single between short and third.

But for a time, the effects of treatment for cancer of a salivary gland discovered last August robbed Gwynn of what he called "a big part of who I am."

"I can smile again. I can laugh again," said Gwynn, coach of the San Diego State Aztecs the last nine seasons, as he sat in the dugout before a game against Long Beach State this month on a field where he played many games during his Long Beach youth.

"People who know me love to hear you laugh, see you smile," he said. "For a while, I couldn't do either. That was really concerning."

Robyn Norwood on the ramifications of a despicable act

Our Robyn Norwood, a veteran sports writer, has a piece in USA Today looking at the repercussions from the savage beating of a San Francisco Giants fan after a recent game at Dodger Statium in Los Angeles. From her story:

Dodgers fans and supporters of other teams who have ventured to Dodger Stadium wearing a rival's cap or shirt have traded stories of incivility for years. A woman tells of her 7-year-old being hassled by an inebriated fan because the child was wearing Giants gear. (The mother was wearing a Dodgers cap.) Another says she was cursed out while 81/2 months pregnant for wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey.

But the attack on Stow has roused public and political sentiment in a way that neither a shooting death in the Dodger Stadium parking lot in 2003 nor a death after a fight in the stands at Angel Stadium in neighboring Anaheim in 2009 did.

Despite a downward trend in crime across the city, roughly half of all serious crimes in the neighborhood occur on stadium grounds. According to the LAPD, there were 21 serious crimes — which includes rape, homicide, aggravated assault, robbery and burglary — at Dodger Stadium in 2010, down from 32 in 2009.

"I think the fact that it was unprovoked, that it was so senseless, that it was so brutal," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says. "That they hit him from behind, kicked him on the ground. It just hit the heartstrings of everybody.

"This really isn't just about one game. This is about a culture that thinks it's OK to attack this way."

Paul Tullis on water, quakes and California's levees

Our Paul Tullis has a deeply reported piece in the recent Miller-McCune magazine about a subject near anddear to all Californians: Water. From his article:

[S]tate Sen. Joe Simitian, the Palo Alto Democrat who pushed through the state Legislature a historic package of bills that will determine a host of water issues in California over the next generation, including what to do with the Delta, told me the Delta is “California’s Katrina waiting to happen.” If, in a flood or an earthquake, a large number of levees fail at once — and there are 1,300 miles of them, a stretch longer than California’s Pacific coastline — up to 515,000 residents and 520,000 acres of farmland will be at immediate risk. Millions more acres and large urban areas will lose access to a major source of their water for months, or even years, as saltwater from the adjacent San Francisco Bay flows in.

[Civil engineer Gilbert) Cosio believes this is largely hype. He’s been working on these levees his entire 26-year career. Visual inspection, physical monitoring, magnetic anomaly studies, ground-penetrating radar and geomorphic studies are a few of the tools he and his colleagues at MBK Engineers use to assess levee condition. He wants to impress upon me the idea that these levees are, in fact, relatively safe.

“In our mind, the glass is half full,” he says with a chuckle, compared to “25 to 30 years ago, when the glass was totally empty. We think there’s room for improvement, but they’re a lot better than they used to be.”

Robyn Norwood on Steve Fisher, the Fab Five, and San Diego State's rise

Our Robyn Norwood catches us up on Steve Fisher, the former University of Michigan basketball coach now in his 12th season coaching at San Diego State. From her story:

SAN DIEGO - The flamboyant freshmen who were known as the Fab Five are the answers to a trivia question now.

"Chris Webber, Jalen Rose," said D.J. Gay, the point guard for Coach Steve Fisher's San Diego State Aztecs. "Glen Rice?"

Try Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson.

The famous freshmen are 37 years old. Only Howard still is playing, for the Miami Heat. Webber and Rose are television analysts. And Ed Martin, the former automobile worker whose payments to Webber and others led to NCAA probation for Michigan and the removal of the banners for the Fab Five's appearances in the 1992 and '93 NCAA title games, has been dead since 2003.

Fisher — who first rose to prominence at Michigan with a dizzying run to the 1989 NCAA championship after Bill Frieder was sacked as coach — is back in the spotlight at 65 in his 12th season at San Diego State.

Robyn Norwood on the new members of the Pac 10 family

Our Robyn Norwood has a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the new schools added to the Pac 10 collegiate sports conference. As she writes, the new teams mean some nice  places to visit for road trips. From her story:

Colorado won a national championship in football in 1990. But NCAA violations and off-field woes have set the program back, and the Buffaloes haven't played in a bowl game since 2007.

Yet Boulder, with 100,000 people and 300 miles of bike lanes, is the new gem of the Pac-12 — a sophisticated, environmentally conscious, walkable town with far more in common with Palo Alto or Eugene, Ore., than it had with some of the Midwestern burgs of the Big 12 Conference, which Colorado was leaving.

It's also an ideal place to leave the car at the hotel and walk to Folsom Field, Colorado's 53,613-seat stadium. The Millennium Harvest House hotel is a five-minute walk along the Boulder Creek Path, the biking, walking and jogging trail that winds through the city.

Lynne Heffley and the Parents' Choice Awards

Our Lynne Heffley has been writing reviews for the Parents' Choice Awards, which strikes us as a fun way to spend some time. This is the link to her profile page, and you can type her name into the search engine there to see what she's been saying. Meantime, this is from her review of The Jimmies' "Trying Funny Stuff":

Wow. Kindie rock doesn't get any better than this fresh and exciting DVD; the mix of music videos and live concert action catapults the Jimmies, fronted by singer/songwriter Ashley Albert, into stellar territory. Bubbling over with offbeat humor, sophisticated musicianship, smart, entertaining lyrics and impressive visual creativity, it's a rock-out feast for ears and eyes, whatever your age.

The band sings six of its image-rich original songs (repeated in karaoke versions) in a riotous combination of live action, animal costumes, film clips and all manner of animation styles. A "backstage" documentary is a deft mash-up of wit and the imaginative high- and low-tech ways the DVD was put together, with some how-to tips for making props. The only misstep: the live concert's brief intro involving certain nasal emissions. This immensely talented band is light years beyond needing a gross factor to engage its audience.

Robyn Norwood on John Wooden's favorite breakfast spot

Our Robyn Norwood, a longtime sportswriter for the LA Times, has this piece on FoxSports.com on a visit to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden's favorite breakfast spot in Tarzana, California. Wooden, an icon in Southern California, died this week at age 99. From her story:

They began trickling into Vip’s Family Restaurant in Tarzana before 8 a.m. Saturday, the regular customers with their canes, a lawyer in a Bruins T-shirt, a family wearing UCLA caps.

Around the time John Wooden used to sit down for breakfast at his favored Table 2, owner Paul Ma and his wife Lucy placed a vase of yellow roses, a photo of Wooden and a copy of the Los Angeles Times with news of the former UCLA coach’s passing in the booth, now a shrine to their most famous regular.

“He liked the No. 2 special: bacon, scrambled eggs, English muffin,” Ma said. “At the beginning, Coach always liked hot tea. So many memories… I always put the honey out for Coach, and I would squeeze the honey for him.

“He was a great man.”