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Saturday, April 15, 2006
Heartbeat gets stronger
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
One goal came from a rookie who says he fired a “no-look shot.” Another came from a veteran who missed the puck with his stick, but fortunately had his skate there as a backup. Two other goals came from a defenseman who is of no relation to Bobby Orr.
These are times when you don’t try to make sense of anything.
You just go with it.
The Thrashers won again. They didn’t look great doing it. They barely beat a Boston team that ended its season with 11 straight road losses and won two of its final 14 games. They were sloppy.
But art went out the window a long time ago. At this point, a team doesn’t care how it gets to the finish line: Glide. Stumble. Follow Monty Python’s Ministry of Funny Walks. Just get there.
A 4-3 win over Boston on Saturday meant there was still hope in catching Tampa Bay for the final playoff spot in the NHL’s Eastern Conference, and hope had an increasingly strong heartbeat.
The Thrashers’ playoff chances now stand at “62 1/2 percent.” That, according to the renowned mathematician Don Waddell. It was a guess. But then, so are BCS rankings. So go with it.
Two weeks ago, the Thrashers lost a game at Tampa Bay 4-3 to fall seven points behind the Lightning. Rookie Jim Slater was a minus-2 that night and decided to take drastic grooming measures. He buzzed his hair.
“We had 10 games left, and everybody was like, ‘We have to go on a 10-0 run,’ ” Slater said. “So I buzzed the head to see what it would do.”
Weird things started to happen — both to the team and Slater’s facial hair. His attempts at growing a beard had always failed in the past.
“The beard always grew in patches,” he said. “But after I buzzed the hair, the beard just started growing. Now the guys are calling me Abe Lincoln or Leprechaun. The beard just fell into place.”
The beard and the season, the second belatedly. After Slater’s follicle metamorphosis, the Thrashers beat Carolina. They are 6-1-1 since. Make that 8-1-1 and Slater may get a clipper endorsement.
The 23-year-old has been one of the team’s best players of late, playing wing on its most effective line (with Scott Mellanby and Bobby Holik). Slater had a goal and an assist Saturday. He tied the game, 2-2, in the first when he skated in on a two-on-one and fired a shot between the pads of goalie Tim Thomas. Only it really wasn’t that clear-cut. Slater initially focused on a camera attached to the back of the net.
“The camera was staring me right in the face on the 5-hole [between goalie Tim Thomas’s leg pads],” he said. “Then I looked down. It was one of those great, no-look shots. Put the head down and rip it.”
With the Thrashers trailing the Bruins again, 3-2 in the third, Slater set up Mellanby on another two-on-one. Mellanby couldn’t get his stick on the puck, but it ricocheted off his skate into the net for the tying goal.
Three minutes later, defenseman Andy Sutton scored his second goal of the game to give the Thrashers their first lead. It was Sutton’s second two-goal game in three games. We’re talking about somebody who has never scored more than eight in a season.
But this is what this season has become. The Thrashers went into the Olympic break a .500 team with a recent seven-game losing streak. They are 15-6-1 since. They officially broke the franchise record for “must-win” games long ago.
“I don’t know how we continue to get this done, night after night,” Holik said. “We’re making mistakes and we’re getting away with it, but … whew.”
As is tradition for the final home game of the regular season, the Thrashers gave away their jerseys to selected fans after the game.
Two weeks ago, nobody figured that they might need them back.
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Even the governor takes in the Steeplechase
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Kingston — For 40 years horses had been jumping brush fences in the interest of improving speech around Atlanta, and rarely did this pastoral scene attract the interest of our governors. This time, it did. This time the governor even came, he spoke, and Sonny Perdue presented the winner’s trophy to a fellow who was in a state of sweaty exhiliration, he so unexpectedly found himself in the winner’s nook.
“We really thought we were over our head,” Carl Gessler Jr. said. His six-year-old jumper named Quem se Atreve — consult your Portuguese translator — had taken the lead in this two-mile Atlanta Steeplechase feature and stubbornly refused to give it up. “He had just broken his maiden at Camden two weeks ago, and we had tried jumping after he was such a failure on the flat track,” Gessler continued, his face a-glow with flecks of perspiration.
The Georgia Cup is a Grade II race, sponsored by Coca-Cola, in this world of the hurdling horse, a refuge for thoroughbreds who don’t run fast enough. That was the case of Quem se Atreve, who at one time was one of the most promising three-year-olds in Brazil. Gessler, a Huntsville, Ala., businessman who grew up amid the fragrance of the barn area at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas, commissioned his purchase along with some other thoroughbreds through Ken McPeek, the trainer who won the biggest Belmont upset in history with another Brazilian import, Sarava, four years ago.
“We ran him in a flat race and he came in last, with Edgar Prado riding. We put him in another. Same result. We tried nothing but high-level jockeys, and he still never showed anything,” Gessler said. He had only raced on the flats, and failed miserably, and he was puzzled. What next? “Maybe he wants to jump over something,” McPeak told Gessler. So they gave him the chance, called Jack Fisher, a friend who trains jumpers, and Quem se Atreve went back to school again. Now he has won two races in a row, both worth $45,000 of $75,000 purses, and Gessler, who operates at Sarah Lyn Stable, was so excited he didn’t know how much he’d won. Two entries shared the most attention — Mixed Up, trained by the leading trainer in steeplechase, Jonathan Sheppard, and winner of an undercard event here last year, and Mauritania, a 9-year-old campaigner. Mixed Up finished second by half a length, but Mauritania was out of the money. Quem se Atreve seemingly had directed his career onto another course, exciting to all his connections, Jack Fisher, his Irish jockey Paddy Young, and all the Gesslers.
It was another grand day in this elbow of the Etowah River, sunny with a freshening wind. Big band music blaring out over the acreage, followed by the skirling of bagpipes. The governor’s helicopter was late arriving, but he joined in the festivities with gubernatorial zeal.
It is a sadness that this happens only once a year in our territory. It is major in the hearts of horse lovers, but actually this is just another stop on the second-level circuit of the National Steeplechase Association, which opened in South Florida in early March. The tour continued on into South Carolina, now Georgia and next week in Kentucky. Several leading jumpers tested the hedges in Camden and Aiken, then headed on to Keeneland to ready up for the $150,000 Royal Chase next week, bypassing Atlanta. The total purse here, in this 41st meeting, was $165,000 for six races.
But so much for the fiscal details of a glowing day devoted to an ancient sport and to Atlanta Speech School. This broadland of meadow and grassy hillside is some 75 miles north of Atlanta, totally involved in its own wilderness, but some 20,000 spirited sportspeople annually find their way here for the good air, the picnicking and the sight, uncommon around our state, of horses leaping gleefully over hedges. There were three spills, but no injuries.
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