Foot Notes

October is the best time of the year for sports fans. College football on Saturdays, pro football on Sundays and Mondays, and the baseball playoffs almost every day. And in a couple of weeks, the World Series. Don’t look now, but the pro hockey season started this week and the National Basketball Assn. preseason begins Sunday. Add NASCAR racing and professional wrestling, and it’s enough to make a grown man cry. And a grown woman too.

Let’s hear a loud amen for sports bars. Two local watering holes--Weber’s Place, 19312 Vanowen St., Reseda, (818) 345-9800, and Yankee Doodles, 21870 Victory Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 883-3030, offer multiple satellite television systems to screen just about any sports event you want to see. Weber’s has 17 screens including three big ones; Yankee Doodles 45 screens, six big ones.

Despite great expectations, neither the Dodgers nor the Angels made the baseball playoffs this year. Pundits predict more heads there are sure to roll. L.A.’s former pro football teams--the Raiders and the Rams--did not make the playoffs the last year they were here, and their heads rolled all the way to Oakland and St. Louis. The Lakers, Kings and Ducks all hope to overcome last season’s disappointments or else heads will roll there too. The Clippers? They must not have heads.

Way back in 1954, E.B. White wrote prophetically of a sports-obsessed society that builds superhighways to huge stadiums where spectators watch multiple games at one time--one live, one on TV and one on headphones. White wrote that sports enthusiasm declines after a disgruntled fan shoots a football player for dropping the ball, causing a panic that results in a record number of casualties.

Ridiculous!