NASCAR on ice. That’s kinda the idea from Geoff Bodine, the former stock car driver turned bobsled designer. “No more racing for me,” said the 56-year-old Bodine. “I’m leaving that to the young guys.” He sells car wax and specialty cars and is a new racing analyst for ESPN. And he has been building Bo-Dyn Bobsleds for a few years. Now he’s cooked up a race for January at Lake Placid in which NASCAR drivers will pilot sleds with their teams’ sponsors and color schemes. Driver Boris Said, who is the son of Bob Said, the former Olympic bobsledder, has committed. Others? Tony Stewart and Kyle Petty have told Bodine they want to participate. He said, “They all want to do it.”
Pat Croce said the December opening of his Rum Barrel bar and restaurant next door to his Pirate Soul museum “will be righteous.” The Key West museum was featured last month on Discovery Channel’s “Lost Treasures of the Deep.” But not all is perfect for the former 76ers president. Hurricane Rita forced him to delay a fund-raiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and he had to abort an expedition to recover Capt. Morgan’s warship off the coast of Haiti. “Their unstable government has caused major delays,” he said. “It’s the Wild West down there.”
ESPN likes a party and wasn’t about to let Mark Shapiro leave to head up Dan Snyder’s bid for Six Flags Inc. without throwing him one. Among the many faces at New York’s Marriott Marquis were ESPN execs John Walsh and Mike Antinoro and on-air talent Andrea Kremer, Dan Patrick and John Saunders. A highlight: A homemade video showing a 10-year-old Shapiro doing pretend interviews.
Big screens and small: Sports marketing exec Tara Modlin and her former skating buddy, Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic gold medal winner, auditioned hundreds of skaters ranging in age from 4 to 19 and selected a hundred for next week’s taping in the Nassau Coliseum of “Sarah Hughes and Friends.” The show is scheduled to air in January on NBC. Modlin’s Manhattan-based Fireworks ICS, a sports marketing and event agency, has arranged for the show to benefit the 9/11 Families Give Back Fund. … John Gatins, the writer/producer of DreamWorks’ much-touted new horse racing picture, “Dreamer,” says he spent a lifetime in research. Growing up near Roosevelt Farms in upstate
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| Tennis Channel exec Bruce Rider with 19-year-old son Sean at “Meet Your Match.” |
New York, he watched his brother George work with horses. “I went to my first race when I was 10,” he said. … Like many in sports,
Dave Sobel needs two things to do his job: “Lots of black coffee and an understanding wife.” He produces FSN West 2’s “Bruin Rewind,” 30 minutes of hard-hitting television that airs 48 hours after UCLA games. Sometimes he and his crew work for 38 hours straight. “We’re strangely proud of the all-nighters,” he said. …
Fran Kowalski, founder of Sound & Video Creations, got a nice surprise when watching TV in his Nashville home. He saw a women’s team using his company’s Click Effects A/V system at the Nassau Coliseum as part of their reward for winning a recent episode of
Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”
Follows: “Passin’ It On,” a musical written by baseball balladeer Terry Cashman and starring Tony Award-winner Len Cariou, will premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami next week in what director Jeffrey Moss hopes will be a three-week rehearsal for Broadway. … The 22 players — including Curt Shilling, C.C. Sabathia and Tim Hudson — who joined Barry Zito in his “Strikeouts for Troops” fund-raiser struck out 1,438 batters and raised $100,000.
Bert Padell, a financial adviser whose clients include Robert DeNiro, Britney Spears and Madonna, was in 1949 and ’50 a Yankees batboy. Since then, he’s built an impressive collection of memorabilia, including a written agreement between Babe Ruth and Harry Frazee. His massive collection is for auction at Geppi’s Memorabilia Road Show (www.gmrs.com), where online bidding concludes Oct. 27.
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| Peter Luukko (left), Billy King (center) and Brent Rossi positively cleaned up in Philly. |
Comcast-Spectacor President
Peter Luukko, 76ers President
Billy King and 76ers marketing director
Brent Rossi helped 200 other employees clean up FDR park in South Philly. Thousands of Comcast employees nationwide participated in SpectaCARES Day.
When Manny Ramirez Jr. goes to bed, he sees monsters. Green ones. His parents, Red Sox all-star Manny Ramirez and Juliana, designed his bedroom to look like Fenway Park. Twin beds resemble dugouts, the closet is painted to look like a clubhouse locker and the wall mural depicts Fenway at night, including the Citgo sign and the Green Monster.
To promote its free trial on Comcast in Pittsburgh, the city that Forbes ranked last in “Best Cities for Singles,” The Tennis Channel hosted a “Meet Your Match” mixer, which it called a cross between tennis and speed dating. Officials liked it so well that they held two such promotions in L.A., at which Tennis Channel CEO Ken Solomon brought 9-year-old son Sam and Executive Vice President Bruce Rider brought 19-year-old son Sean.
