Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Pelini shows his fuzzy side at scrimmage
It’s difficult to envision Nebraska’s hard-boiled football coach Bo Pelini as a cat guy.
It’s difficult to envision Pelini, sometimes known as much for temper tantrums as coaching skill, as a warm, fuzzy type of guy.
Beyond that, it’s difficult to envision the dour-looking Pelini as having a sense of humor.
But there Pelini was Saturday at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb., leading his Huskers out of the tunnel for Nebraska’s spring game with a furry creature named Anya cradled in his arms.
Pelini apparently was responding to the creator of the Twitter account @FauxPelini, which pokes fun of Pelini’s numerous tirades on the sidelines and blowups in news conferences. The account features a doctored cover photo of Pelini holding a cat. So Peilini showed a softer side. Pelini held the cat, who belongs to athletic department employee Ethan Rowley, and petted it as he entered the field. Nice kitty, kitty. And Huskers fans loved it, especially when Pellini hoisted the cat over his head like a championship trophy, drawing roars from the crowd of more than 60,000. Pelini then handed the cat off to Austen Everson, another member of the athletic department.
“The cat was probably a little freaked out,” Pelini said in a postscrimmage news conference. “It was a lot more people than I’m sure he’s used to.”
Pelini went along with the fun, but he did draw the line.
“They tried to get me to put a sweater on [as depicted in the photo header for the fake Twitter account], but that wasn’t happening,” Pelini said. “I hope my dogs will talk to me when I get home because they might get a little jealous.”
Nosy business
One filly figured to get her picture taken in the winner’s circle for the first time after Friday’s fifth race at Evangeline Downs in Opelousas, La.
Every race has to have a winner, even from an highly mediocre 11-horse field of $15,000 Louisianabred maidens.
But occasionally, two horses hit the finish line so close together the placing judges declare the race a dead heat. That happened at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs on Friday, for instance. It happens, but not often. But Friday’s unremarkable group of fillies at Evangeline produced an exceptional outcome, something almost as rare as an unassisted triple play in baseball or a double-eagle, called an albatross, in golf.
There wasn’t just one winner in Friday’s fifth race. Nor were there just two.
By the time the photo was examined by the placing judges at the south Louisiana track, it was determined that there would be three winners, a triple-dead heat.
The three-way tie for first is so rare in thoroughbred horse racing that only a half-dozen have occurred since 1990, the most recent being at the recently closed Hollywood Park in southern California in December 1997.
The official photograph showed all three horses’ noses touching the wire: Chessie Slew, a 25-to-1 long shot ridden by Filemon Rodriguez; All in the Art, at odds of 5 to 1 with jockey Donnie Meche; and Memories of Trina, at 8 to 1, ridden by Carlos Marquez. In the frenzied finish, the winning trio ended up just three-quarters of a length in front of fourth-place finisher Lady Bistineau.