Manly Men Only Need Apply to NHL

Vancouver Canuck General Manager Brian Burke is opposed to lengthy NHL suspensions to curb cheap-shot hitting:

“I’m worried that do-gooders who don’t understand the contact part of the game will start screaming for a hanging judge to start hanging, and all of a sudden you don’t have any more hitting,” Burke told the Vancouver Sun.

“We don’t hand purses out in this league. It’s still a man’s game.”

And you, Brian, are Mr. Macho even though you don’t play.

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Trivia time: What is the PGA Tour record for the longest sudden-death playoff by holes?

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Exhausting: Putting Dan Marino’s 60,000 yards passing in perspective: Seven-tenths of a mile more than 21 trips across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

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Another bargain: Hurricane Irene dumped several inches of rain across Florida recently.

“It was so wet,” said comedy writer Jerry Perisho, “that Florida State football star Peter Warrick rushed into a store and spent 29 cents for $190 worth of foul-weather gear.”

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Ghoulfriends: Jesse Barkin of the San Jose Mercury News notes “that out of about 1,500 participants on Stiffs.com, an Internet Web site where players guess who will die in a given year, and earn points for correct guesses, none listed Wilt Chamberlain.”

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Our long-lost Rams? Bill Lyon of the Philadelphia Inquirer on the 6-0 St. Louis Rams:

“The Rams are firing on all cylinders. They have a look of a team whose time has come. A team gets into a roll like this and its confidence escalates and it ends up playing beyond its capabilities.”

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Fall failures: Jon Saraceno in USA Today: “The Braves are not the boys of October. They are summertime’s beautiful swan, autumn’s ugly duck.

“With one exception, they are the Buffalo Bills of baseball, a teasing assortment of talent and promise that rips your heart out when it matters most.”

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Turn off your set: Jeff Gordon of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wonders “how a Jim Gray-O.J. Simpson interview would turn out.”

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The 19th hole: Pro golfer Jackie Burke, criticizing modern players’ tendency to rely on so-called “mental coaches”:

“Jimmy Demaret and I had the best golf psychologist in the world. His name was Jack Daniels and he was waiting for us after every round.”

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Trivia answer: Eleven holes. Cary Middlecoff and Lloyd Mangrum finally were declared co-winners by mutual agreement in the 1949 Motor City Open.

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And finally: Diana Ditka, wife of the New Orleans Saints’ coach, on her husband’s 60th birthday: “I’m going to get him a Viagra cake.”