A day after NBA Commissioner David Stern said teams had gotten carried away with pyrotechnic displays of shooting flames, booming firecrackers and sparklers during home-team introductions, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich offered an even more critical take.
“When you get that powder and all that stuff on you, people, I think, that have lung problems are really endangering themselves,” Popovich said Tuesday, shortly before his team went out and lost Game 5 of its second-round series against the Hornets in New Orleans. “It is dangerous. But in general, every time I'm at a place where they do pyrotechnics, I just tell myself there's going to be an accident. It's like the stop sign that doesn't get put up until a kid gets killed.”
There was a 19-minute delay during the first half of Game 1 of the series because of a mascot's stunt involving a ring of fire.
After the mascot, known as Super Hugo, successfully used a trampoline to jump through fire and dunk a basketball, firefighters on site were unable to put out the flames with a carbon dioxide extinguisher and resorted to a conventional foam spray, which left a white residue all over the court.
“With all that fire and kind of explosive material going on and there's kids, people, cheerleaders, this, that, all over the place, something's going to happen,” Popovich said.
TRIVIA TIME
Where did Gregg Popovich play college basketball?
RETURN TO SENDER
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is examining whether a Huntington Beach woman had criminal intent when she turned her dog on a mail carrier – who turned out to be former Olympic medal-winning swimmer Shirley Babashoff.
Spokeswoman Renee Focht says Babashoff was trying to deliver a registered letter recently when the woman let her cocker spaniel out of the house.
Babashoff told a 911 dispatcher that the woman, too, came out and reacted verbally. Babashoff said she locked herself in her mail truck as the woman banged on its window.
A woman at the house later told a crew from KCAL-TV that what happened wasn't an altercation but a misunderstanding.
Babashoff won a total of eight medals in the 1972 and '76 Olympic Games.
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
If Sergio Garcia ever wins a major golf championship, the roof may just explode off the building at TaylorMade Golf's headquarters in Carlsbad.
Garcia seized the largest of his seven PGA Tour victories on Sunday at The Players Championship, and the partying hasn't stopped at TaylorMade, where Garcia has been a member of the tour staff since 2002.
TaylorMade hung two 40-by-20-foot banners on the side of its building. One has a picture of Garcia pumping his fist and says, “Congratulations Sergio!” The other reads, “El Matador: Sergio Slays the Players with the New Tour Burner Driver.”
In the TaylorMade cafeteria, they were serving the lunch Garcia ate on Sunday at The Players: BLT, potato chips, ice cream and lemonade. Each employee also received a copy of Garcia's TaylorMade golf ball, which features the silhouette of a bull and “00.”
– TOD LEONARD
TRIVIA ANSWER
Air Force, where he scored 96 points in four seasons from 1966-70.
– COMPILED BY STEVE OAKEY
FROM NEWS SERVICES, ONLINE REPORTS
