Sports in the Phoenix Area by Von

We’ve been hanging around the Phoenix area so long that I’m starting to follow the sports news here. It has been really interesting to follow all the hype about the Phoenix Suns aquiring Shaquille O’Neal. Some hate him and others are seeing him as their savour for the team. I’ve never liked Shaq, I’ve always said that it should be illegal for such a big man to play basketball. He should be made to play football! He’s played in 3 games so far for the Suns and they have lost 2 of them. I think he is too old and tired to do them much good. Only time will tell. I haven’t followed the Portland Trailblazers at all this season. I have gotten out of the habit of caring what the Blazers are doing since they got themselves into so much legal trouble and were playing so lousy.

We went to a college invitational baseball game yesterday and watched the Arizona State University (ASU) Sun Devils play the Oregon State University (OSU) Beavers in Tempe, AZ. The Beavers got clobbered! We left in the 7th inning and the score was ASU 11 and the Beavers 0. I don’t know what the final score ended up being, but I doubt that the Beavers came back and won. It was fun to sit with all those Oregon people and hear them talk about Portland and Salem and the goings on in Oregon. The guy sitting next to me was busy working his phone and talking to people back in Oregon. There was a lady sitting a couple of rows in front of us that was dissing the Ducks, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could tell from her tone and attitude that she was an adamant Duck hater. Good thing I wasn’t sitting any closer to her, we might have had to have some words!

When we left the baseball game we had a perfect view of the AZU football stadium. The architecture in the desert is realy different. The saguara cactus is a State protected plant and cannot be destroyed, so they build around them and they do not plow down their rock hills, they build into them or around them. I guess because there are so few hills around they want to preserve them where they can. The football stadium is built between two rock mounds that in Oregon we would just flatten and built the stadium on flat ground. In Arizona there is too much flat ground that they keep all their bumps and crevices where they are. It make for interesting buildings.

Von