ANN KILLION HAS COVERED nine Olympics, five World Cups and more than a dozen Super Bowls. Along the way she became one of the pre-eminent voices in the national sports scene, while thoughtfully studying the evolution of women’s athletics.

So when softball superstar and Olympic gold medal winner Jennie Finch wanted to write her first book, it made sense to make a pitch to the award-winning sports writer and Marin native.

“The publishing company found her, and when they told me Ann had covered the Pac-10 and the Olympics — and I found out she was a mother of a young female athlete in high school — it was too good to be true,” said Finch, whose book “Throw Like a Girl: How to Dream Big & Believe in Yourself” had long been a dream of hers. The 31-year-old pitcher recalls her own childhood when there was virtually no information available to young women aspiring to be athletes.

“Who she is in her profession and all she has done “… it was a tremendous honor for me to work with her. It really came together magically,” Finch said. “She’s a true game-changer and a pioneer in the sports world and all that she’s done and accomplished. It was truly a perfect fit all the way around. “… I couldn’t have dreamt for it to have been any better, or be written by anyone else.”

The book is more self-help than memoir, written as a “motivational and practical guide to health, fitness and sports for girls and young women,” said Killion, adding it’s not solely for softball players. In fact, much of the book, about 90 percent said Killion, relates to any young athlete — girl or boy.

As a mother of two, Killion knows the importance of youth sports. Her daughter Kaitlin Gillespie, 16, plays for the Tam High girls varsity soccer team and even helped proofread a few chapters. Her husband, Matt Gillespie — also a Mill Valley lifer — coaches the Red-tailed Hawks JV girls basketball team and the freshmen football team. Their son Connor, 20, graduated from Tam in 2009 and lives in Colorado where he is an avid snowboarder.

“(Jennie) had a real specific vision. It’s more like an inspirational book trying to say ‘what are the lessons that you learn in sports and how do they apply to the rest of your life,’” said Killion, a Tam and UCLA graduate with a master’s in journalism from Columbia.

“There’s not a lot of literature out there for girls interested in sports. There’s a lot for boys and there’s a lot of easy-reader books about athletes, and biographies and autobiographies that are aimed for even the adult population,” she said. “But there’s not anything that really pops to what girls might be interested in, and you can’t treat girls and boys the same — at any regard — but in sports as well. They come to it from different places and different things push their buttons.”

Killion described her first book project as an intense experience, but “Throw Like a Girl” was exactly the type of opportunity she envisioned conquering when she made the choice to leave the San Jose Mercury News — a Bay Area News Group paper — in 2009.

“I’d been trying to figure out an exit strategy for a while. The job had changed,” said Killion of her decision. “It’s fun, I’ve been able to be involved in stuff like this (book), be involved in different ventures, and “… who knows where things will take me. It’s exciting to kind of be able to direct your own path and utilize new media and be proactive on your own account.”

A contributing writer for Sports Illustrated and CSNBayArea.com, Killion has also become a familiar voice — and face — for the Bay Area audience. She’s a weekly guest on the nightly television sports talk show Chronicle Live and can be heard often on KNBR radio.

This summer a freelance assignment for Stanford Magazine offered her a behind-scenes-look into Giants outgoing managing general partner Bill Neukom. It was the type of takeout piece a feature writer could sink one’s teeth into. It also hearkened back to a time when long and thoughtful contemplation of a story or subject was seen as an asset, not an expense.

“I enjoyed getting to know him through the course of that story and I’m kind of disappointed about what happened to him,” Killion said. “I think, obviously, every indicator would tell you the Giants were on the right track under his stewardship. He’s a very smart man and it’s never a good thing to get rid of smart people. I do think he affected a lot of important change throughout the organization.”

Her two decades as a scribe provided a great seat to a legion of historical moments, like the 1999 Women’s World Cup — which she said “really felt like a historical moment in the evolution of women’s sports” — Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France, a jaunt to Edmonton with Kristi Yamaguchi and San Francisco’s first World Series title.

But it seems a move toward fiction may be on Killion’s horizon.

“The fun part of writing this book was I got to be a 6-foot-2, gorgeous blond for a while, it was great,” joked the diminutive Killion of co-authoring the book with the tall Finch. “I would like to write fiction at some point. The world keeps changing so fast, it’s hard to know where we might be. But it’s nice to have the flexibility to try different things.”

It’s likely opportunities will continue to knock on Killion’s Mill Valley door. Said Finch, “It was an honor to work with her, and I would be extremely honored to have the chance to do it again.”

Contact Theo Fightmaster via email at tfightmaster@marinij.com

BOOK BEAT

Mill Valley’s Ann Killion is a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.

• First book: “Throw Like a Girl: How to Dream Big & Believe in Yourself” by Jennie Finch with Ann Killion ($14.95, Triumph Books, 256 pages), a motivational and practical guide to health, fitness and sports for girls and young women athletes of any sport.
• Where: Amazon.com, barnes andnoble.com, jenniefinch.com and local bookstores.

http://www.marinij.com/prepcentral/ci_19025773?IADID=Search-www.marinij.com-www.marinij.com

Meanwhile, we’re left with the Trent Baalke hire. Which is so much more of the same for the 49ers that it’s ridiculous.

A week ago, Jed stood in front of the Bay Area media and made it clear that he would hire a general manager. He said he would conduct a search. He implied that he was looking for expertise.

It was a fun game of charades.

Within 24 hours word had leaked that he would hire his in-house candidate Baalke. A man who is getting his job the way everyone with the 49ers gets his job: by being in the building when someone was fired.

Baalke may be a fine talent evaluator – though we have no way of knowing since the 2010 draft evaluation was certainly largely in place before Scot McCloughan left. But he works for Jed and Paraag Marathe. He has been in the 49ers organization for seven dysfunctional years – arriving in Mike Nolan’s first year. He wanted the job – who doesn’t want to be one of 32 general managers in the NFL? So he wasn’t about to tell Jed, “Hey, you’re doing it wrong.”

Jed, in the announcement of Baalke’s hiring, said “In recent months I’ve been very impressed with his knowledge and leadership.”  But how much do you trust Jed to do the evaluating?  How much does he know about effective NFL knowledge and leadership. Baalke isn’t exactly like John McVay coming in.

This is the problem with the 49ers. They think they’re doing it right. Jed is convinced the only – the only - issue with the team was coaching. Everything else inside is hunky-dory.  Except that it’s not.

“They have the worst structure in football, or at least very close to it, with a couple of young guys that believe they have all the answers,” said one longtime NFL insider.

Now, if Harbaugh is The Answer, the Baalke hire won’t matter. Cocksure Harbaugh is not about to take orders from Baalke. He has his own contacts and sources in the NFL and will make his only decisions. He’ll likely look at Baalke as an executive assistant. And if Harbaugh turns out to be a very good NFL coach, everything will be great.

And while I believe Harbaugh has a better chance than most college coaches to be a very good NFL coach (extensive NFL pedigree, inside knowledge and contacts; coming from a program where he can’t just load up on blue-chippers at every position but is forced to more carefully evaluate and select talent), that’s no sure thing.

On the face of it, the 49ers are just repeating their past: Falling in love with a untested candidate as head coach and handing him control of the organization, bypassing Super Bowl winners who are available, while staffing the front office with yes-men who won’t challenge the inept 49ers culture.

Harbaugh better be in the bag. And he better turn out to be The Answer.  It’s the 49ers only hope.

Gosh, no hint of corruption there. Not at all.

Don’t get me wrong. My feelings about what happened Thursday morning when the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid winners were announced have nothing to do with the U.S. getting screwed. I was lukewarm on the American bid at best. I think our country is too spread out. I think not having San Francisco and Chicago involved was absurd. I think Nashville and Atlanta don’t say World Cup soccer. I think the prevailing argument – “Hey, people went to bars this summer to watch games,” – seemed a little weak.

But the U.S. bid would be vastly preferable to what FIFA just did. Does anyone think Russia will pull this off without incredible corruption? Does anyone want to go to Qatar in the summer? The old men on the FIFA selection committee won’t have to worry about it – they’ll likely all be dead by that point.

In picking Russia and Qatar, FIFA put up a giant middle finger to soccer fans and let them know it’s not about the game at all but about how much money FIFA can pocket.  It will not be about the experience. Or even about bringing soccer to soccer- mad countries. Or about trying to help an impoverished country rise up.

Awarding the 2010 games to South Africa made sense because soccer is on the rise in Africa and the area could use the influx of dollars, infrastructure and aid. Though there were thousands of unsold seats and the fan experience drew mixed reviews, it wasn’t a terrible risk.

Awarding the 2014 games to Brazil made sense because Brazil is the first nation of soccer. And even though the news coming out of Rio is scaring the bejeezus out of fans as the war between the government and drug lords escalates in an attempt to make the country safe for the World Cup, Brazil at least makes sense from a soccer perspective.

Russia? Over England, Spain/Portugal or Belgium/Netherlands? Absurd. All those other bids were in soccer mad countries with ready stadiums, trains, infrastructure and what would promise to be a delightful, easy fan experience. Russia, a country run on corruption, doesn’t have that infrastructure. There are already skyrocketing concerns about the 2014 Winter Olympics awarded to Sochi. Now Russia – a country that has qualified for the World Cup twice and never made it out of the first round, making it even less of a soccer nation than our own – will host the world’s greatest sporting event. (NOTE: Alert reader points out that USSR made several World Cups, but as we know in the sports world USSR does not = Russia).

And Qatar. Show of hands: who wants to go to that tiny country in the Middle East where it is 118 degrees in the summer, and where the team has never qualified for the World Cup? It especially sounds fun for us working women who will be expected (though not required) to cover our heads and wear long pants.

For a time, FIFA’s bid award process seemed to make sense.  A newcomer, then back to Western Europe. Another newcomer, then back to Europe – where they know how to do World Cups and the fan experience is tremendous. Starting with South Africa this year, greedy, corrupt FIFA is intent on taking chances all over the globe for years and years.

By the time they’re done in 2022, I doubt we’ll still be calling it the World’s Greatest Sporting Event.  And that’s a shame.

Either way, I’ll be thinking about my dad and the Giants and the relationship between the two. And how much my father would love this team.

My dad loved baseball, and he loved the Giants. It was a steady, unfluctuating love. He grew up in a place without baseball (Minnesota), moved to San Francisco long before there was a baseball team. He got his fixes where he could. He saw games at Seals Stadium, seeing Joe Dimaggio hit there. And he waited for a baseball team to come to him.

His team arrived in 1958. He stood on Market Street to watch the players ride through a ticker tape parade, with my older brother perched on his shoulders. It was the start of a relationship that would last 42 years.

By the time I came along, he had created a household in which we knew, without question, that Willie Mays was the greatest player ever and it was a privilege for all of us to watch him.  My father was a lapsed Catholic – baseball became his religion and he believed in Saint Mays.

He loved athletic excellence, like Mays and McCovey. But he also liked characters. I remember watching the 1997 Brian Johnson game against the Dodgers with him – he loved Rod Beck and that swinging arm.  He loved the unsung hero like Johnson who came through with the big hit. Before that, in the late ’80s, he liked Candy Maldanado and Mitch. What he really liked were homegrown talents that San Francisco could claim as their own. When Will Clark came along, he was, well, thrilled.

Which means he would love this team. He would love the vibe and the characters and he would think that Buster Posey was only the greatest young player he’d ever seen. He would have extolled the virtues of Saint Buster to his grandkids.  He would have been thrilled.

Well maybe he is thrilled. And has a great view of the action.

I suffer from Bonds Fatigue Syndrome.  I wonder if there’s a cure?

I’d already filed a column for SI.com on Barry Bonds throwing out the first pitch in Game 3, and how – more than anything – it just provided a contrast between this 2010 team and those dour, mostly humorless Bonds-centric teams of the early 2000s.  That was the focus of my column, not unbridled outrage that Bonds had sullied the Giants feel-good NLCS home moment.

But talking to my Philly friends, I got a reminder of how the rest of the world views our little Bonds bubble. They were repulsed by the adulation Bonds received from the crowd and slightly disgusted that the Giants chose to honor Bonds who has a trial date in March for perjury. They think everyone in black and orange is still clearly in denial about the cloud Bonds cast over the game.

I’m no fan of Bonds or the never-ending adulation of him by the Giants front office.  I do think it’s weird that the Giants would bring Bonds back in the midst of this cool run, that is so anti-Bonds at its very soul. Fun, team-oriented, footloose.  Again, for narrative purposes, I appreciate the ability to compare and contrast. But why bring up a reminder of how long it’s taken to recover from the team’s debilitating Bonds addiction?

Sure, I know that Bonds has become a scapegoat for an entire era, and that’s not particularly fair. But, fair or not, he is a symbol of that era. The biggest symbol. While shunning him would be hypocritical, embracing him is unnecessary. Just as ill-advised as the Cardinals’ embrace of Mark McGwire.

But I guess I’m just used to it.   I know that when Bonds shows up in San Francisco the crowd will chant his name. I know that the Giants will act like he invented baseball every time he’s around. I can’t get outraged about it.

But the rest of the world thinks the Giants and their fans are crazy, sheep, in denial. Pick your pejorative.

Bonds Fatigue Syndrome. Is there a cure? It actually might be this 2010 Giants team.

On a related note, I asked Posey if he’d seen the piece. He said yes. Then added, “we spent a lot of time talking. It wasn’t very long.” I explained the editing process at SI. And had to smile. That kid doesn’t miss a trick.

While it’s nice that all four time zones are represented and that the fancy NFL stadiums will be used, in truth, it will probably stink for fans.

This has nothing to do with a relative indifference – despite the crowds in bars this summer – to the World Cup (key word is relative). It has everything to do with our missing ingredient: a great national transportation system.

The closest anyone got to asking the question, from what I can see on the transcript, was whether the size of our country was an advantage or a disadvantage during the past week’s whirlwind tour by officials. Gulati, of course, think it’s an advantage, citing the big stadiums and the big cities that have lots of facilities already in existence. “We were able to get to five cities pretty quickly and we could have done one more if we cut out some of the things that we saw within those cities,” Gulati said.

But getting a delegation of FIFA representatives around is one thing. Getting millions of soccer fans around our country is quite another.

Back in 1994, I saw poor Swiss fans waiting on the sidewalk outside the airport in Detroit looking for “the train” to the stadium. It didn’t exist. I remember talking to Brazilian fans trying to figure out how to get from the Bay Area to Dallas in a cost-effective way.  There wasn’t one. Unless our government steps in to artificially suppress airfares during the World Cup – highly unlikely – it’s not going to be a fan-friendly event.

The best World Cup experiences involve trains: excellent trains. I missed 2000 (Korea and Japan co-hosting) and this summer where transportation around South Africa was reportedly difficult at times. But I covered both the 1998 World Cup in France and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. They were both fantastic, thanks in large part to fast, efficient trains that transported fans easily from one section of the country to another.

I can’t see how that will happen in another U.S. World Cup. There’s a natural grouping of cities in the East – Boston, New York, Philly, Washington DC and Baltimore – that will be easy to get between. But the West Coast – especially with the exclusion of the Bay Area – will be trickier. And then there are the landlocked cities in the midwest and south that are difficult to get between – Houston, Indy, Kansas City, Dallas, Nashville, Atlanta. And I doubt air travel is going to be a lot more fun in eight or 12 years than it is now.

The U.S. is bidding for both 2018 and 2022, in hopes of getting either. But it seems that 2022 is a more likely option: 2018 seems destined to go to a European bid. The frontrunner seems to be the Iberian bid from Spain and Portugal.

Great trains in Spain.  Might be a tough act to follow.

Uh, Mr. Mastermind, the event was organized by the conservative right’s foaming cheerleader and featured the political movement’s gun-toting darling.  No, it wasn’t going to be political at all.  Just like LaRussa’s statement earlier this summer supporting Arizona’s anti-immigration laws weren’t political. Nope.

LaRussa’s claim that “it has nothing to do with politics,” is as believable as his claim that he didn’t know Mark McGwire ever did steroids until Big Mac called him up last January to tell him he was about to confess to the world. Which was shocking, absolutely shocking.

Paging Mr. LaRussa. Reality is calling on the dugout phone. Care to pick up?

Right on Slater.

Didn’t Slater only do what many of us have dreamed of doing? Curse out people who make his work life a living hell and then activate the exit slide and slip away – but not before grabbing a cold beer on his way out.

Not all of us have an actual emergency exit slide in our various lines of work. And with the ever-grim news of the economy, most people are afraid of activating whatever exit strategies are available to them. But Slater had had enough of the morons and bastards he was subjected to and he took the plunge. Beer in hand.

Having spent most of my summer traveling, I predict flight attendants will become this era’s postal workers – without the federal benefits.  Too many people on airplanes are horrifying, idiotic, rude and potentially dangerous. The term “going postal” may be replaced by “pulling a Slater.”

But it’s not just air travel that’s snap-worthy. It’s much of American worklife, where the idiots and koolaid drinkers have fallen upward into management, the interaction with customers is boorish and everyone is running scared.

I predict a wave of publicity and a reality show for Slater, America’s newest folk hero.

Here is a link to the story I wrote on Tom Watson.

And the first-roud column on Tiger Woods.

Should be an interesting final round today.