The great thing about summer is that even if I do not play sevens( a chunky 47 year old prop trying to play sevens would NOT be a pretty sight), there is the Tri-Nations championship pitting Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in a proverbial three scorpions-in-a-bottle-deathmatch. South Africa, the defending Rugby World Cup Champs split a pair of games in New Zealand, and lost a tight one to the Wallabys in Perth this past weekend.

Summertime in the Northern Hemisphere is transfer season for European clubs. The French clubs in the Top 14 have been particularly busy. Here is a rundown from Planetrugby.com :

Transfer river flows to France
France's Top 14 continues to attract players from all around the world and at an ever increasing pace. We take a closer look at who has gone where in what the French press are calling an "arms race" as every club, without exception, has reinforced its ranks with big name players and 'foreigners' in the front lines.

After a transfer season that saw some serious traffic, one would be forgiven for asking who isn't off to play in France next season.

To say there is a global mass exodus towards France might be a bit of an exaggeration, but since last year's World Cup, the trickle has become a torrent as the flow of players towards the Top 14 - especially from the Southern Hemisphere - intensifies.

A new trend is also emerging.

Players from the British Isles are jumping on the bandwagon as the attraction of the sunny Mediterranean and French cuisine is become an interesting counterweight to the power of the Pound.

The Super 14 however remains the favourite hunting ground, or should we say 'supermarket'. You can't blame the French clubs for waving their Euros: with the exception of a handful of superstars, pound-for-pound (no pun intended), Southern Hemisphere players are just plain cheaper than their French counterparts and often come with international experience. This time around they're even more attractive since they will immediately be fully operational under the ELVs.

Les Stars d'adord. There's no coincidence that the biggest names are heading for the Mediterranean coast. Take a look at a weather report for any given day in mid-winter and you'll notice that while the vast majority of Western Europe is covered with rain and cold, a small pocket of golden sunshine is ever-present on the French south coast where you'll find Toulon, Perpignan and Montpellier.

Of course Perpignan have stolen the limelight by replacing one of the world's best place-kickers (Percy Montgomery) with the world's best fly-half, Dan Carter. 700,000 Euros isn't bad for seven months in Catalogne. Those tapas are going to taste mighty good. They've also recruited centre Maxime Mermoz from Toulouse and wing Farid Sid, who returns from Brive.

The red carpet has been rolled out at big spending Toulon for Jerry Collins (reportedly for a whopping 1,2 million Euros for three years), who will join his cousin Tana Umaga in one of Europe's most beautiful and laid-back regions. He will team up with, amongst others, former Wallaby scrum-half Matt Henjak and Rugby League star Luke Rooney (from Penrith Panthers).

Victor Matfield might have packed his bags but the newly-promoted club have simply bought a new line-out combination from South Africa in the form of Stormers hooker Tiaan Liebenberg and locks Ross Skeate and Francois van der Merwe. Rumours have also all but been confirmed regarding the arrival of Springbok loose forward Joe Van Niekerk.

 

Of the myriad moves by French clubs, Perpignan getting All Black poster child Dan Carter is by far the most high profile move. Clearly these moves are going to make the Top 14 a better league, but will also make for some compelling Heineken Cup matches for teams like Toulouse, Clermont Auvergne, Stade Francais, Perpignan, Biarritz, Castres and Montbauban.

Maybe Setanta Sports might start showing some top 14 games and not just the Magners League and the English Premiership. One can hope...

This is a copy of a letter sent by Kenny Moore, Olympian, author, and

writer for Sports Illustrated. This letter was sent to the

Administration at the University of Oregon in regard to the announcement

of the dropping of Oregon Wrestling at the end of this season. This is

printed with Kenny’s permission.

I am Bill Bowerman’s biographer, he having hammered in

the lessons that let me run two Olympic marathons. As well, I have

written for SI since 1971, covering everything from Bill Walsh to sumo.

After a life studying sports, I know none performs the primary act of

higher education-transforming a savage heart-better than wrestling. Few

come close.

When you wrestle, you are part of a culture as ancient as

humanity. Washington and Lincoln were wrestlers. Ulysses S. Grant and

Norman Schwartzkopf were wrestlers. Plato was a wrestler, and Ken

Kesey. It’s a vast brotherhood, a family, and therefore universal. I

guarantee you that it will be wrestlers who open the door back into Iran

or Cuba, not the Marines.

Wrestling has never been widely popular because most people

aren’t up to it, and never will be. Watch a practice. Maniacally

straining pairs make the mat squeal and pop with explosive takedowns and

reversals. A hold slips and a face takes a stunning elbow. When time

is called, the most brutal bursts conclude with reassuring little pats.

No harm intended. Understood.

I can’t watch that delicate control of human aggression

and not see the moment-by-moment affirmation of civilization. That is

the self-command we honor as the highest achievement of college sport.

The struggle says my friend Bobby Douglas, the 1992 U.S.

Olympic coach, is to keep the spirit of wrestling alive so dynamic,

combative, disciplined people can find a safe haven. We can’t compete

with football or basketball in sponsorship money, but we do in the men

we produce.

I’m not telling you anything don’t know. All I can add

is my personal feeling about what makes Oregon great. One is that its

coaches are teachers in the mode of Bowerman, and so worshipped by the

young all over the state.

6000 Oregon high school boys wrestle. Most are from small

towns. The finest have always yearned to be a Beaver or Duck. If

wrestling isn’t saved, they won’t be molded by men such as Finley

and Chuck Kearney, but they will owe their allegiance elsewhere, and it

will be a ferocious loss.

Not only that, since wrestlers are our best ambassadors,

since wrestlers are going to open Iran or Cuba, (being the living

refutation of the arrogant, spoiled ugly American), we should make sure

it is Oregon wrestlers who have that high honor. They are better at

diplomacy than the college of international relations.

I don’t have a full appreciation of your Title IX

problems, but I know the math dictates that each men’s sport’s

participant must be roughly balanced by a women’s one.

Which suggest a Bowerman approach. He always said “Over solve a

problem if you can”. He solved the overcrowded department offices

with a whole new building. One over-solution would be not cutting

men’s wrestling but adding women’s wrestling.

I would hope that the majestic Knight Legacy gift has

already jolted the department into finding a way to save wrestling. If

not, I ask you to consider whether the department and the University can

afford a financial saving that is achieved at such moral cost, the loss

of a truly great legacy, a truly Olympian sport.

Kenny Moore

As an ex-wrestler, I would like to thank Mr. Moore for at least trying to save wrestling at the U of Oregon. If you want to see more examples of his writing, you can do a search for archived articles in www.cnn.si On the web, there are a couple of other books that he has written, one of them on great distance runners that I would like to get. He is also a man who worked for years to get the great Ethiopian champion Mamo Wolde released from prison in Ethiopia, where he was jailed without charges for 9 years. Because of Kenny Moore, Mamo Wolde was at least able to die a free man, and not behind bars. That alone is a testament to a great runner, a super writer, and a tremendous human being.

On a glorious Monday morning, I decided to take Buddha and Dakota for a long walk. After an utterly fantastic weekend of sunshine and mild temperatures this past weekend, we are due for increased heat an humidity tomorrow, so If I was going to push the dogs a bit on a walk, today is the day to do it.

Ian and Andrea asked me if I wanted to take my grandson Duncan a long too. They have baby front back, a less costly version of the "Baby Bjorn", that I was able to put the Duncaroo into which would allow my hands to be free.

There is nothing quite like a chunky prop/ex-wrestler/weightlifter carrying a small baby in a front pack with a couple of dogs in tow to make people slow down and stare while driving past us. Most people have a smile when they see babies anyway. I am not sure if they were smiling at Duncan, or about ready to laugh at what a sight we must have made.

Once we got into a good walking cadence, it really was a nice walk. Duncan's 8+ pounds are the least of my concerns, it's trying to control two very different dogs while walking. Buddha has a straight-ahead-damn-the-torpedos kind of a gait, and my sister's dog Dakota has the Attention-Deficit Disorder thing going where her attention is drawn to almost anything during the walk. And of course, BOTH dogs really want to meet other dogs who are also out on their walk. All this means that a walk with them is more of an upper body/core workout than one would usually predict on a 3 mile/5km walk. Ducan was nice an calm during the walk.

All in all, a good time was had by all. Now I have to run and take care of some errands and get down to my 91 year old grandmother's house to mow her yard and then hit the gym.

When I got off work on Friday morning, I thought I would take my bulldog Buddha, and my siter's dog Dakota (I am dog-sitting while she is flying to India for a six day trip-she's a flight attendant) for a quick walk around Cooper High School. I wanted to get a walk in for them, because it was going to get really hot and humid on Friday, and I wanted to get it down while the weather was decent.

As we rounded the corner going from 49th Ave. N. onto Virginia AVE. N, I became aware of another dog behind us. Imagine my suprise to find a stray Pit Bull, unleashed and uncollared, right behind us. She obviously had a recent litter judging by the condition of her teats. I don't mind admitting that I was more than a little nervous and concerned...the hairs were standing up on my neck. In the Twin Cities area, like other parts of the US, there have been some well documented, un-provoked attacks of Pit Bulls on humans and dogs.

So here I am, I have my hands full of two dogs, my 85 pound Olde Englishe Bulldogge, and my sister's flighty 30 pound cattle dog mix, this stray Pit Bull is trying to engage my dogs to play, which was irritating Buddha, who started snarling at the Pit Bull, who in turn started snarling and yapping, I am trying to drag my dogs along to keep them going and keeping an on the Pit Bull in case it decides to put a bite on me. I should point out that I did not have a cell phone or anything that could have been used as weapon against the Pit Bull. If it had decided to attack the dogs I was walking, it would have snapped Dakota like an old twig, and my bulldog is a lover, not a fighter, and I really did not want to have to find out just how well my dog would do in a fight for his life.

By the time I rounded the corner onto 47th, I saw that Cooper High School was open for letting the summer school kids in, I saw a mom getting out of her car with her kid, I asked her if she had a cell phone, she said that she did, and I asked her to phone the cops. She did that, and I took my two dogs in the foyer, instructing the kids present to NOT let the Pit Bull in with us. One of the Janitors went out with a large stick and kept the Pit Bull from the front of the school and kept an eye on it untill law enforcement came-at that point, I took my two dogs and made fast tracks to get home.

I should probably say that if this was a really aggressive pit bull, me or my dogs would have been toast. I would be lying, however, if I said that I was not un-nerved a bit by the experience.

I should add, that I am not one of these people who thinks that Pit Bulls should be illegal. I think it is really tough to ban an entire dog species. The bigger problem in the USA is that you have a real thug element that wants to have Pit Bulls as some kind of macho statement. You see these guys with the urban fashion, pants down to their ass, baseball cap askew and with a Pit Bull in tow. A lot of these people are using the dogs to fight them, to guard their drugs, or they are just flat out mis-treated and abused. Pit Bulls have been around a long time. People in the US forget that in the old "Our Gang" comedies, Petey the dog was a Pit Bull-the American Staffordshire Terrier also used to be owned by people who really knew the breed, or they were fighters. When I was a kid, you really did not see many Pit Bulls. Today, in 2008, you are seeing more of them. You really cannot get away from them. The scary thing in this country is that there have been unprovoked attacks in the country, as well as the city and suburbs-and in Minneapolis, more of the thug element is moving from "The Hood" into the rental property in suburbs like New Hope and Crystal.

I don't really have a ready solution to the problem. All I know is that in the future, when I walk my dogs, I am going to at least have my cell phone. The whole situation certainly has me thinking more tactically as to what I need to do if this happens again.

In my job, I try to soothe the jangled nerves of stressed-out parents who are calling in for care advice about their sick kids. In keeping with the theme from my posting the other day, prevention is a better course than intervention.

Last night at work was a really good case in point. I had a frazzled mom calling in about her 6 month old who was just screaming like a child-possessed. I found out that the child had just had their 6 month shots. In the USA, kids get immunizations at 2,4,6,12-15, and 18 months. The 6 month kids get 4 shots, including the Diptheria, Tetanus and Pertussis(whooping cough). The DTaP makes kids really, really sore. When I asked the mother if she had given her kid some tylenol (Acetaminophen-similar to Pacetamol for my UK friends). The mother sounded confused and said she had not. She told me that nobody had ever instructed her that she should give pain mediction after giving her kids their immunizations. Ouch! Somebody in her pediatrician's office dropped the ball. When kids get these immunizations, they hurt-a lot-for up to 72 hours post-injection. The doctor or nurse in the pediatrician's office could have saved this mom and child a lot of grief at 3 AM if they had just taken a second and gave her instruction about pain coverage. Sadly, this is not an isolated case. I get calls almost every night with stressed out parents with pissed-off, sore infants who have not been given any pain coverage.

The other scenario that can be prevented with a little bit of instruction is when prescribing a child an antibiotic. Many antibiotics kill not just the bad bacteria that made the child sick, but the good bacteria that make up the normal flora of good bacteria in the gut. Antibiotic therapy leads often to diarrhea. This can be prevented if parents could just give their kids a couple of servings of yogurt a day while on antibiotic therapy. The Acidophillus in yogurt helps to replace the bacteria killed by the antibitiotics. Again, I get a TON of calls from parents worried that their kids are allergic to the antibiotic because of the diarrhea shooting out like the Trevi Fountain from their kids.

I guess I should not complain. The lack of instruction by Pediatric offices is good for job security. Still...I don't think it's great customer service for the parents of these kids.