TAKE 2: An alternative look at the day at sports

By PETE BLAND

Published Friday, September 26, 2008

Do fire ants dig FieldTurf? For the sake of the Hickman-Rock Bridge football game tonight at Memorial Stadium, let’s hope not. The folks at Rialto High School in Southern California didn’t expect they’d have to deal with the pests recently, either, even if their outdoor athletic playing surfaces consist strictly of grass of the natural variety.

Last week at Rialto High, a groundskeeper discovered the venomous insects in droves on the school’s football and baseball fields. As The Associated Press tells it, they had set up numerous mound-like colonies and weren’t packing up and moving on anytime soon. A freshman football game was canceled, practices were relocated and a call went out to the state Department of Agriculture.

“They’re from South America,” Syeda Jafri, spokeswoman for the Rialto Unified School District, told the AP. “How they got here, we have no idea.” Hmmm. Sabotage?

If another early discovery of a rare infestation doesn’t delay the Kewpies and Bruins in their Providence Bowl battle tonight, keep a close eye on the crowd. You never know who might release the residents of his or her formicarium onto Faurot Field to wreak havoc.

Also, as the game goes on, if at some point you see the players partaking in an unusual amount of scratching, start to move as far away from the gridiron as possible. And pray, pray I say, that the cause is only a bad case of jock itch.