Kentucky Derby favourite Bellamy Road is the property of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. That has radio host Don Chevrier fearing the worst.
"The way the Yankees are going, Bellamy Road had better win if he wants to live a long and productive life," Chevrier said with a laugh.
Steinbrenner's thoroughbred stable is 0-for-5 at the Derby, and given the poor start of his baseball team, the Boss will be anxious for a win on Saturday.
"Bellamy Road was picked up by Steinbrenner at a sale for $87,000 [U.S.] in Florida last year," said Chevrier, a Canadian broadcaster living in Florida. "He won the Wood Memorial by an astonishing 17½ lengths in March."
The Premiere Radio Network broadcast, with Chevrier anchoring the show and Dave Johnson calling the race, will be carried on about 300 stations in the United States. In Canada, it's been picked up by CJAD in Montreal and The Team1040 in Vancouver. There's a Canadian angle because Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk's stable has an entry, Flower Alley.
But in Toronto, The Fan 590 took a pass. Program director Nelson Millman said there's no room in the Saturday schedule. Live At Gretzky's airs until 6 p.m. (all times EDT), followed by the International Sports Report. "It's great to have the major events and I'd love to carry them, but there's only so much you can do," Millman said.
The Premiere radio broadcast will start at 5:30 p.m. On TV, NBC's coverage will begin at 5 p.m.
Albom's antagonists
In his first Detroit Free Press column after returning from a suspension, Mitch Albom was appropriately contrite, but also engaged his critics.
"A volcano erupted," he wrote. "An explosion that mixed the criticism I deserved with a lava flow of anger, hate, self-righteousness and people who once called themselves friends preferring to act as my judge and jury."
Albom's trouble was caused by an April 3 column in which he reported that two former Michigan State basketball players had attended MSU's Final Four game against Louisville the night before, when, in fact, they hadn't shown up. The column was written one day before the game was played and two days before it appeared in the paper. Reports over the past month have characterized Albom as something less than a sympathetic figure.
"There were the Mitch rules [at the Free Press] and then there were the rules for everybody else," Terry Foster, a Detroit News columnist and former Free Press staffer, told the Los Angeles Times.
As well, a Free Press copy editor told a staff meeting on April 7 that he had been instructed when he joined the newspaper to keep his hands off Albom's columns. Aside from correcting spelling mistakes and glaring errors, substantive questions were to be directed to Albom's editor and then let go.
According to reports, Albom, who presents a moderate to liberal perspective on his syndicated radio show, used the long and bitter Free Press strike in 1995 to research his first bestseller, Tuesdays With Morrie, and then crossed the picket line two months into the strike. The Free Press killed a negative review of his second bestseller, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski told MarketWatch that Albom "treated people badly." Posnanski wrote: "When I was 25, I sat next to him at an event. I tried to introduce myself, tried to express how much his columns meant to me. He looked right through me. The only five words he spoke to me, as far as I can remember, were: 'Could you pass the phone?' "
Jack Lessenberry, a journalism professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, said one of his students quit an internship at a radio station where Albom worked after he threw a computer keyboard at her. A former staffer at the radio station said: "I remember one time when I was his producer, he was unhappy with the way something had gone. Even if they were upset, most people would have a few words and that would be it. But Mitch screamed and screamed. It was a major tantrum."
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