Tom Stoltman (left) Photos by Aniko Kiezel
Minor Delights HOW SMALLER SPORTS CREATE MEMORABLE MOMENTS
B
eing a sports fan in Sacramento isn’t completely awful. True, the Kings have exploited the community’s onehorse status for decades. The basketball team sells far more tickets, suites and sponsorships than failure warrants.
RG By R.E. Graswich Sports Authority
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A season or two of home games with 10,000 empty seats would embarrass the Kings, if that’s possible, and provide visual and financial motivation to fix the mess. But there’s a benefit to being a bigleague backwater. Sacramento gets to pursue events other cities won’t bother with, fun stuff that doesn’t qualify as major league but is worth checking out. This spring and summer delivered two examples, the World’s Strongest Man competition in May and the Junior Olympic track and field championships in July. Recent years have seen the U.S. Senior Open golf championship, bicycle races, rugby tournaments and bass fishing contests. Something for everybody.
These aren’t events that attract global audiences and require the Goodyear Blimp to hover overhead. But they beat sitting around pulling weeds. The games may be second-rate and hopelessly irrelevant, but they fill hotel rooms and steer crowds into restaurants. The goal of every professional sport is to generate cash. With luck and decent management, even the most obscure competition spins off dollars to the host city. The World’s Strongest Man competition proves the point. It’s counterintuitive to believe sports fans will want VIP tickets to watch big guys lift heavy objects. But the World’s Strongest Man shows the way, building
a successful franchise atop ridiculous displays of strength. The strong man competition bridges the gap between the primal urge to gawk at muscular prowess and the boredom that comes from sitting in a bar with nothing good on TV. Creatively, the World’s Strongest Man evokes Gaelic hunter-warrior lore. One event involves lifting five logs, each heavier than the last, 375 pounds to 474 pounds. Apparently, lifting logs was a prized skill in ancient Ireland and maybe Scotland and even Iceland. I first encountered the World’s Strongest Man on TV at my local bar. I was hooked from the start. Could Magnus Samuelsson lift five “atlas stones,” which range in weight from
