Letters

Tales from the Super Bowl
Your Feb. 2 cover was great. For those readers who were wondering, the Green Bay Packers were Willie Davis (87) and Bob Skoronski (76).
FRED EVERDING, Arvada, Colo.

Let me see if I have this right. Roger Director is given tickets to the biggest game of the year, scalps them to pay for a "fat slice of his daughter's tuition," then spends part of Super Bowl week getting drunk and buying lap dances (The Greatest Stories Never Told, Feb. 2). His daughter must be very proud.
JEREMY HURWITZ Atlanta

The LEADING OFF picture of all the Super Bowl tickets at first made my stomach turn as I imagined the future price of such ducats. However, I forgot entirely about that when I saw the Super Bowl XXXVI ticket: SECTION 09, ROW 11, SEAT 01. It reminded me what the country had been through in the months before that game and the lessons we learned on 9/11 about what really matters—life, family and liberty.
ERIC RODRIGUEZ, Houston

For your LEADING OFF look at Super Bowl coaches (Feb. 2), couldn't you have included Chuck Noll, the only coach who took the winner's ride four times?
William R. Smith, Indiana, Pa.

Maine Lines
Over one weekend in January 2000, I got stuck in Camden, Maine (Slide Show, Feb. 2). I asked some local colleagues if there was anything to do and was told the National Toboggan Championships were that weekend. Wow, I said, can I go watch it? Watch it, they asked, you want to be in it? Thus I and three teammates—the backs of our heads rather too intimately nestled into one another's crotch—made our run, screaming all the way down, hitting the finish line at 43 mph, crashing some 10 or so seconds later into a snow bank, laughing until we peed in our snowsuits. So which national championship can you say you were in?
MIKE TODARO, Marietta, Ga.

According to your poll (Feb. 2), Mainers' favorite baseball team is the Boston Red Sox, their favorite football team is the New England Patriots, their favorite basketball team is the Celtics and their favorite hockey team is the Bruins—but their biggest state rival is Massachusetts. Talk about a conflict of interest!
DUANE D. CARPENTER, Buckhannon, W.Va.

Your list of Maine's all-time best sports figures overlooked Shirley Povich, a 17-year-old Bar Harbor caddie who wangled a ticket for himself to a 1923 Giants-Yankees World Series game at the Polo Grounds. The next year, he covered the Fall Classic as a reporter for The Washington Post and in 1926 became the paper's sports editor, at age 20. His "This Morning" column ran six days a week for the next 47 years, winning him international acclaim and a flood of reader mail addressed to Miss Shirley Povich. Along the way he became the father of Maury Povich, the talk show host, and father-in-law to Mr. Connie Chung.
ROGER ANGELL, New York City

Two for the Show
North American tennis commentators can take much of the blame for the decline in popularity of doubles (INSIDE TENNIS, Feb. 2). The few occasions when doubles are on TV, the announcers spend most of the time gossiping or talking about the players' singles records. Hardly ever do they comment on what's going on during each point, even though the tactics employed are far more interesting than those in most singles matches.
JOHN J. FUREDY, Toronto

Matt's Cup Runneth Over
I am tired of hearing how Matt Kenseth won the Winston Cup title with only one win and that he would have been eighth in the new points system (SCORECARD, Feb. 2). Too bad, Ford haters! In 2002 Matt won five races—the most of anyone that year—and finished eighth in the Cup race. This was a long-deserved title.
MATT ZUKOWSKI, Palm Desert, Calif.

Full of Grace
Does Roger Staubach, an otherwise brilliant man, really believe that he coined the phrase Hail Mary pass in 1975 (SCORE-CARD, Feb. 2)? When I was a freshman at Massapequa (N.Y.) High in '73, my coach, Joe Sella, told us that when all else failed you could always throw a Hail Mary pass: "You know what that is, fellas? That's when you throw a pass downfield and then say a Hail Mary that a teammate catches it." He said he had learned about the Hail Mary playing high school ball in the mid-'40s with Joe Paterno at Brooklyn Prep, a high school run by the Jesuits.
MICHAEL WATT, Babylon, N.Y.