maly, too: Iowa-Iowa State Game Starts At 2:30 p.m. Sept. 13. More Proof That Bicycles and City Streets Are Not a Good Combination. The Paper Didn't Know What Team Valley Beat To Reach the State Softball Tournament. Cardinals Pitcher Wainwright and St. Louis Sports Columnist Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves After All-Star Game 'Grooving' Incident

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Iowa-Iowa State Game Starts At 2:30 p.m. Sept. 13. More Proof That Bicycles and City Streets Are Not a Good Combination. The Paper Didn't Know What Team Valley Beat To Reach the State Softball Tournament. Cardinals Pitcher Wainwright and St. Louis Sports Columnist Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves After All-Star Game 'Grooving' Incident

By RON MALY

I was told by people at the University of Iowa today that the Hawkeyes' Sept. 13 football game against Iowa State will start at 2:30 p.m. in Kinnick Stadium. The game will be televised by ABC, ESPN or ESPN2. Iowa's Aug. 30 season opener against Northern Iowa at Kinnick Stadium starts at 11 a.m., and will be on the Big Ten Network. The Hawkeyes' Sept. 6 home game against Ball State starts at 2:30 p.m. and will be on ESPN2.

*

You know by now how I feel about bicycles and streets.

They don't get along with one another.

Especially when there are cars, trucks and vans being driven in the streets where the bikes are being ridden.

It's never a good sign when there's a bicycle lying in the middle of the street, and a group of adult women and a kid who appeared to be a teen-ager are standing 15 feet away.

That's what I saw late this morning after leaving a medical office in Clive.

The good thing was that the people all were standing.

No one was lying in the street or on the parking.

All I could do was guess what had happened.

I'm presuming there was a collision between the van and the bike.

I'm also guessing that kid was riding the bike and one of the adult women was the driver of the van.

But I suppose the kid could have been driving the van, and one of the adult women was on the bike.

All I know for sure is that bad things--sometimes very bad things--happen when people ride bicycles on city streets.

I rode my bike a lot on the streets when I was younger.

I do it no more.

Bike trails are safer.

Back to today's incident...

After driving for about another half-minute, a fast-moving police car, with its siren and flashing lights on, was coming from the east on the same street on which I was driving.

It obviously was headed to the accident scene.

I hope everyone was all right.

*

It said in today's paper--at least the paper here--that Valley's softball team beat Lincoln, 12-2, last night to earn a spot in the state class 5-A high school tournament.

Obviously, all the paper had on the game was the final score.

No other facts about the game were in the story.

And it wasn't Des Moines Lincoln that Valley defeated.

It was Abraham Lincoln of Council Bluffs.

The knucklehead who wrote the story obviously didn't know what team Valley played.

But, don't forget, Valley is the superb athletic program the paper loves to hate.

*

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright admitted he purposely grooved a couple of straight-ball pitches 40-year-old Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees could handle in the first inning of last night's All-Star game, otherwise known as The Derek Jeter Retirement Love-In.

Well, at first Wainwright admitted he grooved the pitches.

Then he backtracked and tried to lie his way out of it when he was attacked verbally by baseball fans on Twitter during the game.

Jeter's double helped the American League take a 3-0 lead en route to a 5-3 victory in a game that decided which league would have the home-field advantage in the World Series.

The fact that Wainwright's actions cost the eventual National League winner [perhaps Wainwright's Cardinals] the home-field advantage in October didn't bother Bernie Miklasz, the less-than-mediocre sports columnist at the St.Louis Post-Dispatch.

Miklasz gave Wainwright a pass on making sure Jeter got some easy pitches to hit.

Miklasz is a clown who is afraid of being fired by his paper. If it had been a pitcher from the Reds, Brewers, Cubs or Pirates who grooved pitches to Jeter, he'd have been all over the story.

Miklasz should be ashamed of himself, and so should Wainwright.

JOLTIN' JOE GOT IT STARTED

When Ron Maly was a kid in Cedar Rapids, he wanted to enter an essay contest, and he did. He wrote about Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees being his favorite baseball player. For finishing second in the contest, Ron won a Louisville Slugger baseball bat autographed by DiMaggio. Ron later wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, and he was. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and did what all political science majors do. He became a sportswriter. He had, after all, covered high school football, basketball and baseball games for the Cedar Rapids Gazette while he worked parttime during his university days. Ron wanted to sit in the press box and write about an Iowa-Minnesota football game, and he did. It happened while he was the sports editor at the Albert Lea [Minn.] Tribune, and the game was at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis. Ron wanted to cover a World Series, and he did. Also when he was working for the Albert Lea newspaper. Ron wanted to cover Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Orange Bowls, Cotton Bowls, Holiday Bowls, a Freedom Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Super Bowl and NCAA basketball tournaments, and he did those things after he moved to Des Moines. Ron was a four-time sportswriter of the Year in the state of Iowa [the years were 1977, 1978, 1994 and 1996]. In 2006, he was named a charter member of the University of Iowa's media Wall of Fame in the Kinnick Stadium press box. A photo of the plaque that's displayed in the press box is displayed above this story. Following Ron's retirement from the newspaper business, a publisher asked him if he wanted to write a book about the rich football tradition at the University of Iowa, and he did. The hardback version of "Tales from the Iowa Sidelines" was a best-seller, and so was the revised, softback version. Now he's been asked by his publisher to update the book for a second time. He's in the process of doing that at the present time. Ron considers being asked to update a best-selling book for the second time to be the supreme compliment, considering the Hawkeyes won just four games in the 2012 season. When Ron isn't working on books, he's busy traveling and spending time with his family. Indeed, he attends the athletic, theatrical and musical [both vocal and instrumental] events in which his six grandchildren participate. He also writes about anything that interests him for his many websites. Every chance he gets, Ron proudly wears his America Needs Farmers T-shirt.

The Hawkeyes' Rich Football Tradition, Revisited

I mentioned a while back that I was in the process of updating my Tales from the Iowa Sidelines book. Updating it for the second time. The original hardback edition of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines [pictured at the right] was published in 2003, during the 10-3 season, when coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa football team had a 10-3 record that included a 37-17 victory over 15th-ranked Florida in the Outback Bowl and after the Hawkeyes went 11-2 in 2002. That book was a best-seller, so the publishers came to me again in 2005, a season that finished with a breathtaking 30-25 victory over No. 11 Louisiana State in the Capital One Bowl on New Year's Day, 2005. Because buyers had cleaned out the the shelves in the bookstores, the publishers wanted to know if I'd do an updated version of the book. I agreed, The revised, soft-cover edition [pictured at the left] was published in 2005. Warren Holloway, who teamed with quarterback Drew Tate on a miraculous 56-yard touchdown pass to win the Capital One Bowl, was featured on the cover. That book, too, turned into a best-seller, So I had reason to feel very good about my years as a published author. It's not every day that a the original version is a best-seller, and so is the updated version. Then, imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from a senior editor at the publishing company last fall, wanting wanted to know if I was interested in doing a second updated version of the book. It came at a time when things weren't going well for the Hawkeyes in the 2012 season. They lost their last six games and finished with a 4-8 record. Frankly, the thought of doing a revised edition of the book during a 4-8 season seemed to be a stretch. "Maybe producing a revised edition in a year or two would be a better idea," I told the publishers. "We'd like to do it now," I was told. "Let me think about it," I said. After a few days of thought, I accepted the idea. I talked myself into the idea that this was the supreme compliment--being asked to do a second book update during a 4-8 season showed strong confidence by the publishers in me and in the Hawkeyes' football program. So I got back into the business of interviewing players and coaches again, going to postgame press conferences, weekly press conferences and a scrimmage in West Des Moines. After a press conference in Iowa City, I did a one-on-one interview with coach Kirk Ferentz, and mentioned to him that I was in the process of doing a revised edition of my two best-selling books. I congratulated him on the excellent things he had done for Iowa's football program--all of which contributed to the success of my books. "I think Coach Fry had more to do with it," he told me, bringing up the name of Hayden Fry, his one-time boss at Iowa and a man who brought Iowa's football program back from the dead in the 20th century. That's modest Kirk Ferentz for you. Even though the 2012 season wasn't something Hawkeye coaches, players and fans will recall with any special feeling, Ferentz has a 14-year record of 100-74 at Iowa that includes two 11-victory seasons [2002 smd 2009], two 10-victory seasons [2003 and 2004], plus he's been the Big Ten coach of year in 2002, 2004 and 2009, and national coach of the year in 2002. Indeed, Ferentz has done some wonderful things at Iowa City, and I fully expect his success to continue. I've concluded my writing for the second update of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines, and the senior editor has furnished me with an early look at the book. Not only are the Kirk Ferentz years included in the updated version, but so is the stuff I previously wrote about Howard Jones, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick and the 1939 Hawkeye Ironmen, Ronald Reagan, Ozzie Simmons, Ossie Solem, Randy Duncan, Alex Karras and lots of other legends from Iowa's rich football history. I expect the book to be in stores soon. I hope you like it.