R-C Sports Notebook: Sertoma game features strong senior class

All right, we know that Douglas High School's graduation ceremony is scheduled for Friday night, but just in case you didn't have any other plans and you happen to really enjoy football, you might want to think about making the drive up to Reno.

The Sertoma Classic All-Star Football Game, now in its 26th year, always features some of the brightest gridiron stars in the area.

This year, though, promises to be a matchup for the ages.

Let's forget for a second that this year's senior class was one of the most electrifying and talent-rich to come out of the region in quite some time, if not ever, and focus on the storylines.

Ever since the Sertoma committee went away from picking teams geographically to a team-by-team draft process, the game has taken on entirely new levels of competition

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Take this year, for instance.

For starters, rivalries will abound.

You'll have Northern 4A Regional champ Galena on one side with regional runner-up Manogue on the other.

Carson will be on the opposite sideline from Douglas.

3A upstarts Sparks and Dayton will be pitted against each other and new rivals Reed and Spanish Springs will be on separate sides.

Add to it the showcase players, like Reno tight end Dan Knapp, Galena defensive end Justin Gates, Fallon lineman Lyle Gardner, Dayton quarterback Travis Wood, North Valleys all-everything man Archie Kovich, Reno quarterback Jon Dankworth, Galena running back Jimmy Sargent, Reed quarterback Tony Maldonado and Sparks quarterback Alex Toler and you have quite a stable of talent.

Knapp, Gates and Kovich are bound for Division I and I-AA programs while the others are either entertaining or set in opportunities at the next level.

Five starters from Douglas' vaunted defense will be on hand, which should be interesting considering that six of the North's top rushers will be on the other side of the ball, along with the state's all-time leading passer and two of the best tight ends to come through in at least a decade.

The game, which starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday, will be at Mackay Stadium on the University of Nevada, Reno campus.

I won't go on and on about this, but isn't it rather strange when the Reno Gazette-Journal/Las Vegas Review-Journal All State baseball list was released Sunday, only one player from Douglas was mentioned.

Nate Whalin was given second-team honors.

Galena had a total of six players honored, McQueen had three on the first team alone, and Damonte Ranch and Reed each had two.

Just in case anyone forgot, Douglas won the Sierra League title and advanced to the Northern 4A Regional championship game. Along the way, the Tigers thumped Reed and McQueen to get there.

Surely someone else might have deserved a mention.

My wife and I got out of town for a couple of days last week to see the Boston Red Sox take on the Oakland A's in the Bay area.

A little background is needed here.

I am not a lifelong Red Sox fan. I didn't suffer with them through years of disappointment and was hardly long-suffering by the time they brought home their first series title in 86 years.

I fell in love with the history of the team while spending a summer in Boston in 1997. At the time, they were already out of the playoff hunt just after the All-Star break and I watched knuckleballer Tim Wakefield throw a game against the Texas Rangers on local TV.

Other names on the field that day included Mo Vaughn and a second-year player called Nomar.

"Hey, this team is pretty good," I said to myself at the time.

I signed up to get tickets to a game at the summer college program I was attending, but the guy who was supposed to drop off the tickets never showed up.

The closest I got to seeing a Red Sox game was the sidewalk of Lansdown Street just outside Fenway Park's famed green monster.

I came back home to Nevada a week later, the Sox acquired a young righty named Pedro Martinez the next season and I was hooked.

So last week, my wife took me to my very first live Red Sox game for my birthday.

Here's the funny thing. I hate crowds. Passionately. I even get tense in rush hour.

Any of you who've ever seen me cover a sporting event at Douglas know that I will, to every extent possible, stray away to the most secluded spot I can find in order to avoid them.

So once at the game, I found myself walking the very fine line between enjoying the beautiful summer evening with the big leaguers putting on a show in front of me and wondering how fast we'd have to leave in order to beat the fans trickling back to the BART station after the game.

With Boston losing 3-0 heading into the top of the seventh, I figured it was an ideal time to get away.

They looked flat all evening anyway, and having arrived at 5:30 that morning after an all-night flight from the east coast coming off a late-inning loss to the rival Yankees the night before.

I figured I was on solid ground in thinking the game was as good as over.

We heard the crowd roar as Boston's Wily Mo Pena hit a home run while we were walking away from the stadium, and I began to think perhaps I'd made a mistake.

A guy sitting in front of us on the BART, fully-clad in an Eric Chavez jersey, gave us a play-by-play all the way back to our stop as J.D. Drew hit a run-scoring single to right and Pena singled to right center to score Coco Crisp and tie the game at four in the top of the ninth.

We listened on our car radio as J.C. Romero worked Boston out of a bases-loaded jam in the bottom half and watched from our hotel room TV as Chavez hit the game-winner for Oakland in the bottom of the 11th.

I stayed up and watched the Sportscenter highlights later that evening as the anchors labeled it as the best game of the year thus far " Walk-off homer, Mark Ellis hit for the cycle, late comeback from Boston. It really did have a bit of everything.

At least I can say I was there.

For a little while.