9:00 PM With their come-from-behind win over the Texans and the Jaguars' loss to the 49ers, the Colts become the first team eligible for the playoffs by clinching the AFC South title.
8:17 PM The Sports Hernia spots Prince at the Metrodome Mall of America Stadium for Sunday's Vikings-Bears clash. And the artist formerly known as The Artist looks less than thrilled to be there.
If you’ve just called “got next” at one of President Obama’s famed pickup basketball games, you’d better be sure of two things: One, you always set picks for he Prez. Two, you’d better be a guy. Believe it or not, there’s a growing undercurrent of discontent — including those in his own party — that Obama isn’t letting women play in his White House basketball games.
I wasn’t really sure I believed that people were getting worked up over this, so I did some checking around, and sure enough: The President of the National Organization for Women is one of those who finds Obama’s all-male games “troubling.” THE NEW YORK TIMES just did a big story on it, and bloggers have been debating the topic all week.
• Novak Djokovic delights the Monday night US Open crowd with his manic impression of John McEnroe - only to have Mac come down & reclaim his honor in an impromptu tennis match.
For a couple days now, Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari has been teasing fans with a #44 jersey, asking them to figure out where he’s sending it. If it were a recruiting ploy, it would be fantastically popular - and, of course, riotously illegal in the NCAA’s eyes. So that wasn’t it. Who’s getting el double cuatro, then?
(Um, Mr. Calipari, you may want to “vacate” this decision.)
Oh, him. Yes, Barack Obama is our President, and how you feel about his job thus far probably directly coincides with your party allegiance. And unfortunately for Calipari, he now coaches in the middle of Kentucky, and if there’s one thing they hate, it’s some Barack Obama. Commence Internet meltdown!
If Vegas actually had a betting line on Pete Rose making it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, it would have probably been taken off the board for “suspicious activity” after the events of the last few days. The odds improved significantly when Henry Aaron - a close friend of Commissioner Bud Selig - mentioned to reporters that he’d like to see Rose in the Hall of Fame, leading to a report by the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS that Selig was “seriously considering” lifting Rose’s lifetime ban.
But if ESPN is correct, betting on seeing Rose anywhere in Cooperstown other than selling autographs at a card table might be a sucker bet. Their sources are saying that Selig is not considering reinstating Rose, leaving him to be happy with his place in the Soup Bowl Haircut Hall of Fame (alongside sartorial luminaries as Moe Howard, Chairman Mao and Jim Carrey from “Dumb and Dumber”).
Personally, I could care less one way or the other - at this point, the only way Rose actually makes it into the Hall of Fame is through the Veterans Committee, and they are chock full of grumpy old men who would keep people out of the Hall of Fame for not wearing suits and hats on their train rides during road trips, much less betting on baseball. The only person I feel sorry for is Ray Fosse, as he has to deal with a new round of awkward questions about Rose turning him into a tackling dummy and ruining his career.
All of which Rose finds pretty funny, I guess:
And speaking of “suspicious activity,” I guess you can go ahead and add The Big Security Threat to Shaquille O’Neal’s list of monikers. While appearing on “The Mike Wise Show” a few days ago to promote his stint tonight on WWE Raw, he asked the hosts if they thought he could get into the White House and meet President Barack Obamaif he dropped in unannounced. DC SPORTS BOG has the answer, and it’s a resounding “No.”
Shaq actually tried it yesterday, as part of a bet (1,000 push-ups) with one of his handlers. While the guys at the front gate were “nice,” they weren’t going to let Shaq act like this is a Tonight Show episode from 1982, and he’s Bob Hope interrupting an interview between Johnny Carson and an 82-year-old shoe collector to do a walk-through on the way to his latest special. Between the economy, the Middle East and studying the White Sox roster to find Walt Weiss, President Obama might have better things to do.
As far as Raw is Shaq went: he hung out with a leprechaun:
So yeah, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want him hanging around the Oval Office.
Finally, Jim Bunning might be a Hall of Fame pitcher, but it turns out that the Republican Party has no problem pulling him early and telling him to hit the showers. The WASHINGTON POST says that the Senator from Kentucky is bowing to pressure within his own party and will not run for re-election in 2010, a political fall from grace that would have been almost unthinkable a few years ago.
So what happens to the 77-year-old Bunning? Perhaps a seat on the Veterans Committee - or at least a table at a card show next to Pete Rose.
Other sports news that happened while you were accidentally shooting three people with your brand-new Taser gun.
If the Washington Nationals were looking to enhance the trade value of Josh Willingham, they just received the Mother Lode of all gifts last night. He became the 13th player in MLB history to hit two grand slams in one game in the Nats’ 14-6 rout of the Brewers. To put this into perspective, Willingham had 14 home runs this season - 12 solo shots, and 31 RBI. So the real story here is that the Nationals actually loaded the bases twice in one game.
Speaking of grand slams: Alfonso Soriano’swalk-off slam in the 13th inning gave the Cubs a 5-1 win over the Astros. Meanwhile, Matt Holliday had an RBI double in his home debut with St. Louis and Brendan Ryan had four hits as the Cardinals stayed a half-game back in the NL Central with a 6-1 win over Los Angeles.
Police feel they are making a break in the case of former Memphis Grizzlies player Antonio Burke, who was shot in the leg and abdomen during a robbery of a dice game at his house on July 20 - they’ve arrested a 16-year-old as an accessory after the fact in the shooting.
And it’s one, two, three punches and you’re knocked unconscious at the old ball game! At least it was in Irvine, CA as a baseball game turned rowdy, with a steal attempt turning into a brawl that left four people taken the hospital and two people arrested.
Here’s what you need to know about Jerry Byrd Jr., a high school football coach in Shreveport, LA: he came to the Superior Bar and Grill to do two things - drink some beers and get arrested for disorderly conduct. And he’s been cut off from having more beers.
If you’re young son is a budding tennis prodigy and you’re looking for a tennis academy for him, here’s a good rule of thumb: if the coach says he’ll need nude pictures of your kid for his computer records, you might want to look elsewhere.
BALL DON’T LIE points out that nothing says “I love you” likeStephon Marbury Valentine’s Day cards. For that special, totally insane person in your life.
You might remember Caleb Campbell as the former West Point football stand-out whose shot at the NFL was taken away from him when the Army backed out on a deal. Now he’s getting his second shot at athletic glory - this time as a potential Olympic bobsledder.
You really have to give Barack Obama for sticking to his claim of being a diehard White Sox fan. Most guys might back off a little bit after botching the name of the home ballpark where the team called home for 100 years. But Obama was back on the bandwagon on Friday, crowing this to a crowd after Mark Buehrle’s no-hitter:
“Today everybody is a White Sox fan. I was up on the North Side and all these Cubs fans were all like what about Buehrle. And I was like that’s right. That was extraordinary. I spoke to Buehrle on the phone, on the Air Force One, one of the privileges of Presidency. You can call up a guy after he pitches a perfect game. I told him that he had to buy a big steak dinner for that center fielder Weiss because he saved that perfect game.”
There have been few athletes who have dominated pop culture the way Shaquille O’Neal has over the past 15 years. He was one of the first to fancy himself a crossover star between the worlds of sports and entertainment. Sure, you might think that Michael Jordan was there first, dominating the NBA, sneaker market, and business worlds in equal measure, but he never did so with the wink-and-a-nod lightheartedness that Shaq did with things like Shaq Diesel and Kazaam.
(Wouldn’t be the first time.)
But the odd thing about Shaq is that as his athletic ability has diminished with age, his presence in the cultural discussion has increased. He was the first athlete to embrace Twitter, and his hubris has taken on a whole new level lately with things like his “Shaq Vs.” reality show concept. And now Shaq is throwing around his celebrity weight in a whole new way, with plans to show up at the White House and pal around with President Barack Obama - uninvited and unannounced. This could end badly for everyone.
Yep, JUST what President Obama needed at this juncture of the health reform battle: A national debate over a supposedly racist cop. Remember when just such a thing was so beneficial to the O.J. Simpson prosecution team? And now our latest story is new and improved with an oven-fresh sports angle, which I’ll get to in a second.
On the left here we have Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, who this past Thursday arrested noted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at Gates’ own home following a report of a break-in. Gates was arrested despite showing Crowley his ID, prompting President Obama to opine in his news conference on Wednesday that Crowley had “acted stupidly.” Is Crowley a racist? No, he says — he can’t be. Because he once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Celtics star Reggie Lewis. Read more…
With Joe Jack Buck’s passing, there’s probably no more revered man in the St. Louis baseball scene than Stan Musial. “Stan The Man,” you may recall, is the Cardinals’ franchise leader for home runs with 475, and he was named to a jaw-dropping 24 All-Star Games (they named him to one in 1997 after a clerical error, and he went 2-3 with a double and 3 RBI).
Musial’s also 88, and there’s discussion that his health is on the decline. This year’s All-Star Game, then, was the “last, best hope” for a proper send-off for the Cardinals legend - a laWillie Mays in San Francisco back in 2007. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the real VIP in the house.
