I don’t normally write about commercially sponsored contests, but this one involved a chance to trade emails with Christian Laettner about perhaps the greatest shot in NCAA tournament history.
If you were alive and taking in oxygen on March 28, 1992, you remember it. Duke was down 102-101 to Rick Pitino’s Kentucky squad with 2.1 seconds left. Grant Hill threw a 75-foot inbounds pass, Laettner – one of the greatest college players to ever play the game – went high to grab it, turned and threw up the 17-footer that won the game. (To refresh your memory, watch it again here.)
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If the New Jersey Devils win their fourth Stanley Cup this year, the Conn Smythe Trophy for the MVP of the playoffs should go to Martin Brodeur’s surgically repaired left biceps. Yes, it kept him out of 50 games this year, but it also brought him to the season’s final 22 games fresher than he’s ever been. And a fresh and strong Brodeur in the playoffs is something the Devils desperately need.
The trouble has been that Brodeur’s insistence on playing more games than any goalie in the league has been taking a toll on the 36-year-old goalie. Last year, when he played in all but five of the Devils’ 82 games, he looked tired and slow in the playoffs. He gave up 3.19 goals a game in a five-game first-round loss to the Rangers. That’s 1.23 goals above his career playoff average of 1.96. For one of the few times in his career, Brodeur was uniformly awful.
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Somebody ought to tell Scott Boras that you can’t use leverage if you don’t have a lever. While they’re at it, inform him that if he doesn’t think the Dodgers are throwing enough money at Manny Ramirez now, just wait and watch it evaporate.
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Alex Rodriguez made more of an apology and more of a confession than just about everyone who’s ever been caught using performance enhancing drugs in any sport – ever. I accepted it with its flaws and holes and shortcomings and decided it’s time to move on.
Then I turned on ESPN and discovered that I am utterly, completely, entirely, wholly and in every way wrong.
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A-Rod stories got you down? Depressed by Darryl Strawberry’s revelations about the 1986 Mets in his new book? Outraged at Miguel Tejada’s guilty plea to charges of lying to Congress?
Do yourself and your battered spirits a favor. Take a cyber trip to the Special Olympics World Winter Games and remind yourself of the true value of sports.
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Let’s start with the obvious: When it comes to common sense in social situations, Michael Phelps is not the freshest clam in the chowder. When you’ve spend the last six years of your life soaking in chlorine every day, that’s probably not that surprising.
But Phelps is a regular Einstein compared to Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County, S.C. That’s the lame-brained lawman who has declared that he is going to try to prosecute the 14-time gold-medalist swimmer for smoking pot. Lott’s evidence is a picture that appeared in a British newspaper of Phelps sucking on a bong.
“Our narcotics division is reviewing the information that we have, and they’re investigating what charges, if any, will be filed,” said Lott’s spokesman, Lt. Chris Cowan. (Apparently, the way to get ahead in the Richland County Sheriff’s Department is to have an alliterative name.)
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It was Saturday evening, the toughest night to get a table at a good restaurant. And Donatello’s in Tampa is as good an Italian restaurant as you’ll find in any city in America; so good, a friend told me, “It’s worth spending your own money to eat there.”
But around 7 p.m. on the night before the Super Bowl, three guys walked in without reservations and were seated immediately.
If you wanted evidence that the Super Bowl is getting hammered by the recession, that was it.
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TAMPA – Town is finally filling up with fans, and a lot of them hang out in hopeful knots in front of the headquarters hotels and the media center, standing for hours at a time in the hopes of seeing someone vaguely famous.
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TAMPA -- You’re never quite sure what to believe when people start talking about celebrities they know. But I’m going to take Jey the Barber at his word – for the moment, at least -- when he says he’s down here from Pittsburgh at the request of his Pittsburgh Steelers clients and pals who can’t go a day during Super Bowl Week without getting their hair touched up.
Jey – that’s how he spells it – is the nom de trim of Justin Drewery, who turned up at the same hotel I’m in with his friend, Don Matthews. Jey was wearing a Steelers hat, and I was heading out to do a fan story, so I asked him if he was in town for the game.
He’s 28, bright and personable, and he was wearing a do-rag under his cap that covered braids that hung down to his collar in the back. He said his clients helped pay his way down here so he could be available to tend to their hair so they’d look nice for the TV cameras every day.
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TAMPA, Fla. - Super Bowl Week is supposed to be a time of wretched excess. But two days into Super Bowl Week, Tampa was still looking for the first hints of the crowds to come.
Even some media organizations seemed to be delaying their arrival. Broadcast locations in “Radio Row” in the Media Center remained empty. The crowd seemed down at Media Day. Cabbies were complaining that business was too slow for their liking.
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