PETE’S PUNCHLINE

The National Sports
  • Just a shout out to two Hunters who have been the quiet achievers, the unsung heroes over the opening three rounds. Whallan Tau-Loi’s defensive work has been willing, smart and of a high standard. They should call him The Plumber because he’s been plugging any leaks on the right egde and doing all the one percenters unfailingly. The other guy who needs a salute is Solo Wane. Lots of runs and helps the team coming out of the territory early in the set. Must be one of the leading metre-gainers. Now if he could just score some tries. Maybe in round 4, no?
  • Happy Easter everyone. The Q-Cup are having a break over this weekend. Gives everyone a chance to regroup, recover, reset, readjust and hit the return with more intent and purpose. The Hunters have the bye in round 5 though. More downtime, I guess.
  • One of the best boxing callers there has ever been, Howard Cosell, made this howler in the 1979 stoush between light heavyweight beasts Marvin Johnson and Matthew Saad Muhhammad (who went by Franklin then). Johnson was a killer but he met his match in the equally hard-hitting but better skilled Muhammad. In their first clash in 1977, Matthew wore down and stopped Marvin in the 12th (they went 15 rounds in those days). Two years later he repeated the dose but this time he stopped him in the 8th. Both bouts were brutal slugfests and Cosell described erroneously the final salvo from Muhammad in that ‘79 dance as a ‘fuselage’ of punches when he should have said ‘fusillade’. Even the greats slip up once in a while.
  • Speaking of boxing bouts, Tim Tszyu fights Sebastian Fundora this weekend in Las Vegas. It’s a great match-up and a good stay-busy fight for the junior middleweight champion in Tszyu whom they’ve dubbed the “Soul Taker” because of his penchant for taking the fighting spirit of opponents with relentless but calculated aggression.
  • Is ‘disruptance’ a word? I heard someone use it with such nonchalant confidence that she had me fooled, for a moment. Couldn’t find the word in any dictionary so I figured that it must be a new one – a cross between disruption and disturbance?
  • Now to some pop culture: Re-watched “Platoon” the other day and got this memorable line from Willem Dafoe’s charcter “Elias” when he looks intensely at an agitator who was harrassing the young recruits, and deadpans: “Hey O’Neill. Take a break……….you don’t have to be an a$#h@!% all the time.” Classic.
  • Can the NFS sound guys make it so a siren or some type of hooter goes off whenever a set restart is signalled by the ref so everyone is clued in on it? Make sense? – PGTP ([email protected])