Sidelines
Girls wrestle some
attention from boysGIRLS wrestling is a good thing.
Please read that again. Girls wrestling is a good thing. It provides opportunities and competition, and life lessons and all the best things of high school sports.
And good for those girls that they get that chance.
But you have to feel for boys wrestling.
Boys wrestling already had a hard enough time attracting any attention, and then here come the girls. Taking half -- or maybe more, since girls wrestling is still new and unusual enough to be a curiosity -- of the limited ink, airtime, headlines, features, profiles and various and sundry athletes of the week that go to wrestlers and wrestling.
Wrestling people will often tell you that their piece of the pie is a small one as it is.
Now it is split two ways.
This is perhaps the best argument I can think of to keep girls basketball in its separate season. Combine girls and boys hoops, and attention for each gets cut in half.
Or perhaps one of them gets more of the attention and the other gets little at all.
>> My favorite "candidate" in an irresponsible, laughable, sparkling, wonderfully witty Lettermanesque Internet list of possible new athletic directors at Hawaii: Jim Nabors.
Hey, wait a minute. Didn't Evan Dobelle invite Nabors to sing before the BYU football game?
Hmmmm ...
>> If cheerleading is a sport, so is marching band.
>> A physical activity (that gets competitive under special circumstances) that requires precision, practice, dedication and teamwork. Have you ever seen a marching band drill? It looks like football practice.
>> It's not that I want marching band in the sports pages, but it's a slippery slope, isn't it?
>> Brian Dennehy is NOT Bobby Knight. At least not according to the thousands of previews. Doesn't look like Bobby Knight, sound like Bobby Knight, doesn't carry himself like Bobby Knight.
Knight is a great coach, a former tough-guy player who's still crazy enough to scare the living heck out of you. Dennehy is a fat guy in a sweater.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but judging by what ESPN is constantly showing us, "A Season on the Brink" looks like "Tommy Boy" with more cursing.
Yeah, I'll probably watch it. I kind of liked "Tommy Boy." It could have used more cursing.
>> Who is leading in the popular "Hawaii's Favorite Sportscaster" contest (where votes and nominations are still being accepted)?
Early returns -- and, like Peter Jennings, I stress this isn't official yet -- show the most votes going to Channel 9's Liz Chun!
In a wide-open (no legends) field, Liz has the early lead.
>> Congratulations to KFVE for getting the men's WAC tournament on local television. That's coming through in crunch time.
We're spoiled in Hawaii. It isn't like this in the rest of the country. Every game of your school's every sport isn't on TV.
We'll have to see how much longer we remain spoiled with live television.
Because there's a reason this isn't done anywhere else.
Kalani Simpson's column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
He can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com