by TAKEO "BABE" UTSUMI

Well, I took a hiatus of a couple of weeks from these pages. As the years go on, I find it a bit more difficult to find something worthwhile and interesting to write about.

Many of the subjects I wrote about were regarding my old friends. And now most of them have gone, as they say, to their rewards.

For the first 15 years or so of this column, I used to drive all the way from my Outer Richmond District home to the Hokubei office every Friday morning by 9 a.m. Later, as my vision became impaired and I was unable to drive, our daughter purchased a fax machine, which made it easier to send this column to the office.

Our method of writing this column almost goes back to the horse-and-buggy days. I recite my words to Helen and she takes it down in shorthand. Then she transcribes this on her old manual typewriter. It has to be corrected for spelling and grammar, and here we go again. Sometimes it takes two or three times to get it down to almost perfect.

So you can understand how difficult it has become for this old geezer to knock out any kind of an interesting column. Besides, we have a young lady from New Orleans and an instructor from San Francisco State, and now the bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America filling the pages. Now I wonder if it’s time for me to step aside for the younger generation.

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Finally, the time has come for the end of quarterback Alex Smith’s tenure with the San Francisco 49ers football team. He was the first-round choice years ago. A clean-cut, good-looking, nice guy from Utah, but he just didn’t have it.

The reason for his departure will be attributed to another shoulder injury, but actually Smith just did not have the talent to lead the team. I am sure that former coach Bill Walsh would have seen this a long time ago and dismissed him.

If you think that the Niners made a mistake in their draft choice of a quarterback, you should have seen Matt Leinert of the Arizona Cardinals in a pre-season game. He was a Heisman Trophy winner and the quarterback of the undefeated USC Trojans for two years. So he was the first draft choice for Arizona.

But he has been a miserable performer for the past two years and has been replaced by an old-timer, Kurt Warner, in that key position. Warner goes way back to when the Cardinals were in St. Louis, and then before that to arena football.

So you can understand that the draft choices are an iffy proposition, and yet a multi-million-dollar gamble.

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Still on the subject of money in sports, some of the gold medal winners in the Beijing Olympics will become instant millionaires, especially swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight gold medals and will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Even some of the track stars participating in various events in the world will be awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars for their appearances.

Avery Brundage, who was of the old school of pure amateur Olympic athletes, must be turning over in his grave. When one speaks of the athletic competition for the gold at the Olympics, it’s more like the bullion at the finish line.

This reminds me of the fate that befell Jim Thorpe. He was the great American Indian athlete who competed in the Olympics in 1912. He won both the decathlon and the pentathlon.

Later, when it was discovered that he played a few games of semi-pro baseball and was paid a few dollars, the Olympic officials took his medals away. Years after that, an outraged sports public demanded that the medals be returned to him.

Can you imagine the humiliation that Thorpe had to endure for so many years?

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That ruling by the LPGA to enforce that only players who are able to speak English be allowed to participate in their tournaments was the most ridiculous attempt at discrimination. I believe it was mostly directed at the Korean ladies who have become quite dominant in these tournaments. What does language have to do with athletic ability?

It’s also ironic that this strange ruling will be settled by the next time the LPGA holds its national tournament at Half Moon Bay next year. Oddly enough, that tournament will be sponsored by Samsung, a large Korean corporation.

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I heard of a man who claims he has eaten a Big Mac every day for over 30 years. However, he missed one day when his mother passed away.

I wonder how his cholesterol count is. He’ll make a great poster boy for McDonald’s — while he is still alive.

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Also, I heard on the radio that certain vegetables will be irradiated. This is to eliminate E-coli, which could be a deadly disease. We have had suspicions and even hysteria regarding this bacteria heretofore in green onions, tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, cantaloupe, etc.

The word “irradiate” seems to throw a lot of people into fear about the effects of this process. Remember, canned milk used to be labeled “irradiated” long ago and it has been eliminated to allay fears.

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A couple came back from a baseball game. The husband was angry and frustrated because the home team lost 12 to nothing. As for the wife, this was the first game she ever saw, and she did not quite understand it.

The husband was furious at the local team’s pitchers; however, the wife was praising the hurlers. She explained, “Did you notice how well our pitchers managed to hit the opponents’ bats?”