Hey everybody, it’s that time again, Fred and the Fantastics. The Fantastics being
Mark Mancini and Art Sorce. Mark Mancini, the World’s Worst Sports Handicapper,
Art Sorce from Galaxy Sports in Pennsylvania. We’re on BLEAV and PodClips and
there’s so much to talk about. The Lakers have a new mentor and the LA Times not happy with it.
Let’s start with Art. JJ Redick, the answer to the Lakers’ woes?
Any one thing in scrimmages, he can still pop the three. I know that for a fact, but you know,
the guy’s never coached at a high level. That’s my only trepidation with JJ. And I also feel like he
might be, you know, last week’s meatloaf because I mean, they were supposed to get him in there,
talk to him about being the Laker coach and, and then Hurley comes in and there’s a big
swirl. And you know, I just, I feel like it’s, it’s kind of unfair for him, but then again,
he’s getting like $75 million.
So go get ’em, JJ.
Let’s go.
Mark, what do you think?
Well, if you put a gun in my head
and told me what I’d take a guy with no experience
that played in the NBA 15 years,
or a college coach who’s been very productive,
I’m taking the guy that’s played in the NBA
for 15 years.
College coaches haven’t cut the mustard in the NBA.
Go look at Jerry Tarkanian and some of these guys.
Calipari, Pitino, the list goes on and on, but you know, people say you don’t have the
experience.
Well, Erik Spoelstra didn’t have the experience in Miami.
They gave him a shot.
Steve Kerr got a shot.
So J.J. Redick, I’ve always liked him.
He’s a pure outside shooter, 15 years.
Somebody’s going to give you the experience.
I think he’s going to do something with the Lakers.
I like his style.
And you know, let me tell you, I’m not a big Duke guy, but the guys that come out
of Duke, they got a little bit of swag to them. Christian Leitner, Grayson Allen.
Well, Krzyzewski knows how to coach and they do pay attention. That guy’s a brilliant,
brilliant coach. And of course, the genius Kyrie Irving.
He played at Duke for about eight minutes. Well, how long did he play?
You know, Mark, it’s interesting. You always mentioned this guy came out of the
booth next to Chick Hearn and became the coach. Who might that have been?
Pat Reilly. Pat Reilly was one of the best coaches, innovators, motivators, whatever
you want to call it. J.J. Starks hits his shots out there in New York. The Knicks would
have won a title. He would have won in three cities.
You’ve got to put Pat Reilly in the top five of the greatest GM coaches, color-analysts
of all time.
No, no, I agree.
You’ve interviewed Pat. You guys have interviewed Pat, haven’t you? That’s the one guy
that eluded me. Long time ago. Folks, you can email us at sportsfred@aol.com, sportsfred@aol.com,
Fred and the Fantastics, Art Sorce. Hey, by the way, you guys, this is fresh off the presses.
The entire AFC North is going to be on Hard Knocks, the HBO show on the NFL this year. This
is the first time they’ve had an entire, you know, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Pittsburgh,
And Cleveland all are going to be on that show.
So I’m looking forward to that.
The best billed series.
I thought the Bears were the team that they chose.
Bears are doing the mini camp deal.
Oh, okay.
So later in the season you’re talking about.
Yeah, they’re already tired of Caleb Williams.
Folks you can email us at sportsfred@aol.com, sportsfred@aol.com.
you got to talk about this. Willie Mays, we lost him on Tuesday of this week,
a couple days before the honor of going for the Negro League game that was televised on Thursday.
Art, Willie Mays, comment. Well, personally, he’s my all-time favorite player in my generation.
I told you the story on Sports Overnight America, listening to him as we came steaming into
San Francisco Bay in a Dodger game in ’66, and he hit an amazing home run.
But I mean, what he did in 24 years, you guys, unbelievable, lived to be 93, “Say Hey
Willie Mays”, you know, and then to have that tribute to the Negro Leagues, what
they had this week, you know, for Major League Baseball at Rickwood Field where
he came out of Birmingham, Alabama.
I got to meet him a couple of times when I was with Prime Sports.
Got to interview him a couple of times.
Spent a half inning with him here and there.
And I got to tell you, the man had such great charisma.
He loved people.
I mean, he was just a wonderful human being.
And, you know, we’re missing guys like him and Jerry West.
Those are class acts that you just can’t replace.
And I was just privileged to be able to see him at his best.
And same with Jerry West.
I was thinking about the shot he hit before the,
you know, with the Knicks before halftime
from past half court.
I mean, just, it’s sad, but you know,
it also lets me know that I gotta get busy living too.
Yeah, it’s, you know, last month,
Bill Walton, Hall of Famer, West Hall of Famer,
and in baseball, Mays, of course, Hall of Famer.
You know, growing up, baseball was always my favorite sport, but right behind was college
basketball.
And again, I grew up with UCLA.
My mom had graduated from UCLA and then John Wooden had taken over and they were always
in the hunt.
And there were like 25, 24 teams and sometimes 25 teams because there was an extra team
in the West in the NCAA tournament.
And of course, Wooden wins 10 championships in 12 years, seven straight.
And now the NCAA is talking about adding from, let’s see, 32, 40, 48, 56, 60, 64, 68.
They want to go to 76.
Why not just let everybody in the playoffs?
Everybody gets a trophy.
Come on.
The regular season means nothing.
Art, I mean, take it away.
I mean, it’s so-
Well, you know, Fred, it’s just too much at this point in time.
I mean, I liked the tournament when it was a 48th.
I’m real excited to see how college football playoff
with the 12 teams is gonna go.
But I mean, part of it is,
it all comes down to what we always talk about
on Fred and the Fantastics,
that six letter word, greed.
You know, when are you gonna finally realize,
okay, not everybody can make the playoffs.
And I mean, I want smaller schools to get a chance.
Like my personal theory on this whole college football deal
is you have 10 big conference teams
and save two spots for the smaller conferences, okay?
And that way, at least they can be a part of it all.
That gives those kids, two teams a chance.
You know, it’ll probably be Memphis State
or Memphis, you know, somebody like that,
or maybe the school Boise State or somebody like that, you know.
But that’s what I think.
I think you gotta have a little bit of parity there,
but yeah, I’m with you on that one, Fred.
Too many teams.
Hard, a couple of weeks ago,
you showed me that you got the college football annual
for 2024.
Have you opened it up?
I actually have.
I’m really intrigued
by this Detroit Lions football team, Fred.
I just feel like they’ve got an awful lot of talent.
I don’t remember the last time running backs,
two running backs went over a thousand yards,
one inside, one outside, like Jahmyr Gibbs in Montgomery.
You know, my college football book,
I haven’t quite got to that one yet.
And we’re only 64 days.
I got it, I bought it, okay?
You know, it’s interesting.
at the store, if you can find it, it’s like $13.95.
That’s exactly right.
If you go to Amazon, they add $5.
So that’s $18.95.
If you go to a company called Etsy,
if Amazon doesn’t have it, it’s like $25.95.
So folks, try to get it at the market if you can.
Yeah, I know, how can there be that big a disparity?
You know, now Athlon’s bringing theirs out.
I got Lindy’s, they used to have Street and the Smiths.
The one that I really like is done by the ex-Cleveland Browns guy on college football.
It’s about, it looks like an encyclopedia. It’s about two inches thick.
I’m waiting for that one. They do a real good job, but he’s got all these nicknames for different
terms. It takes you a while to get used to it. But yeah, I’m excited for football.
You know, the UFL championship game was a blowout. 25-0 last week. Birmingham.
Birmingham’s got a big league, huh?
Hang on, I gotta ask you this question.
I’ve never seen a fan in the stadium on those games.
Are there fans there?
Are there fans there?
There’s about 4,000 people.
Because I swear to you, they hide the fact that the fans are so limited.
I mean, it’s like they don’t show the grandstands.
They should go to the schools and just drop off a hundred tickets and say,
bring your parents, bring, you know try to do it the old-fashioned way give it
away maybe they’ll like it, you know, I mean I don’t know. I got, I got to ask you
this, do you know, and Art and Mark, you can chime in here, you say you’ve got
the college football yearbook annual, do you know who’s coaching where, do you
since the transfer portal and the NIL and all this nonsense,
you know, obviously we don’t have to Saban anymore
in Alabama, but the point is, it’s so confusing.
Dylan Gabriel went from Oklahoma to Oregon,
the Kansas State quarterback went to Washington.
Coaches are just the same, Fred.
It’s no different with them, by the way.
They’re going this way, that way, the other way too.
15 really good quarterbacks have switched universities.
Cam Ward went from Washington State to Miami.
Yeah, it’s wildly crazy.
But you know, here’s the funny thing about it, you guys.
We’re not far away, based on what I’m hearing,
from these new commissions the universities are having
to pay the kids, you know, with the NIL and all that.
We’re not far away from the NFL having to raise
the price they’re gonna pay draft picks, okay?
Because these kids are making $6, $7 million in college and, you know, NFL quarterbacks that are rookies don’t make that much.
Mark, what do you think about college football, college basketball not keeping up with all the changes?
Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You know, Halloween comes around once a year.
Halloween might be coming around quite a few times for some of these people might be dressing up as empty seats, man.
People just can’t afford to go to these games they can’t afford it, it’s
going to cost you. I told you guys last week, a family of four went to went to a Dodger game that I’ve
known for years and by the time they got out of there with everything it was
just north of eight hundred dollars, not for great seats either, for
family of four. Well the Mancini way, yeah the Mancini way of going to a
Dodger game is parking out near the Police Academy, bringing your own water and
hoagies in and enjoy in the $100 seats if nobody’s sitting in them. And we can
sit in the left field bleachers in PNC ballpark for 12 bucks. How much does a
hot dog cost at a ballpark? How much does a hot dog cost at a ballpark?
16 bucks last time I had one. How much? The beers I think are 20 something.
Yeah beers are 24 dollars. Come on. Fred, We should go. They give you a nice pour at 16 ounces.
Yeah, 26 bucks. We should, we should go to AM PM and stop and get to two for three Dodger Dogs and
put on our own condiments. Here’s the story guys. Back in the days when the Reds would play
the Dodgers in the 70s, we had our cooler you can get into the left field pavilion.
We’d have all our sandwiches and ice underneath it we’d have we each had one like Coors regular
Coors beer down there low, low, and the guy would see us and he’d let us in real, you know we’re very
very cool and I mean we’d get all the baseballs from batting practice and we were like you know
kids having a great time but we used to go and it was six dollars parking, was 10 bucks so six
yeah four guys 24 dollars 34 plus you know what we had to pay for the food 10 bucks a game.
Basically, for four guys, not counting gas, drive up, you know, from Newport to Dodger
Stadium.
My dad used to take me in the late 50s and early 60s when I was very young, a dollar two
and three.
Then it went to three, four and five.
So you remember going to the box office, Fred?
Oh yeah.
There’s something you don’t do anymore.
My dad would go there and he said, hey, we’d like to be along the first base line,
maybe six or seven rows back.
Oh, we got unbelievable Mark.
Wow. Mark, it’s your anniversary now.
Yeah. 38 years today.
Happy anniversary.
What a woman to put up with you for your wife.
Your wife called me and she says she wants to go to Anaheim and watch the Dodgers.
Are you going to take her? Uh, Amtrak.
All right, Mario, thank you. I love you guys! Okay, let’s go 30 seconds.
30 seconds.
Tell Darren to get you some tickets.
Art, give me 30 seconds.
You want me to give you 30 seconds?
Yeah.
Okay, Fred, here’s what’s going on.
We have, and I said this last week, we’re really close with this LIV,
vis-a-vis, PGA Tour deal, that’s going to be number one on the agenda.
Number two on the agenda is the Olympics. If anybody’s been watching late night on USA,
they’ve got all the different Olympic prelims and everything. I’m kind of getting the French
fever, the Olympic fever, but I’m really excited about the Women’s PGA championship from
Washington, the state of Washington this weekend. Should be really awesome. Nelly Korda,
who’s won like six of the last eight events, could be great. And how about
Caitlin Clark the other night. Is she a shooter? I don’t care what anybody says. She makes the
Energizer Bunny look like she’s got no energy. Mark, should she make the Olympic team?
I do. She’ll make it that much better than WNBA. And I think my 30 seconds is the Pirates are
throwing three great ones at the Braves next weekend. My dad’s birthday is next weekend.
God rest his soul. He would have been 89. And somewhere up in heaven, Bill Walton’s
Negotiating with God to broadcast the PAC-12 games
the Conference of Champions
Mario, thank you very much Mark. Thank you Art. Thank you guys and gals fantastic
Thank you listening to Fred in the Fantastics and we’ll see you around the corner. Bye everybody. I love you guys!,