Battier left foaming at the house
Athletes are superstitious, and some habits are stranger than others.
Wade Boggs, the five-time American League batting champion in the 1980s and eventual Hall of Fame third baseman, used to eat chicken every day, take batting practice at 5:17 p.m. and field exactly 150 grounders in infield practice.
Detroit Tigers Manager Jim Leyland once refused to wash or change his underwear during a winning streak.
“Athletes are all superstitious,” Miami Heat forward Shane Battier said in a recent interview with NBA.com’s Hang Time Blog, “and even if they don’t admit it, there’s a routine and just a cadence to our days. Especially when things go well, you can see us try to replicate that.”
No stinky socks for Battier, whose team ran a winning streak to 27 games before the playoffs started. What was his secret?
“Well, I try to drink the same beer, Bud Light, but that’s about it,” Battier said. “You never know. I don’t want to chance luck and switch up brands, so I’m staying loyal to Bud Light.”
Battier said he prefers Bud Light because it was the beer his father drank.
“I wanted to be like my dad,” Battier told the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “Being from Michigan, if it was good enough for an assembly-line worker, it’s good enough for me.”
Word of Battier’s impromptu plug made it back to brewer Anheuser-Busch, which sent Shane Battier 1,100 free cases - or 26,400 bottles - of the stuff last week.
According to SI.com, the truck driver making the delivery said, “we wanted to make sure we were loyal to him as well.” Battier was home at the time of the delivery and said, “I’ll take it all.”
That may have been a slightly impulsive decision.
“My house isn’t that big to house all that,” Battier told the Associated Press after considering just how much space that much beer takes up. “I’ll have a whole new slew of friends today.”
Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times had a different take on Battier’s foamy windfall: “Guess it’s probably too late to mention he also drove the same Lamborghini.”
Bad branding
The Boston Bombers are no more.
Up until two weeks ago, the Bombers, members of the Women’s Blue Chip League, were Boston’s only semi-pro women’s basketball team. Their logo featured a cartoon bomb with a lit fuse and basketball grooves.
Then came the Boston Marathon bombing, causing the Bombers to decide it was time fora new name.
“It was something we were thinking about for a while, but obviously this tragic event solidified that decision,” Charne Dixon, the team’s assistant general manager and marketing director told Boston magazine. “We are going to go by the ‘Bulldogs’ now.
We had a lot of people reaching out to us [after the bombings], both good and bad. For obvious reasons, the name does not reflect a good one after what happened.”
Not only did the team drop the explosive appellation, they also abandoned the team’s Web site, BostonBombersBasketball.com, shut down its Twitter account and deactivated its Facebook page.
“There are a lot of things that we have to replace, including uniforms, travel equipment … it’s a process, but we are getting there,” Dixon said.
They announced their new name last week: the Boston Bulldogs.
Draft observation
From Brad Dickson of the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald: “The NFL Draft just ended. The first round is the second biggest day to showcase guys turning pro, right after signing day at Auburn.”
Quote of the day
“I think we had a very productive draft.” Dallas Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones on his team’s 2013 draft class
Sports, Pages 14 on 04/29/2013