Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 5, 1995 TAG: 9501050027
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Public anxiety about the future what it is today, we consider it a service to the sports obsessed of our readers to offer a listing of predictions for 1995.
Unfortunately, my own vision into the future is very dim indeed. In fact, there are many who would have you believe that I can't see beyond the tip of my very crooked nose.
Be that as it may, it was imperative to seek aid in this endeavor. Thus, while traveling in an obscure region of Floyd County recently, it occurred to me to consult a resident of those parts who is most learned and literate in the study of smudged tarot cards, the divining of tea leaves, the reading of animal entrails, and the interpretation of Ouija board gyrations.
She is a lady of Middle Eastern descent, grave of voice and regal of bearing, who is trusted implicitly by her clients. I am speaking, of course, of Madame Crista Il-bal.
She warned me beforehand that looking into the future was not for those of flimsy constitution. Occasionally, she said, the information imparted in her sessions caused weak minds to snap and grown men to writhe and crawl on their bellies like serpents on espresso.
The disclaimers brought a shudder, but we pressed on.
Herein abbreviated are the great lady's predictions:
Pulaski County football coach Joel Hicks will retire in order to take a job as a personal trainer for Texas honky-tonker and Grammy Award winner Delbert McClinton. Hicks will say that although McClinton's cessation of carousing and carrying on is a step in the right direction, the formerly hard-living singer also needs strenuous weight and marathon training.
One fellow who is offered the job as Hicks' replacement turns it down because the Pulaski County School Board declines to enclose Dobson Stadium in a dome.
The Floyd County girls basketball winning streak will finally be terminated this year when many of the key players abruptly quit the team to join a little-known monastic order.
A distraught Alan Cantrell, the Floyd County coach, will be stricken by these developments and renounce basketball forever. Later, he will surface in Broken Arrow, Okla., where he has taken up a new career as a designer and builder of monster trucks.
A catastrophic air pressure problem prompted by a faulty blower will cause the fabric top of the Dedmon Center in Radford to overinflate and explode in the middle of the night, causing water from the adjoining indoor swimming pool to rain down as far away as the Radford Army Ammunition Plant and spare basketballs to pelt nearby neighborhoods. Fortunately, nobody is injured but several car windows are broken by falling barbells and a woman's new hairdo is ruined when she is involuntarily showered while on the way to work on the night shift of a Dublin manufacturing facility.
Ninth District Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, will curtail his congressional responsibilities while embarking on a new career as a professional body-builder
Blacksburg will upset archrival Christiansburg for the state boys cross-country title in large part because of the arrival of a mysterious and long-legged Nigerian exchange student.
Virginia Tech President Paul Torgersen will be threatened with a sexual harassment suit after one too many of his crosscourt forehands drill a female member of the faculty when she unwisely plays too close to the net in a supposedly friendly round of mixed doubles. She declines to carry through, however, when her attorney counsels she take up bowling instead.
Tech golf coach Jay Hardwick is hired to be the exclusive private tutor of a Japanese shipping magnate whose vast wealth is belied by his impoverished short game.
Radford High School will lose only one football game while discoing to a 13-1 record and the state Group A Division 2 crown. Bobcats coach Norman Lineburg will then announce that he is retiring in order to run as an independent against Boucher in the 1996 congressional elections.
New River Valley Speedway will be bought by a man who then transforms the banked oval into the training course for a university of tractor-trailer studies.
Steve Ragsdale, the Giles High football coach, will rebuild the Spartans by ditching the single-wing, installing a run-and-shoot offense, and appointing 5-foot-11, 240-pound senior Brandon Steele as quarterback.
Kevin Costner will buy aging Calfee Park in Pulaski and plant corn in it.
Ray Cox is a Roanoke Times & World-News sportswriter.
by CNB