Obscure sports trivia

Temple?

 

It is not the Owls.
Go West, young man.

 

My final guess, BYU?

 

That is correct. The Cougars have made 31 appearances but have never made it to the Final Four.

 

It'll depend on the draw, but they've got a puncher's chance of ending that streak this year. They're sneaky good.*

*Yes, I know they lost to likely No. 1 seed Houston by 20 tonight.

 

Ending their nine-game winning streak. The result says more about the Houston Cougars than about the BYU variety.

 

While Chicago singer/songwriter Steve Goodman famously sang about his desire to have his ashes spread at Wrigley Field, his survivors couldn't get the club's front office to go along and reportedly had to bribe a groundskeeper to surreptitiously drop some of his cremains in the outfield.

The club's official position is that the field would be knee-deep in human ashes if they relented; certainly many people have successfully ignored the rule as ashes are hard to unscatter once they're tossed over the ivy-covered wall.

But management made an exception for one family, allowing cremains to be mixed ceremoniously into the dirt along the first-base line. Who was the lucky soul?

 

Harry Caray?

 

Heh, no.

 

The guy whose mama got run'd over by a danged old train?

 

He was drunk the day she got out of prison.

 

No, nor was it the men who love women who love men.

It was Charlie "Jolly Cholly" Grimm, who played for the Cubs from 1925 to '36, the last four as player-manager. After retiring from the field he managed the team for two more years before moving to the broadcast booth for Mr. Wrigley. He came back as manager in 1944 before resigning from the post in 1949. After that he moved to the front office briefly before moving on to the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers and later on, the Braves.

NPR reporter Scott Simon, who was Grimm's nephew, did a nice writeup on the spreading of Grimm's ashes. https://strangersguide.com/articles/scatter-my-ashes-at-wrigley-field/