The Denver Connection: On a wall in a house hangs a cartoon drawing by Paul Conrad of Jack Carberry, my grandfather, which was drawn when he retired as sports editor of the Denver Post in 1960. Conrad, who died last week at age 86, came to the Los Angeles Times from Denver soon after, and his exemplary work was honored three times by the Pulitzer committee. Also coming from the Post to the Times was Chuck Garrity, who had been sports editor for a time after my grandfather retired. Garrity eventually became assistant sports editor in L.A. before moving on to the NFL.
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add Denver Connection: Jack Faulkner, who spent many years with the Los Angeles Rams as an assistant coach under Chuck Knox and Ray Malavasi and also as a front office executive, was the head coach of the Denver Broncos when the team began as a charter franchise in the old American Football League. The Broncos played in Mile High Stadium, which was a baseball park where the minor league Denver Bears played. The Bears were a Triple A affiliate of the New York Yankees. The push to get Denver an AFL franchise was led by the city's civic leaders, and especially by Carberry and the Denver Post sports section, who saw the opportunity to turn Denver away from it's backwater Old West image and move forward to becoming a modern city. The fledging Broncos were placed in the AFL's Western Conference with teams from Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston and Kansas City. The Broncos quite possibly wore the ugliest uniforms in the history of pro football, brown and yellow and highlighted by vertical striped socks.
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Crazy scheduling: Whatever happened to Saturday afternoon football games? The one-time honored tradition seems to have bitten the dust in Los Angeles where this weekend USC and UCLA both have night contests kicking off at 7:30. The Trojans play host to the Virginia Cavaliers in a non-conference game at the Coliseum. The Bruins open Pac-10 play against Stanford at the Rose Bowl.
It wasn't long ago that when both USC and UCLA were at home, one would game would start in the early afternoon and the other a couple hours later, giving fans and football columnists the opportunity to see both games. The best example of this was several years ago when UCLA met Tennessee in the Rose Bowl at 12:30, followed by USC against Florida State at 5. You couldn't ask for a better day of big-time college football.
Plus, the late starts play havoc with newspaper deadlines. Chances are both games will still be in progress when some Southland editions are forced to go to press.
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