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San Francisco Chronicle
17 hours ago
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Pioneers exude pride, not envy, for Valkyries and how the pro game is today for women
Whatever sadness and regret the old San Francisco Pioneers carry, they checked at the door of the bar Sunday when they gathered for a reunion. Sure, the promising basketball careers of these nine women and other teammates got cut short when the Pioneers went out of business after two seasons, but there's no crying in basketball. The Women's Professional Basketball League, America's first attempt at women's pro basketball, lasted just three seasons (1978-81). The Pioneers joined the league after its first season. But these OGs didn't come to Rikki's Women's Sports Bar in the Castro to cry in their beers. They came to drink to the glory. Gerry Booker recalled her first day at open tryouts in the Potrero Hill gym. Undrafted and unknown, Booker simply showed up. One of the men running the tryout told her to play defense, then he dribbled hard into her. Booker took the charge without flinching. ''Sign her! Sign her right now,'' Booker remembers the man saying, and so it was that she became the Pioneers' enforcer. 'Nobody messed with us because of Booker,' said Cindy Haugejorde, the Pioneers' All-Star forward. They blazed the trail, these women. They played in the spotlight briefly, then got yanked back to the real world. Booker became a schoolteacher — music and drama — back in her home town of Charleston, S.C. She never talked about the Pioneers. When her former high school recently informed her that a ceremony was in the works to retire her high school jersey, Booker's daughter Krin looked at her mom and said, 'Who ar e y ou?' All Krin knew was that mom is crazy competitive. 'Candyland, whatever, she just won't lose,' Krin said. 'She will slap the ball from a 3-year-old.' They're all creeping up on 70 now, these girls of winter, but the decades-old memories are fresh. Haugejorde recalled her first practice. She's about 6-2 and was standing under the hoop next to 5-9 Cardte Hicks. 'Cardte went up for a rebound,' Haugejorde said. 'She didn't get the rebound, but she grabbed the rim. With both hands.' Oh, Hicks had hops. She was the first woman to dunk in a game, in a pro league in Holland in 1978. For the Pioneers, she was an All-Star, a scorer and rebounder who sometimes sang the national anthem before the games at the Civic Center Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Auditorium). The brief experience changed the Pioneers' lives. Roberta Williams played for Milwaukee in the league's first season. In her scrapbook are a few bounced paychecks from that team. Then she got traded to the Pioneers, where the checks were good, if not large. 'This was my dream spot,' Williams said. 'I stayed here.' She played one season in Italy, then returned to San Francisco and became a high school counselor, then a construction worker. A plasterer by trade, she did work on the Getty mansion. So she worked for the Gettys twice, since Ann Getty was a minority owner of the Pioneers. Basketball wasn't something these women did, it was something in their blood. Anita Ortega was not well treated by the WBL, but her good memories cancel the bad. Ortega had led UCLA to a national AIAW (precursor to the women's game becoming part of the NCAA) championship and was the Pioneers' star that first season, their leading scorer (24.1) and playmaker (5.2 assists). But in the second season, when Ortega protested a pay cut from her $15,000 salary, team coach Dean Meminger traded her. Ortega got to her new team in Minnesota just in time to walk out with her new teammates to protest bounced paychecks, and that was the end of her WBL career. Ortega became an assistant college coach, then had a double career as a police officer in Los Angeles and a Pac-12 referee, a job from which she retired just last season. Basketball lifers, these women. Molly Bolin (now Bolin Kazmer) arrived in town that second season as a free agent. 'Machine Gun Molly' was the Pioneers' marquee player, the prototype for Caitlin Clark. Molly's fame and her high-volume shooting might have sparked resentment, but she fit in beautifully with the Pioneers. 'It's so amazing I was able to bond with these teammates,' she said. 'We had a blast. It was so much fun.' The get-together at Rikki's was organized by Maya Goldberg-Safir, a freelance writer and creator of 'Rough Notes,' which covers the history of women's basketball. She has been intrigued by the spiritual connection between the Pioneers and the newly minted Golden State Valkyries. When the WBL folded, there was a 15-season gap before women's pro ball restarted, with both the WNBA and the American Basketball League. The ABL, launched in 1996, lasted three seasons. Joe Lacob, the Valkyries' owner, had a team in that league, the San Jose Lasers. The Pioneers' contribution to the evolution of women's pro ball was to be honored Monday night at the Valkyries game at Chase Center. The Pioneers should be envious of the Valkyries, who need not live in fear that their league will fold underneath them. But to a woman, the Pioneers love the Valkyries. 'I went to their first game, and I was like a little kid,' said Booker. 'I had tears in my eyes.' Anna Johnson, who was born and raised in Oakland, bought Valkyries season tickets. Ortega feels a bond with the Valks. 'Their coach (Natalie Nakase) and I were walk-ons at UCLA,' Ortega said. The 45 years between the Pioneers' death and the Valkyries' birth makes it hard to connect the two, but the OGs know in their hearts that they got the party started. Hicks, the first dunker, standing straight and tall despite multiple surgeries and a recent cancer scare, said it best: 'We're the ones that gave them the ball.'
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
WWE icon defends Goldberg retirement match despite fans' health concerns
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Goldberg is set to retire at WWE Saturday Night's Main Event, with his last ever match getting underway in a matter of hours. The 58-year-old legend is challenging GUNTHER for the World Heavyweight Championship later tonight, and fellow WWE Hall of Famer Booker T is 'loving' that Goldberg is getting one final moment in the ring. Speaking exclusively to Metro, Booker said: 'I'm not surprised one bit, and I'm loving it because Bill Goldberg has been talking about having his last match. 'And one thing about us professional wrestlers, we always talk about it, man, 'I got one more run, and I got one last run'. And for Goldberg to be able to come back and finish it like this, with GUNTHER, it's not going to get any bigger than that.' Booker – who is a coach on WWE LFG (Legends and Future Greats) on US network A&E – acknowledged that not everyone is happy with him getting a title match just 17 months before his 60th birthday. The current NXT commentator argued: 'I know you got your your critics and your pundits out there, your armchair quarterbacks, talking about Goldberg. 'Why Goldberg, when you got all these other guys in line it could have been?' 'Well, those [younger] guys are going to be there, they're going to be there for a shot later on down the line after Goldberg come back – because this is show business.' He insisted that anyone thinking otherwise is 'missing the boat' on the point of the wrestling game. 'You're missing the boat on what we're doing in this business. If I got a chance as a promoter to use Goldberg on my show just one last time, it's his final run, I'm gonna do it,' he added. Some fans have also been concerned about Goldberg's physical state, as he appears to have been struggling with his movement in recent weeks, and has been open about the injuries he's suffered in recent months. In a new interview with CBS Sports, Goldberg confessed his 'old body' isn't in the best shape, as he's having issues with his knee. However, he added: 'I'm not going to miss the opportunity to put a stamp on my career, on my terms. It's a privilege, it truly is.' With Goldberg clearly willing and ready to go one more time, Booker insisted anyone in charge would 'do the same damn thing' as Paul 'Triple H' Levesque, given the chance to put on this match. 'If I got a chance to use The Rock, I'm gonna do it. If I got a chance to use Kurt Angle, you know I'm going to do it. That's the promoter's mentality,' he told us. 'And when I hear this armchair quarterbacks talking about 'why Goldberg?' They would do the same damn thing if they were in that position. Trust me. Trust me on that.' For all his critics, Goldberg has always had a special something for fans to latch onto, whether it's his intensity or his signature moves. More Trending Stars like Stephanie Vaquer – who is appearing at WWE Evolution this weekend – and LA Knight are doing that in their own way, and Booker T thinks the rookies on WWE LFG need to find what makes them stand out, while it's his role as a commentator to give them that boost. 'Sometimes they need a little bit of something extra. Back in the day, when I was a young guy coming up, doing the Spinneroonie and Mark Madden goes, 'Spinneroonie! Spinneroonie!' It becomes famous, it becomes a household deal, you know? I think you need that. And I'm just happy to be a part of the business still today.' View More » WWE Saturday Night's Main Event airs live on YouTube tomorrow (July 12) at 1am. US fans can watch WWE LFG on A&E. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: You can finally binge the crime show 'the internet should be screaming about' MORE: 24 years ago South Park crossed a line and was never the same again MORE: 'Wildly entertaining' sci-fi series with 97% Rotten Tomatoes score gets second season
Newsroom
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Short story: Collective Tissue, by Craig Cliff
Terry Voss (born 1975) is the author of the story collection The Boring Aurora, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Supplement's best first book award in 2001. His poems and stories have been published in many print and online journals, including Visigoths, 2B/X2B, Sundown and Herringbone. He is currently working on an as-yet-untitled novel about Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Voss lives in West Tapping with his wife, K.M. Kildare, author of three highly acclaimed novels, and their two young children. Terry Voss is a writer and failed home handyman. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a filleter on a fishing ship, a milliner's assistant, a sandwich artist and a sock model. On his blog, Aurora, Aurora, Voss has described the decision he and his wife made to both become full-time writers: It was bonkers. We'd both sold our first books but the advances were meagre. We had two other mouths to feed, but we were so open to the idea of success. I shudder to think what would have happened if Katie didn't have The Ontologist's Niece in her bottom drawer.' Terry Voss is an author and birdwatcher. Gianni Hill, his companion on many twitches and the author of the Booker shortlisted Far Flies the Dunlin, has called Voss 'quietly brilliant and brilliantly quiet.' Terry Voss is a fiction writer and film reviewer ( His favourite film is the woefully underappreciated The Last Valley (1971), starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif. He lives in West Tapping with his wife, K.M. Kildare, the author of six highly acclaimed adult novels and the bestselling High Salvage young adult series, and their own young adults, Dulcie and Cody. Terry Voss is a proud father of two. 'Cody and I are incredibly lucky to be surrounded by brilliant, original and driven women,' he said during his speech at the launch of Dulcie Kildare-Voss's debut novel, Quintessence. 'As Katie, Gianni and Ms Mackenzie have said, this book is all Dulcie. It's thrillingly honest about life as a teenager in the first decade of this new millennium.' Terry Voss is the author of The Boring Aurora, described by the West Tapping Courier as 'a promising debut from a local scribe'. His novel-in-progress, Connective Tissue, is a fictional account of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, during a zombie apocalypse. Dulcie Kildare-Voss, Terry's daughter and the author of Quintessence and Aftermathematics, recently described her father's project while onstage at the Hay Literary Festival: 'It sounds bonkers. I guess that's where I get that strain in my own writing from. The bonkers gene. A computer nerd battling zombies—I know! But he's actually very good at the sentence level. He does a wonderful line edit, if you catch him in the right mood.' Terry Voss was born and raised in West Tapping, a small town notable for the preponderance of published authors. 'It's worse than bloody Iceland,' he recently told the Observer, although the paper attributed the quotation to Terry Moss. Terry Moss is a brave new voice in English letters. The well-respected social commentator's first book, Connective Tissue, is the kind of debut you can't believe is from a first-time author. Terry Voss is a short story writer and the husband of K.M. Kildare. In an interview with the Guardian, Kildare described life in the Voss/Kildare household: 'Oh, it's a finely oiled machine. Terry's a great father. He always proofreads the kids' work and attends all their book launches. And mine, of course. When Cody got his deal with Bantam last autumn, Terry went out and bought champagne, proper French champagne, even though Cody was only fifteen at the time.' What Wisdom Could This Head Contain, Cody Kildare-Voss's first novel, has been described by Adam Mars-Jones as 'self-assured yet sweetly vulnerable and utterly, utterly compelling'. According to Michiko Katukani, 'Kildare-Voss, whose elder sister and mother are also writers, casts no shadow but his own.' Terry Voss ( writer, father, vegetarian. Terry Voss was the proofreader of the Fury's Reach trilogy by Dulcie Kildare-Voss. He is credited with questioning the decision to set all three books on a spaceship travelling to a distant planet without ever reaching that destination, and coining the phrase 'a claustrophobic space opera', which appears on the covers of each book in the bestselling series and the recently released posters for the Hollywood adaptation. Voss admitted on his blog that the full sentence was: 'A claustrophobic space opera without aliens or ray-guns is a recipe for sedation,' though he later claimed on Ms Kildare-Voss's Facebook page that it was an extended joke he shared with his daughter. Terry Voss is the author of the story collection The Boring Aurora, which was out of print until the author figured out how to use Amazon Kindle Direct. He is married to K.M. Kildare. In a recent interview with Radio 4, Kildare described life in the Kildare-Voss household: 'It's no picnic in a house full of writers. No one ever wants to do the dishes. And don't get me started on the Green-Eyed Monster.' Terry Voss was born in West Tapping in the mid-1970s and raised by his mother, memoirist Anita Custer. To friends and even his wife he claimed to have never met his father, but as Custer explains in her memoir, The Ship We Built at Sea, she regularly took Voss to see his father in London. 'Terry was always a bit of a cold fish. He never warmed to Reinier. Maybe it was the age difference, or Reinier's bohemian lifestyle. I gave Terry every chance to know his father but as soon as he was old enough to make his own way in the world, he broke off all contact. I don't think he's read a single one of Reinier's books.' Terry Voss has a foldout bed in his office, which comes in handy when progress on his novel, Connective Tissue, is slow, or when close friends or family publish memoirs disclosing his deepest secrets to his wife, the publishing phenomenon K.M. Kildare. Terry Voss is so fucking tired. Terry Voss is the son of the poet Reinier Voss (1929–1994). As a child, once a month he would be dropped off at his father's house in North London, which backed onto the grounds of Friern Hospital. Voss Senior liked to talk about his 'neighbour', previously known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, during rambling summer evenings as he and his guests drank dandelion wine. The main asylum building was famous for having the longest corridor in Europe. Terry Voss never drank the dandelion wine on offer, nor set foot inside the asylum, missing the chance to walk the nine kilometres of corridors before the facility was converted to luxury apartments for footballers' ex-wives and reality TV elites. Terry Voss is taking a break from fiction after two decades of toil. He is not writing a revenge memoir. Terry Voss is the new treasurer of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum Historical Society. He admits he was never that good with money, but his recent return to bachelorhood has shown him the importance of careful financial management. Growing up in a single-parent family, he took for granted the scrimping, saving and sacrifices on the part of his mother, perhaps because his father never seemed to work a day in his life. That house in Friern Barnet was forever filled with a revolving cast of blurry-eyed men in cardigans, incense-burning, barefooted women, and cloth-nappied toddlers at home in ambiguity. A proper-seeming woman, Mrs King, came and cleaned the house and cooked one-pot-wonder meals for whoever was around. As she worked, she sang one of three songs: 'Doo Wah Diddy Diddy', 'Da Doo Ron Ron' and, when she was feeling more eloquent, Bowie's 'Let's Spend the Night Together'. Terry Voss finally broke the back of his Tim-Berners-Lee-faces-the-zombie-apocalypse novel when he decided to set the majority of the action in and around Princess Park Manor, on the site of the former Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. 'I became interested in the old asylum when I returned to that part of London after several decades away,' he wrote on his blog in September. 'I joined the Colney Hatch Historical Society pretty soon after and feel more than a little dense that it's taken me twelve months to see what is now blindingly obvious. My father wrote a sequence of poems about the fire at the asylum in 1903, in which at least 50 female patient-inmates perished—the worst peacetime fire in London since the medieval period. Now it is a site of pilgrimage for One Direction fans, as members of the pop group lived there for a time. Disaster, insanity, the ephemeral, young blood—it writes itself.' Voss hopes to complete his novel before Christmas. Terry Voss (@Terryvoss75) was the first person to see a wild Scopus umbretta, otherwise known as hamerkop, hamerkopf, umbrette or anvilbird, on UK soil. He was birdwatching in the wetlands south of West Tapping with his friend, Gianni Hill, whose play, A Feather for My Aunt, remains the number one non-musical production on the West End. 'Gianni and I have been to that marsh dozens of times, but not since I moved down to London a couple of years ago,' Voss told BBC World News. 'I rang Gianni to discuss a tricky section of my novel, which asks what if Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, and the members of One Direction were the only ones who could stop a zombie apocalypse? Gianni suggested a spot of birdwatching to clear my head and I drove up Saturday morning. About three minutes after we settled into the hide, poor Gianni, he gets a call from his agent. I know, poor form having his phone on in the hide, but he had a film script that was going to auction. Anyway, he leaves the hide and heads back to his Land Rover to get better reception, and not five minutes later I see this self-assured brown wader walk right past me, so close I could probably touch it. I noticed its bill, its head—how could you not? That hammer shape. It's like nothing I'd seen before. I turned on my phone and in a few seconds I had identified it, tweeted, and here we are.' Voss's photos of the hamerkop have been hailed as 'historic' and 'not that shaky, given the circumstances'. Terry Voss does not know what a hamerkop was doing in the wetlands south of West Tapping, when the territory for this non-migratory bird typically does not extend north of Mecca. He does not know whether climate change, creeping urbanisation, deforestation, salination of waterways or any other Anthropocene horror is to blame. He still holds that it could be an escapee from a nearby bird park, though it wasn't tagged and no operator ever came forward. Yes, he has been told the various myths about the hamerkop. If you look into the water at the same time as a hamerkop, someone you love will die. If you disturb a hamerkop nest you'll develop leprosy. If you steal its eggs you'll be struck by lightning. Voss did none of these things. He simply took a couple of photos, shared them via social media, gave a few interviews with carefully deployed plugs for his novel-in-progress, and went back to his quirky bedsit in North London to knock the bastard off. He hasn't been struck by lightning. His kids are returning his texts. His ex-wife and mother are not, but they have both tweeted within the last twelve hours. His fingers are not about to fall off, though maybe that would be for the best. Terry Voss foresaw his own death. Before passing, he made sure both of his kids still had the playlist for his funeral he had emailed them a couple of years ago. It read: Waiting music: 'Da Doo Ron Ron' (The Crystals), 'Sigourney Weaver' (John Grant), 'Vein of Stars' (The Flaming Lips), 'There is a Valley' (Bill Fay). In lieu of a hymn: 'More Than This' (Roxy Music). For when you walk the coffin out: 'Don't Let it Bring You Down' (Neil Young). Terry Voss is prone to bouts of melodrama. He blames his childhood. Terry Voss woke one night when he was seven or eight. He called for his mother but she didn't come. He called long enough to forget for all time the content of the nightmare that had woken him. He got up and walked to his mother's room. He switched on the light. The bed was still made, but several dresses, scarves and jackets lay on the quilt. In the kitchen, dishes were stacked in the wire drying rack. His mother's keys weren't by the telephone. The clock showed quarter to twelve, not nearly as late as he had supposed. She was out—somewhere—safely betraying him. He flicked off the light and fumbled his way into the living room to turn on the television. He slid the volume down so he could hear it but if his mother returned home, unscathed and unaware, she would not be able to before he could leap up, switch off the set and slink down the dark hall and back to bed. On screen: the late film, part-way through. 'The next time I see you, Vogel,' shouted a man leaning against a tree, 'I'll cut out your eyes.' The other man, Vogel, ran to comfort a young blonde woman on her haunches. She was dressed, young Terry thought, like a milkmaid. Before he could get any further bearings, the film cut to a different man and woman lying in bed, a bearskin for a blanket. The man's torso was bare. Only her head was showing, but that was enough to be striking. Tanned skin, sharp features—the black-haired temptress to the innocent milkmaid. They were interrupted by a knock at the door. The man rose, pulled on a shirt and gestured for the woman to hide in the next room. She sat, facing away from the camera, allowing a second-long glimpse of her bare back. Terry sat down, cross-legged, two paces from the TV. The village, apparently under the protection of this man—the Captain—was being attacked by thirty men with swords, axes, a mace, bows and arrows, but also guns. Horses hurtled their riders into wooden spikes. A man licked another man's blood from his knife. It was a gift, all of it. A reward for conquering his fear. After the carnage, a priest threatened the Captain with an eternity in Hell. 'There is no Hell,' the Captain shouted. 'Don't you understand? Because there is no God. There never was.' Terry Voss, who still believed in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Heavenly Father, but was beginning to question practical aspects of their feats, received what felt like definitive proof of an adult conspiracy. There was no God. This heroic Captain knew the truth and wasn't afraid to speak it. But then the priest found Erica, the dark-featured woman, praying to Satan—Satan!—to protect the Captain and she was swiftly thrown on a pyre. When the Captain returned, mortally wounded from an extraneous battle, he mistook Inge, the blonde milkmaid, for his dark-haired lover. Young Terry could not quite fathom this. Inge and Erica had already become the two poles between which all alluring women must sit. But sweet, compliant Inge, encouraged by the other men, pretended to be fierce and fiery Erica and comforted the Captain as he expired. After the credits: the weather forecast. Terry Voss, aged seven or eight, pushed the on/off button of the boxy TV set and found his way back to his bed in darkness. The next morning he looked up the name of the movie in the Radio Times. The Last Valley. Already a dozen years old and relegated to late-night screenings. A commercial flop despite the star power of Michael Caine (the Captain) and Omar Sharif (Vogel). But The Last Valley was a place his imagination returned to again and again over the next weeks and months. He defended the valley from invaders. He convinced Erica there was no God and, therefore, no Satan. That it was better to lie in bed with him than be accused of witchcraft and burnt on a pyre. He started staying awake at night, waiting for the phone to ring and his mother to be invited somewhere so that he could watch the late movie. It happened once or twice a month. Sometimes he'd turn the set on before the late film had even started and catch the end of the news headlines or Wogan. He soon learnt that they didn't play late films on school nights, just Fridays and Saturdays, and, though it was still thrilling to rise once his mother had left, turn on the TV and position the volume slider just so, after a couple of minutes of Question Time or Italian language programming, he was completely deflated. As far as he knows, his mother never learnt of his late-night viewing sessions. She certainly has not mentioned it in the first two volumes of her memoirs. When he met Katie Kildare at university, he was struck by her resemblance to actress Madeleine Hinde, who played Inge. The straight blonde hair, the narrow nose, the slightest dimple in her chin. He was confounded, however, to learn by degrees that her personality was much more closely aligned to Erica. Not that he ever caught her praying to Satan, but she loved fiercely. There was something carnivorous about her approach to life and to writing. She would not abide the word 'something', for example. Early on in their courtship, Voss rented The Last Valley and watched it with Katie at her flat. She criticised the lengths the filmmakers went to make Omar Sharif's skin appear more pale. 'He's suffering from suspected plague,' he said. 'A convenient device,' she replied. She could not believe the scene in the first half of the movie where the Captain and Gruber, the town's de facto mayor, roll dice to decide who will get Erica. The Captain rolls a three but Erica announces 'Eleven', a winning score. 'Not only have we been given no reason for her to prefer Michael Caine over Gruber,' she said, 'but there's no way she'd be willing to risk everything she has to betray the most powerful man in the valley.' 'I guess,' he replied, though in the years to come he'd often find himself feeling his beloved had acted on similar hunches to Erica. That night back in Katie's flat, she announced the plot was confusing, the pacing poor. He did not agree, could not. He did concede that perhaps the first hour was not as striking or memorable as the second, and that he may have felt differently about the film if he'd seen it in full that first time, but he hadn't and he'd love the film forever as a result. This made her smile and lick her lips. They never made it to the end of The Last Valley, retiring to Katie's bedroom somewhere around the time Captain announced there was no God. The marriage of Terry Voss and Katie Kildare lasted thirteen books (one for him, twelve for her) and nineteen years. Terry Voss's Connective Tissue took nineteen years to write and was rejected by seven publishers (not such a large number when he started the project, but there are so few of the buggers left these days) before he decided to selfpublish. For legal matters, Mr Voss first asks lawyers for Mr Berners-Lee, Mr Styles, Mr Malik, Mr Horan, Mr Tomlinson and/or the estate of Liam Payne to consider the minimal financial gain likely to accrue as a result of this book's publication. Failing this, enquiries can be made via email: terryvoss@ Taken with kind permission from Landfall 249: Autumn 2025 edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $30), the latest issue of New Zealand's premiere literary journal, which includes new writing by Elizabeth Smither and James Pasley, a long, outstanding review by David Eggleton of CK Stead's collection of reviews and assorted prose, Table Talk (the best line in it is by Stead, when Eggleton quotes him saying of Maurice Shadbolt, 'Maurice could be good company, but he seemed to be constantly on the brink of hysteria'), and the winner of the Landfall young writers essay competition, Ava Reid (Te Ātiawa, Pākehā), who is studying anthropology at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. The issue is dedicated to the great Brian Turner (1944-2025). It's also the last issue that the journal will be known as Landfall. To mark its historic 250th issue later this year, it will be renamed Landfall Tauraka. The new name has been gifted by Te Irika o Wharawhara Te Raki, the Office of Māori Development t the University of Otago.
Fox Sports
4 days ago
- Sport
- Fox Sports
Cowboys Rookie Tyler Booker: Not Winning at Alabama Fuels My 'Burn and Passion'
The Dallas Cowboys beefed up the trenches in the 2025 NFL Draft by selecting Alabama offensive lineman Tyler Booker with the No. 12 pick — and the Crimson Tide alum is hungry to make Dallas a contender. "I love to win, and I hate to lose. I lost too much this past year. I lost a lot more than I should have in college, me being at Alabama," Booker said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. "I left without a national championship and that's something that is going to burn at me for the rest of my life. So I'm going to bring that burn and passion and desire with me to the NFL and transfer that over to wanting to win Super Bowls." Booker, a four-star recruit, played three seasons at Alabama (2022-24), with whom he shined. In 2022, Booker played at both guard spots before becoming Alabama's full-time left guard and earning first team All-SEC honors from the Associated Press in 2023. Last season (2024), Booker started 12 games at left guard, one at left tackle and was an All-American. As for Booker's Crimson Tide teams as a whole, Alabama went a combined 32-8 over the past three seasons, making the College Football Playoff in the 2023 season but losing a heart-breaker to eventual-national champion Michigan in the semifinal round. Last season, Alabama went 9-4 overall and 5-3 in SEC play, but Booker played in the team's ReliaQuest Bowl loss to Michigan. Booker, who stands at 6-foot-4 and 321 pounds, joins a Cowboys team that missed the playoffs last season at 7-10. Meanwhile, quarterback Dak Prescott missed the final nine games due to a hamstring injury, and Dallas fired head coach Mike McCarthy after five seasons, then promoted offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer to head coach. Booker's selection marks the third time in the past four years that the Cowboys have drafted an offensive lineman in the first round; Dallas selected Oklahoma's Tyler Guyton with the No. 29 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft and Tulsa's Tyler Smith with the No. 24 pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. With Guyton and Smith on the left side, Booker is projected to start at right guard for the Cowboys. "I'm very excited about training camp and putting the pads on," Booker said. "I'm really excited for the opportunity to get better, because I know there will be things I have to work on and things I have to get better at and things I have to learn. I'm very excited to go through the whole process and learn." Booker and the Cowboys open the 2025 preseason on the road against the Los Angeles Rams on Aug. 9 and open the regular season on the road against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sept. 4. Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account, and follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily! FOLLOW Follow your favorites to personalize your FOX Sports experience National Football League Dallas Cowboys Tyler Booker recommended Item 1 of 3 Get more from the National Football League Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Cory Booker reports record campaign haul after marathon speech
Booker's campaign manager, Adam Silverstein, said in a statement that the funding "reflects the energy and hunger" for Booker's style of leadership and said that he "will continue building the campaign infrastructure needed to win in 2026 and support Democrats running up and down the ticket." On April 1, Booker delivered the longest recorded floor speech in Senate history, breaking the record set by segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957. Booker was protesting President Donald Trump's policies. Booker said that he decided to undertake the marathon speech because Democrats had a "responsibility" to "do something different" in the face of the unprecedented changes taking place in the first few months of Trump's second term as president. Booker ran for president in 2019. His name has been floated as a potential contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. Other potential Democratic presidential candidates, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have reported raising similar amounts, according to NBC News, which first reported Booker's cash haul. Fundraising reports for the second quarter are due July 15.
