8:00 PM CSN Baltimore has video of Marcus Smith, a U.S. soldier who dressed as a minor league umpire to surprise his children at a Bowie Baysox game with a home visit from Afghanistan.
7:45 PM A Japanese Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was swept out to sea during last year's tsunami washed up on a shore in British Columbia last month. The bike's owner asked that the motorcycle be displayed at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee as a memorial to the tsunami victims.
7:30 PM Buffalo Bills receiver David Clowneytweeted the results of his HIV test which came back negative. And to the critics of his decision to share his results, Clowney added: "Some people are Ridiculously stupid ... And can't see the bigger picture about things that are important in this world."
It’s been well-known that Mark Cuban is an unconventional owner whose fandom and fervency borders on obsessive. That’s fine, and a welcome respite from the Donald Sterlings of professional sports, but it becomes problematic when he finds himself rewriting the record books on fines levied by the league.
(And now there’s so many new layers of poetic justice in this.)
It also appears that the enmity that sometimes boils over has also targeted former Mavs coach (and current Warriors head honcho) Don Nelson. At stake is deferred compensation that Cuban, well, just isn’t going to pay, judges’ rulings be damned.
The great thing about Mark Cuban is that the fun doesn’t end when the NBA season does. A great philosopher — I think it was Spider-Man — once said that with great power comes great responsibility. Also plenty of litigation, apparently. Cuban no sooner extricated himself from one legal entanglement on Friday, than he got caught up in another.
And this time, Cuban is being sued by a company owned by H. Ross Perot, Jr., son of former Presidential candidate and noted screwball H. Ross Perot. Which is always fun. Cuban is accused of diverting millions of dollars from the Mavericks’ arena, American Airlines Center, to make up for team financial shortfalls. Read more…
Like many control freaks who are in the public eye, Mark Cuban often gets frustrated with bloggers. What’s he supposed to do when they put out scurrilous rumors about the Mavericks, or post unflattering images of him alongside discredited 1950s politicians? Mr. Cuban figures, as one would probably guess, that a blacklist would be a good thing.
And who to administer this list? Why ESPN of course. Cuban’s modest proposal is that the WWL should present a page of blogs and websites which they won’t use in their reporting. But wouldn’t such a list just give these sites the publicity that Cuban says they don’t deserve? He has an answer for that, too. Read more…
The contentious playoff series between the Mavericks and Nuggets may have ended on Wednesday, but the off-court drama surrounding it continues. Yesterday, Nuggets coach George Karlstoked the flames surrounding Carmelo Anthony’s fiancee’s fight club video, keeping that brouhaha brewing long past its expiration date. Today, the original Nugs-Mavs offcourt drama, the feud between Mark Cuban and Kenyon Martin’s mom got another jolt, keeping it out ahead of the pack.
Cuban may have thought that a crummy blogpology (buzzword!) would be enough to end the tiff between himself and Kenyon Martin’s mom, but almighty NBA commish David Sternhas decreed otherwise.
It was billed as the hockey playoff series everyone wanted to see, and for six games it was. With three overtimes in that spell — and two other games that easily could have been pushed into extra frames, too — the Capitals-Penguins second rounder felt like an instant classic heading into Game 7. All it needed was a respectable finale.
It didn’t get one.
Instead, Pittsburgh’s experienced markmen carved up Washington’s rookie goalie, Simeon Varlamov, jumping out to a 5-0 lead before finishing with a 6-2 victory in D.C., which spent much of the third period reminiscing about a strong season and wondering what might havce been.
That made for a deflating end to Alex Ovechkin’s second playoff campaign, with Washington’s transcendent star thoroughly outshone by Pittsburgh star Sidney Crosby, whose two goals and an assist paced Pittsburgh’s stunning Game 7 rout.
In fact, while conventional wisdom holds there’s nothing like a Game 7 in hockey, this graph from the WASHINGTON POST’s writeup of the game tells you all you need to know about what got the Caps into trouble:
Varlamov wasn’t totally to blame; he didn’t get much help from his teammates, who were outplayed in almost every sense of the word. They took bad penalties. They were beaten to loose pucks. They made mental miscues when the team could least afford one.
The game began with Ovechkin being stopped by Marc-André Fleury on a breakaway after 3 minutes 1 second with a brilliant glove save. It was all downhill from there for the Capitals.
There you go, and there go the Caps in a game which could have cemented Washington’s status as a burgeoning hockey town. Instead, it’ll just be a quiet one until training camp starts this summer.
If it helps cushion the blow, the Caps didn’t go quietly into the night alone. The Mavericks are headed to the golf course, too, thanks to a dominant performance by, who else, Chauncey Billups and Carmelo Anthony, in a 124-110 victory.
Only Dirk Nowitzki really showed up for Dallas, which is nice considering the fact that his pregnant fiancee most definitely couldn’t be there. And while the final scoreline shows a 14-point victory for Denver, it felt bigger than that, since the Nuggets opened up an equal 14-point lead by halftime and never really looked back.
Not to be overshadowed by the exploits of his own team on the court, Dallas owner Mark Cubanhad his apology to the mother of Kenyon Martin labeled as insincere by none other than K-Mart himself. And he had company, with Carmelo also questioning whether Cuban could possibly be sincere with an apology posted in the middle of the night on his personal blog. In fact, while we’re at it, I’d like to apologize to my second grade art teacher. I really didn’t mean to spill all the macaroni for those zebra designs on the floor, and I really shouldn’t have laughed so loud when they flew all over the floor and you had to throw them out. If I knew how little money you made, I never would have laughed.
Case in point: Last fall, former Gators quarterback Shane Matthews, a proud, former greasy-haired Florida alum, offered up one of the stronger rebukes of Meyer’s game strategy after UF’s lone loss, to Ole Miss.
At the time, Matthews called the Rebels’ man-to-man defense on Florida’s wide receivers an outright affront to the team’s passing game, questioning why Meyer wouldn’t take advantage of what seemed like mismatches.
That led to a stern speech at a Gator Club (read: really rich alumni) rally where Meyer said former players who criticized any part of the program could buy a ticket to a game, not hob nob in the team’s athletic offices.
Needless to say, that’s made plenty of headlines because it was uttered by Urban Meyer, since anything he says at this point ends up on a front page in any state with an SEC school.
For his part, Matthews is just amazed that the entire episode has become such a media flashpoint.
“I’m as Gator as there is and very supportive of the program,” he said on ESPN Wednesday. “You can be critical of a coaching decision here and there, but that’s just being a Monday morning quarterback, everyone does that.”
He’s that, and a well-known radio host, so it is kind of his job to critique coaches’ decisions. It’s not like he’s some Florida high school football coach. Maybe Meyer can consider that the next time he launches a diatribe, or maybe not. After all, Urban Meyer does what Urban Meyer thinks he should, when he thinks he should.
• Just when you thought things might finally be looking promising for the Eagles, one of Andy Reid’s sons goes and gets himself sent back to the slammer. Nice work Garrett Reid. Donovan McNabb doesn’t send his condolences.
• Wait, so just because Al Davis hated Tim Brown, that means he hates all black players from Notre Dame? Is there a significant difference between those two classifications? How many other black Notre Dame alums have played in Oakland?
• Ex-NBA player Corie Blount is sentenced to one year in prison for having too many blunts, but not without a final jab from the presiding judge: “Cheech And Chong would have a hard time smoking that much.”
When the story broke about Dirk Nowitzki’s fiancee, Cristal Taylor, being arrested at his house on outstanding warrants, one seemingly benign detail that got us salivating was her age: 37. That told us one thing: there’s more. Women don’t turn criminally manipulative in their mid-30’s; it usually hits by puberty. So considering that Taylor’s had nearly two decades as an adult to pull some wild stunts, we knew more crazy stories were en route.
On that note, enter Tony Banks (the one shown above, not the dude from Genesis). Remember when he was quarterbacking the St. Louis Rams before Kurt Warner showed up? Remember how he wasn’t very good? Well, apparently he was good enough back in 1997 - good enough for Cristal Taylor, anyway. Banks shared his bizarre story with the DALLAS MORNING NEWS about the best kind of young love: with a noticeably crazy woman. Read more…
Skip Bayless has made his name by throwing out brash declaratory statements that tend to be pretty inflammatory. His lived up to that reputation earlier this week on ESPN’s “First Take” (formerly “Cold Pizza”, before that conceptual nameplate was killed off ritualistically), when he said that Dallas Mavericks fans were engaging in “Philly-style behavior“.
Not surprisingly, that left proud Philadelphians pretty upset, considering that the insinuation was that they were completely rash and uncivilized. So the city struck back today on Philly ESPN radio host Mike Missanelli’s show Tuesday afternoon.
With the Mark Cuban-Kenyon Martin flapapparently settled, you’d think that would be the end of any hostilities between the Dallas Mavericks & Denver Nuggets. Thank goodness for LaLa Vasquez.
The video footage found only shows the aftermath of the incident, so we’re not exactly sure what started the whole mess. But Ms. Vasquez explains why it all went down - because Mavericks fans are racists.
