Puck

On January 27,2010, Leon A. Pucklis, A memorial service will be held Friday, February 12, 2010 at 11:30 A.M. at St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church, 533 East Jarrettsville Road, Forest Hill, MD. Flowers are gratefully declined. Memorial donations if desired may be made to The Smile Train, 28th Floor, 41 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010 or to the Activities Fund at Lorien Riverside Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, 1123 Belcamp Garth, Belcamp, MD 21017.

John Buchleitner's blue eyes dart back and forth behind thin-framed glasses as he watches the black puck zoom across the rink. He grits his teeth, revealing a missing tooth, and clears the puck with one swift movement of his stick, passing it to a teammate. Beneath his hockey pads, Buchleitner's joints ache and his knee twinges from the pain of an old hockey-related injury. His ease on the ice, although slower and more deliberate than the pros, masks his greatest athletic disadvantage: his years.

Your holiday weekend version of sports media notes to peruse while you consider whether to sell the piano so you can afford a tank of gas for a trip to Ocean City: Sunday's Indianapolis 500 (noon, WMAR/Channel 2 and WJLA/Channel 7) is the first since the rival factions of open-wheel racing unified and Danica Patrick proved once and for all that she's not Anna Kournikova in a fire suit by winning her first IndyCar Series event. So maybe the Indy 500 is carrying a bit more buzz this year for ABC/ESPN.

Good morning --NHL -- If a puck drops on the ice and no one is paying attention, does it still make a sound?

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. / / Put three gourmet restaurants, all run by celebrity chefs, within a couple hundred feet of each other, and you might expect dueling flambes. But the master cooks who have opened upscale dining rooms in the new expansion at the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa are counting on the critical mass of fine food to contribute to their mutual success. Chefs Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and Michael Mina -- who are either familiar from TV appearances or highly regarded efforts in Las Vegas and elsewhere -- have all introduced new eating spots at the Borgata.

Baltimore hockey fans haven't had their own professional team since the Bandits of the East Coast Hockey League - one of six teams to come and go here since 1933 - disbanded in 1999. But that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of college and professional action for local puck maniacs to witness in person. For the well-heeled connoisseur, there are always the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals and Philadelphia Flyers. The Caps, currently in last place in the Southeast Division, nonetheless boast stalwart netminder Olaf "Olie the Goalie" Kolzig and one of the league's most explosive players and top scorers, rookie forward Alex Ovechkin.

Sidney Crosby scored on Pittsburgh's first shot and finished with two goals last night, leading the visiting Penguins to a 6-4 victory over the Montreal Canadiens, the team the 18-year-old star rooted for as a youngster. "If you're too awestruck, you get caught watching, you get caught being happy to be there and you're not worrying about trying to contribute and then make the difference," Crosby said. "Don't get me wrong, it's nice to enjoy the moment but you don't want to get caught up in watching too much and getting stuck out there, so I think the best part for me was probably at the end, getting the win and it was a bonus to come out with the first star."

Wolfgang Puck, one of the most recognizable chefs in America, has taken readers inside the kitchens of his Spago and Chinois restaurants in previous cookbooks. In his sixth book, Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy (Rutledge Hill Press, 2004, $35), he takes readers inside his home kitchen. The result is a collection of 150 recipes that rely on fresh, yet readily available, ingredients that can be assembled fairly quickly. California-style pizza and panini, which made the Austrian-born chef famous in Beverly Hills, are here, but so are breakfast dishes, side dishes and meats.

So, the National Hockey League's moronic players and equally moronic owners really did it. The owners have locked out the players, claiming they can't operate under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement that expired yesterday. The collective bargaining agreement, by the way, was forged in 1995 after the owners locked out the players for 105 days and canceled more than half of the 1994-95 season. That agreement had been renewed twice. Now, the owners in a sport that is struggling mightily to keep its status as "major league" have threatened to shut the game down for as long as it takes - the over-under seems to be the whole 2004-05 season - to get a collective bargaining agreement that gives them "cost certainty" (standard sports owner code for salary cap)