25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports: 06.28.18

June 3, 1993

Larry Keller, who has thrown the discus farther than any other high school athlete on Long Island this spring, will lead a contingent of East Hampton High School competitors to the county meets at Bellport High School this weekend.

Keller, a 235-pound junior, whose best throw thus far has been 158 feet, 8 inches, is the county boys meet’s first seed, though he can expect competition from Port Jefferson’s Mike Helbig, who edged Keller by one foot in the recent Division III meet held here.

Besides Keller, Mike Burns, the boys coach, will take to the county meet two pole-vaulters, Rob Balnis and Chris Minardi, a high-jumper, Rory Knight, and, if his broken hand is healed, a shot-putter, John Hayes.

Becky Cooper, a senior, who in a meet with Mercy on May 11 set school records in the discus and the shot, has been seeded fourth in the county shot-put and 11th in the discus. 

June 10, 1993

A 36-hour sleepless skein seemed not to affect the Nasty Boys Rugby Club’s 7s side much. The Nasty Boys, all of whom have played rugby since their days in Toronto’s Danforth Technical High School, romped through the Montauk Rugby Club’s 20-team tournament here Saturday.

The all-day tournament was also notable for the fact that the host side, for the first time in the tourney’s five-year history, made it into the final four. Montauk was defeated 17-4 by the Nasty Boys in a semifinal matchup.

“They didn’t ruck over the ball — they picked it up right away, and that made the difference,” Kevin Bunce, Montauk’s player-coach, said.

. . . Kelly Dolan, a second-row forward, was one of the Montauk stalwarts. He played last season with the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club of San Diego, made the all-California all-star side, and is trying out soon for the Eagles, the national team.

Paul Blodorn, a Mercy High School senior who lives in Sag Harbor, “blew everyone away,” according to his coach, Kevin Barry, in the Suffolk County 1,600-meter race at Bellport High School Saturday.

Blodorn, who recently signed a letter of intent to attend the University of Massachusetts on a partial athletic scholarship, ran a personal best 4:19:05, thus bettering by six seconds his winning Division III meet time run at East Hampton two and a half weeks ago.

June 17, 1993

Kevin Ruch, 28, of Camp Hill, Pa., on Saturday became the first person to win the Shelter Island 10-kilometer race three times. Ruch, who did not quite meet his goal of breaking 30 minutes, has, in fact, won the popular 10K three times running.

Surprise, surprise. Eben Jones won the Montauk triathlon on Saturday, for the sixth time in a row.

Jones, 32, a government bond trader from New Canaan, Conn., has yet to meet his match at Montauk, though he finds the course there, and its organizers, matchless, which is why the world’s top-ranked amateur keeps coming back. 

Jones’s time of 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 17 seconds was six minutes faster than last year, though he was the first to acknowledge that “the swim was short.”

The New Canaan speedster, a swimmer who later took up cycling and running, was out of the water at the Waterfront restaurant staging area in 11 minutes and 38 seconds, getting a bike-leg jump of several minutes over the stiff competition. Chuck Sperazza, a former Mighty Hamptons winner who regularly trains with Jones, and who is in the 35-to-39 age group, wound up as the runner-up, about two minutes off Jones’s torrid pace.

“Since I’m getting older, I figured the course had to be shorter,” said Jones, who, while he had no complaints, offered that his wife, Beth (the sixth-place woman), might have fared better had the swim been a full mile. Strong swimmers would be less tired after a long swim than their competitors, he reasoned.

June 24, 1993

Handy Hands Construction, a Springs team, won the East Hampton Town Little League Softball championship Sunday by defeating Amaden-Gay Agency 9-3 in the first game and disposing of the Town Police Benevolent Association 14-4 in the final.

It was the first year that the organization, also known as the Lassie League, held a final-four tournament, and judging from the large turnout at Amagansett’s Terry King ball field, it will be repeated hereafter. 

Pat Glennon, Handy Hands’ head coach, said that the level of play in Little League softball has risen considerably in the six years that he has been associated with the league. “It used to be throw-around. Now, there are bullets from short to first. It’s progressed so much — it’s becoming very competitive.”

“. . . I would say that 95 percent of the girls in our league stay with softball as they go through high school.”