This past Sunday afternoon my friend Richie from up the street came by to watch our favorite pro team, the Colts, smash the Arizona Cardinals in Week III of the new NFL season (MMIX, I guess … the NFL loves roman numerals). So the Colts are indeed crushing the Cardinals, in Arizona, as predicted. [...]
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To paraphrase Richard Nixon: Let me make one thing perfectly clear — I am not a sports nerd. I’m not. I’m just a regular guy who happens to like sports. I have an actual life. Seriously. Don’t even try to stereotype me as one of those pathetic sports geeks who sleep with their sports almanacs. It’s just that questions like, What was the score of the very first Prep Bowl football game? Who was UH baseball’s first freshman all-American? When was the last time the UH football team shut out an opponent? How many times did “Bobo” Olson fight Sugar Ray Robinson…these things just come to me! Maybe it started when I was a 10-year-old watching UH basketball games on TV. I would list the entire UH roster in my notebook, and then jot down every field goal, free throw and personal foul. Or maybe it began in 1981 when I began tracking stats for every NBA first-round draft pick. This was before the Internet, mind you, so you can imagine how much time I put in to tabulate their points and figure out their scoring averages. So yes, I suppose I have to come clean: I’m a sports nerd. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. ~ Lance Tominaga, author

The Hawaii Sports Trivia Challenge: 1,000 Questions to Test Your Sports IQ! presents 1,000 brain teasers in 100 quick quizzes on the games Islanders play: Rainbow Wahine Volleyball, the Prep Bowl, Little League champs, Hawaii’s Olympians and more. Just released by Watermark Publishing, the 200-page book provides a first-ever source for testing local sports knowledge or settling that friendly wager.

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Head trainer Melody Toth spent 30 years courtside—and behind the scenes—with the Rainbow Wahine, the basketball ’Bows and the other championship teams of University of Hawai‘i athletics. In Let’s Go ’Bows! Behind the Scenes with University of Hawai‘i Sports, she shares insights and inside stories of this remarkable legacy—the world-class athletes, the heartbreaking losses and the heady triumphs of victory on the national stage.

Toth speaks from a point of view that only a few have access to, having spent eight to 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, with the athletes. Her stories, adapted from her journals, reveal what sports writer Ann Miller of The Honolulu Advertiser calls “stolen moments you have never seen and rarely read.” In Let’s Go ’Bows! Toth shares funny and heartwarming stories fans never knew, and recaps some of Hawai‘i sports history’s most beloved and well-known names and games.

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