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A8 | THURSDAY, 02.23.2012 THE LEDGER INDEPENDENTA8 | SPORTS THURSDAY, 02.23.2012 | THE LEDGER INDEPENDENT

SPORTS DIRECTORY606-564-9091 OR 800-264-9091

NAME EXT. EMAILChuck Hamilton 251 chuck.hamilton@lee.netZack Klemme 273 zack.klemme@lee.net

SCORE DEADLINE FOR NEXT DAY’S EDITION: 10 P.M.

PREP SCHEDULETHURSDAY, FEB. 23

BOYS’ BASKETBALLMason County vs. Augusta, 39th

District championship at Bracken County, 8 p.m.

GIRLS’ BASKETBALLMason County at Bracken County, 39th

District tournament championship, 6:30 p.m.

Fleming County vs. Rowan County, 61st District tournament championship at Bath County, 7 p.m.

Lewis County vs. Raceland, 63rd Dis-trict tournament championship at Greenup County, 7 p.m.

Deming vs. Harrison County, 38th District tournament championship at Nicholas County, 7:30 p.m.

Ripley vs. Georgetown, district tourna-ment at Wilmington, 7:30 p.m.

Peebles vs. Oak Hill, district tourna-ment at Waverly, 8 p.m.

Times subject to change

SPORTS ON TVTHURSDAY, FEB. 23

AUTO RACING2 P.M.SPEED — NASCAR, Sprint Cup, Duel at

Daytona, at Daytona Beach, Fla.GOLF10:30 A.M.TGC — LPGA, Women’s Champions,

first round, at Singapore (same-day tape)

2 P.M.TGC — PGA Tour-WGC, Accenture

Match Play Championship, second round matches, at Marana, Ariz.

6:30 P.M.TGC — PGA Tour, Mayakoba Classic,

first round, at Playa del Carmen, Mexico (same-day tape)

MEN’S COLLEGE BASKETBALL7 P.M.ESPN — Duke at Florida St.ESPN2 — Alabama at Arkansas9 P.M.ESPN — Louisville at CincinnatiESPN2 — Wisconsin at Iowa10:30 P.M.FSN — Stanford at Colorado11 P.M.ESPN2 — BYU at GonzagaNBA BASKETBALL7 P.M.TNT — New York at Miami9:30 P.M.TNT — L.A. Lakers at Oklahoma City

THIS DAY IN SPORTSFEB. 23

1938 — Joe Louis knocks out Nathan Mann in the third round to defend his world heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden in New York.

1960 — Carol Heiss captures the first gold medal for the United States in the Win-ter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif., winning the figure skating event.

1968 — Wilt Chamberlain becomes first player to score 25,000 points in the NBA.1980 — Eric Heiden wins his fifth gold medal and shatters the world record by six

seconds in 10,000-meter speed skating at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. His time is 14:28.13.

1983 — Mark Pavelich of the New York Rangers scores five goals in an 11-3 victory over the Hartford Whalers.

1985 — Indiana coach Bob Knight is ejected five minutes into the Hoosiers’ 72-63 loss to Purdue when he throws a chair across the court. Knight, after two fouls called on his team, is hit with his first technical. While Purdue was shooting the technical, Knight picks up a chair from the bench area and throws it across the court, earning his second technical.

1987 — Seattle’s Nate McMillan sets an NBA rookie record with 25 assists to lead the SuperSonics over the Los Angeles Clippers 124-112.

1991 — North Carolina becomes the first team in NCAA basketball history to win 1,500 games with a 73-57 victory over Clemson.

2000 — Boston’s Marty McSorley is suspended for the rest of the season (23 games) for hitting Vancouver’s Donald Brashear in the head with his stick on Feb. 21.

2001 — Jeremy Roenick records the ninth three-goal game of his career and becomes the third U.S.-born player to reach 400 career goals in leading Phoenix to a 7-3 win over Buffalo.

2002 — The Americans end nearly a half-century of Olympic frustration for the U.S. men’s bobsled team, driving to the silver and bronze medals in the four-man race.

2006 — Japan’s Shizuka Arakawa, the 2004 world champion, stuns favorites Sasha Cohen of the United States and Irina Slutskaya of Russia to claim the women’s figure skating gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

2007 — Tiger Woods’ winning streak on the PGA Tour, which began in July, comes to a shocking end. Woods fails to notice a ball mark in the line of his 4-foot birdie putt that would have won his third-round match against Nick O’Hern. Woods misses, then loses in 20 holes when O’Hern saves par with a 12-foot putt at the Accenture Match Play Championship.

2010 — In Vancouver, British Columbia, Dutch skater Sven Kramer loses the Olympic gold medal when his coach Gerard Kemkers sends him the wrong way on a changeover during the 25 laps of the 10,000-meter speedskating race. Kramer had not lost a 10,000 in three years.

SPORTS CALENDARBASEBALLThe Tom Browning Boys & Girls Club is

now forming its spring and summer baseball and softball leagues, free of charge and for children ages 5-15. The teams are divided by grade category. The deadline to sign up is March 16 at 5 p.m. Applications are available at the club or at tombrowningboysand-girlsclub.com. For more information, contact Caitlin Waddell at 606-564-3093.

BASKETBALLThe Lewis County Hoops Mania

Tournament for boys in grades 3-6 will be held on Feb. 25-26 in the middle school and high school gyms. Entry fee is $100 per team. For more information, call Todd Ruckel at 606-202-1406 or Joe Hampton at 606-776-7980.

The third annual Roundball Classic is

March 10-11 at Lewis County High School, Lewis County Middle School and Central Elementary gyms and is sponsored by the LCHS football program. The entry fee is $100. For more information, call John Holder at 606-796-2531 or 606-202-3009, or Harlan “Bub” Lee at 606-798-6006 or 606-301-1048.

RUNNINGThe Lewis County High School baseball

team is hosting “The Roaring Lion” 5K walk/run March 10 in Vanceburg at 11 a.m. Registration is $20, which includes a T-shirt. Day-of-race regis-tration is at Trace Creek Construction beginning at 9 a.m. For more informa-tion, call Keith Prater at 606-796-2823 or email keith.prater@lewis.kyschools.us or call Kenny Ruckel at 606-541-6244 or email kdruckel@gmail.com.

RACESFROM A7

And don’t forget about No. 13 Baylor; the Bears are just two games back and as dangerous as any team in the conference.

ACC: The two-team race everyone predicted at the start of the season has another team that nosed its way in: No. 15 Florida State. The surpris-ing Seminoles are tied for second with No. 5 Duke, just a half-game behind No. 7 North Carolina, and has beaten both teams. Florida State and Duke play Thursday night in one of the most anticipated games in Tallahassee in decades. North Carolina and Duke still have to play each other in the regular-season finale in Durham on March 3, while Florida State follows its game against the Blue Devils with road games against

Miami and Virginia, then Clemson at home in the finale. Depending on what happens to other teams in the top 10 over the final two weeks, this could be a race with a No. 1 NCAA seed on the line.

IVY LEAGUE: The hook in this race is what hap-pened last season. Har-vard won a share of its first Ivy League championship last season, only to miss the NCAA tournament after losing a one-game playoff to Princeton. For a team that hadn’t been to the NCAAs since 1946, that was a tough one to take. While most of the nation is caught up in the Linsane attention being paid to Harvard alum Jer-emy Lin — you know, that guy with the Knicks who’s everywhere — the Crim-son have been trying to build a case to get a dance ticket no matter what happens in the Ivy. Still, after what happened last season, Harvard would

much rather lock it up for sure. With a two-game lead over Pennsylvania, a win over Princeton on Fri-day could go a long way to doing that.

PAC-12: Yes, it’s a down year in the conference. The Pac-12, depending on how things fall, has the potential to get just one NCAA tournament bid. Ugly, but it kind of adds to the intrigue over the final two weeks. California and Washington are on top at 12-3 and have a 1½ game lead over Colorado, with Oregon and Arizona right behind. The Bears and Huskies have, outside of Cal’s road game against Colorado on Sunday, rela-tively easy schedules to close out the season. But, the way things have gone in the Pac-12 so far, one or even both could slip up and create havoc the final weekend of the season. If things do hold up, the conference could get as many as three NCAA bids,

which wouldn’t be bad considering what a rough year it’s been out West.

CONFERENCE USA: Neither Memphis nor Southern Miss can seem to pull away in this race. The Tigers had a chance to go up a game on Saturday, but lost to middle-of-the-pack Texas El-Paso at home. The Golden Eagles had a similar hiccup on the same day, losing to 12-13 Houston on the road. Heading into Wednesday night’s games, Memphis and Southern Miss were tied atop the confer-ence, with Tulsa, Central Florida and Marshall still within sight of the lead. This is a title no one seems to want to take, which means it could come down to the last weekend, when Memphis faces Tulsa and Southern Miss goes to Marshall. Even then, we could be looking at a shared title the way things have gone this season.

DAYTONAFROM A7

Now, he might even be considered a front-runner heading into Thursday’s qualifying race and Sun-day’s season-opening Daytona 500.

“I do feel like I have a better shot at winning in this current style of racing,” Earnhardt said Wednesday. “I do feel more confident than I did coming down here and tandem drafting. I never felt really great about that. It is a completely different

style of racing and it’s not what I enjoyed.

“I definitely feel better about this.”

Still, Earnhardt and others believe tandem racing in the final laps will determine the outcome in the qualifying races and “The Great American Race.”

But not having to push, pull, sweat and swap for 200 laps around the high-banked track means everything to NASCAR’s most popular driver — and maybe even more fun to his legion of fans.

After all, Earnhardt won the 2004 Daytona 500 and

has a dozen other victories at NASCAR’s most storied track. It’s also the place where his father, seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt, won 34 races and died on the final lap in the 2001 opener. So Daytona has become syn-onymous with the Earn-hardt legacy.

It will always be an im-portant place for Junior, for better or worse. He knows it, and so does ev-eryone around him.

And now that the rac-ing has returned, at least in part, to the pack style Junior enjoys and seems to thrive in — it was just two

years ago that he stormed through the field on the final lap and finished second to Jamie McMur-ray in a thrilling finish — it only makes sense that he would be a favorite again.

Nonetheless, he knows he needs good fortune to stay out front.

“I really wouldn’t know what to tell you do to as far a series of moves or what kind of mind-set to have,” said Earnhardt, whose winless streak is at 129 races. “There is no sure strategy that is go-ing to keep you out of a wreck or having you lead the race off turn four. You just have to go through-out the race and hope you continue to make every decision right, kind of like a line of dominos; you just hope everyone that falls hits the next one.

“Eventually, you come off the last corner and

you are in position to try to make that last decision that is going to win the race. That is about it. I think you just have to have good instinct about draft-ing and what is happening around you. ... You have to be really selfish and always want to help your-self and always do what is going to help you, which is really not my personal-ity, but for whatever rea-son I’m pretty good at it. Hopefully it will work out for us.”

It worked to perfection in 2004, a victory Earn-hardt still savors nearly a decade later.

He vividly remembers the raucous celebration in Victory Lane, the un-remitting adulation from fans and media, and the flattering comparisons to his late father.

“I had no idea what winning that race would feel like until I won it,” Junior said. “I didn’t know what to compare that to. When you win that race, it is really hard to explain. All the things that you want out of life and all the pressures you put on yourself or you feel from other people, all the things you want to accomplish; everybody sort of has this mountain in front of them that they put in front of themselves that they want to climb.

“For a moment, or for a day, you are at the top of that mountain.”

Nothing else matters, he said. Little things that can be bothersome are distant memories.

LINFROM A7

Lin went into New York’s game Wednesday against Atlanta averaging 24.6 points and 9.2 assists in a 10-game stretch since join-ing the Knicks’ rotation, and the Knicks have won eight of those games to save a season that was spiraling out of control.

Basketball’s reach has long been global, which is evident every time Spoel-stra speaks with report-ers. Whether it’s in the Heat press room or on the practice floor, his media availabilities almost always take place with him stand-ing or seated before a drape bearing with the Heat logo — and one for Tsingdao, a Chinese beer company that entered into a multiyear agreement with the team a few months ago.

And Spoelstra’s follow-ing in the Philippines is

massive.The Heat broadcast

department streamed live pregame, halftime and postgame shows on the team’s website during last season’s playoffs, get-ting more clicks from the Philippines than any other foreign country. He has made trips there in recent summers for camps and clinics, typically being overwhelmed by the sizes of crowds coming out for those events.

Still, no one ever coined the term Sposanity.

Spoelstra remembers the first time he heard of Lin, and it wasn’t when he started turning the Knicks around.

It was July 2010, about a week after James, Dwy-ane Wade and Chris Bosh dominated the NBA news cycle by all deciding to play together in Miami. Lin was with the Dallas Mavericks’ summer league team in Las Vegas, simply trying to make an NBA roster.