Author: David Shama

Trevor Mbakwe injured his left thigh in last night’s Howard Pulley ProCity championship game and didn’t play in the second half.  He leaves for the USA’s world university games team training camp today and told Sports Headliners he hopes the injury won’t diminish his chances of making the team.

The Gophers senior, playing for the Errol Carlstrom team, lost last night to El-Amin’s Fish House team that included former Gopher Dan Coleman and was coached by Khalid El-Amin who was injured and couldn’t play.  It was the fourth consecutive ProCity title for El-Amin’s Fish House team.

Bert Blyleven’s last season in the major leagues was 1992.  The former Twins, California, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Texas pitcher, who won 287 games during his career, was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame this month.  Former three time American League batting champion Tony Oliva, who had a .304 lifetime average playing his entire big league career for the Twins, retired after the 1976 season and is still awaiting a call from Cooperstown.

Oliva, 71, told Sports Headliners that according to Hall of Fame rules he will have to wait three more years for consideration if he doesn’t receive enshrinement in 2012.  “I should have been there 20 years ago,” he said.

Oliva has no regrets about playing in Minnesota but admitted the more powerful New York and Boston media would have made his Hall of Fame selection likelier if he had been a Yankees or Red Sox outfielder.  “My numbers are better than a lot of people in the Hall of Fame,” he said.

The Twins open a three game series in Oakland tonight with starting pitchers expected to be Francisco Liriano, Nick Blackburn and Carl Pavano.  The Twins travel to Anaheim for games next Tuesday-Thursday before coming home to play the White Sox.  The Twins are 10-9 against AL West Division teams this year.

Former Gopher All-Big Ten tight end Charlie Sanders has a son, Jordan Sanders, who is a redshirt freshman defensive lineman at Michigan State.  The younger Sanders, 6-1, 288, wasn’t recruited by the Gophers two years ago when he was a high school senior, according to an email from a Sports Headliners source.

Charlie Sanders is assistant director of pro personnel for the NFL Lions.  He and his wife Georgianna have nine children.

Former Gopher quarterback Adam Weber will try to make the Broncos roster as a free agent but if pro football doesn’t work out he has the background and intelligence to coach.  Weber’s ex-teammate at Minnesota, receiver Eric Decker, enters his second season with the Broncos in search of a position and more playing time.

Fifty of the state’s top high school goalies are participating in the Minnesota Hockey Dave Peterson Reebok High Performance Goalie Camp now through Sunday at the Schwan Super Rink in Blaine. The invite-only development program, now in its seventh year, is designed to improve the individual skills and techniques of goalies in the 15-to 17-year-old age group.

Searching the newsstands for college football magazines has long been a tradition for me.  Reading the national and Big Ten forecasts of various publications has ranked among my top 10 delights of summer since grade school.

Somewhere between fresh strawberry shortcake and lazing by a swimming pool comes the pleasure of reading about the Gophers, the Big Ten race, the nation’s top 25 teams, preseason All-Americans, the best incoming freshmen and high school seniors to watch.   Through the years, publications have expanded their content and in addition to all of the above a reader just might see a pictorial of the nation’s hottest cheerleaders, or an article on regional tailgating with recipes included.

As a kid I was excited in late July or early August to buy my Street & Smith’s, the bible of college football magazines.  The best of times was reading Street & Smith’s in the family car as we drove thousands of miles during August vacations.  I read page after page and it didn’t matter that the predicted order of finish in the Big Ten was similar each year.

Perhaps there was appeal ─ even security ─to the sameness of each issue.  An Ohio State football player was often the Street & Smith’s cover boy.  The Big Ten section was always written by Columbus sportswriter Paul Hornung.  As a kid I was almost dumbfounded by the coincidence that there could be a Paul Hornung newspaper guy and an even more famous Notre Dame and Green Bay player by the same name.

Ohio State (no surprise) was often the favorite in the Big Ten race and it was a rare issue that predicted a high finish for the Gophers, but that didn’t stop me from analyzing every word Hornung wrote about Minnesota.  Often I thought he slighted the Gophers, showing an eastern football bias.

And I might even have been critical of the Gophers chosen for photos in the magazine, or perhaps the absence of any Minnesota players.  Back in the 1950s and 1960s players posed for stock photos, often not wearing helmets and grimacing like a pro wrestler.  But who cared as long as your favorites were included in the magazines?

Today the marketing is more sophisticated with regional covers, and now a Gopher is often found on the cover like this year’s issue of Sporting News College Football Magazine that includes a small picture of Minnesota quarterback MarQueis Gray.  The marketing plan also puts the college football publications on the newsstands before summer officially arrives.

That means I am a buyer now in June, not August as in the old days.  And there are more magazines to choose from, making this preseason tradition almost as much fun as the fall college football season.

To some the preseason publications are a waste of time and money.  This view is pragmatic and asserts that nothing matters about the college football season but the results on the field.  I can’t argue that games are won on paper but college football publications offer a glimpse into what might happen and fire up the passion on the eve of the season.

If you don’t get it, then maybe you don’t like strawberry shortcake either.