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."
Gisele is the new face (and other body parts) of this summer’s collection by Italian women’s clothier Calzedonia. (I think I had a calzedonia for lunch yesterday. Pepperoni & sausage, I believe.)
It’s nice to see Gisele keep busy. It would be even nicer to see more shots of Gisele in bikinis. And I’m happy to oblige after the jump.
Reality used to be a friend of Ron Artest’s. However, it was long before the public met the kid from St. John’s a decade ago. For example, no one would be surprised to find out the new Gatorade/Tiger Woods cartoons seem like mini-documentaries to the Tru Warier because he has secretly considered himself the NBA’s Dr. Doolittle for years.
Therefore, we shouldn’t be shocked to find out reality’s been stiffing his calls again. After a questionable ejection in last night’s 111-98 Rockets loss to the Lakers to tie the series at one game apiece, Artest entertained the media with alternating moments of clarity speaking about the ejection and tales about that one time he was in Space Jam II as directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Apparently, this is the first time in Artest’s storied violent past that he remembered a pick-up game where tempers flared and one player snapped the leg off a nearby table and threw it with enough force to pierce the heart of another. By the way, Violet Palmer would only call a flagrant one on that.
One expert on keeping it real is Skip to My Lou himself, Rafer Alston. Eddie House’s yipping dog act (which is only the third-most irritating version on this Celtics squad) wormed its way under the skin of the boy from Queens, causing this rather understandable reaction:
The head slap will probably take the Orlando Magic’s only nominal point guard out of an upcoming game, a rather unappealing proposition after the 112-94 posterior-kicking administed by the Celtics last night. Ron Artest would like to know what reality would eject him for chattering with Kobe Bryant about his flailing elbows while a head smack only earns double techs.
(”No, man… I was just asking if you saw ‘House’ last night. Why so sensitive?”)
And maybe one of those aliases once killed a man with a table leg from 20 feet. Hey, it’s no stranger than knowing Ron Artest took the Houston Rockets to a plane of existence Tracy McGrady never could: the second round.
2006 Olympic figure skating silver medalist Sasha Cohen will unretire for the 2010 Vancouver Games, pretty much saving the Games for NBC and Vancouver officials.
Shaquille O’Neal has returned to his offseason MMA training, which he embraces for rewarding all the physicality of the NBA without any of the free throws.
Many pointy-nosed media observers have recently reasoned that rogue sports blogs are responsible for the increased prying into the off-field lives of high profile athletes.
(Photo shoot or scouting Pats’ 2009 draft class?)
I’d love to take credit for that, but it isn’t true. Some athletes are now being covered like show business celebrities only because they are in relationships with well-known entertainment names. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen top the list, which makes some rather provocative photos that I recently discovered of Brady’s new bride somewhat salient posting material.
Of course, this kind of coverages pisses off players and teams to no end. (And dinosaur media members.) But when you mingle with tabloid targets, you don’t get the free pass that the sports media has provided ballplayers for over a century.
And lest you think I would only post the smallish, thumbnail collage of the photos, there are some full size images after the jump. Read more…
The second Tom Brady-Gisele Bündchen wedding went down in Costa Rica last night, and when you mix lawless Central America with the lawless NFL, something’s bound to go down. So it’s not a huge surprise that the power couple’s ceremony was interrupted by gunfire.
No worries, straight men with a crush on Bündchen, and “straight” men with a mancrush on Brady; the happy couple is fine. The trouble occurred when the security detail came across paparazzi in the bushes, and fired on them as they attempted to escape. You know, the usual celebrity wedding stuff.
Like Bigfoot & the Loch Ness Monster, another mysterious creature has been caught on grainy film - Gisele Bundchen in a wedding dress:
Somehow this shot was sneaked out of St. Monica’s Church in Santa Monica, CA, during the recent marriage ceremony between the Brazilian supermodel and New England Patriots QB Tom Brady. And like BF & the LNM, there may be some debate among researchers & scholars whether this photo is really of Gisele. But both THE INSIDER and POP ON THE POP say it’s her - and there’s no strong evidence that it isn’t.
As the legend goes, there’s more photos of the nuptials floating around cyberspace. But be wary if you come across any - they be cursed … with legal ramifications!
So much for US WEEKLY and the glamo-celebrity gossip mags finding ways into weddings where people don’t want them there. According to the website for the aforementioned weekly dose of celebritant glitz, USMAGAZINE.com, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen — arguably the most beautiful woman in the world — were married yesterday in Santa Monica. And none of the celebrity mags were there to cover it, despite the wedding being held right under their noses.
The ceremony was called a small, private affair in Santa Monica’s St. Monica Catholic Church, where only relatives, including his son (with ex Bridget Moynihan) John Edward Thomas Moynihan, were attendees.
So, what does this mean for the rest of us? Well, it means you get to see pictures of a gorgeous woman here at the top of the Speed Read. And it means that we can all finally put this ridiculous, inevitable Brady-Bundchen marriage behind us and forget the constant media subterfuge both Brady and Bundchen have been spreading for months.
Of course, Brady wasn’t the only living Boston sports legend in the news yesterday, even though the other one-name star doesn’t play at Fenway Park anymore. According to a snippy Dodgers press release sent out at 8:30 p.m. last night (Pacific Time, so it was already 11:30 on the East Coast), Manny Ramirez’s agent, Scott Boras, rejected the team’s latest contract offer via written letter.
Naturally, this is no surprise to everyone who’s been keeping tuned to Manny whims and wanes here. Brooks predicted he wouldn’t sign before spring training back in December, and his later prediction that ManRam would start the season without a team is looking a lot more likely by the day.
Now we know: The best way to piss off a team’s owner and GM is to reject their “improved” contract offer via letter, not by phone call, e-mail or signing telegram. Just listen to Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, when asked about negotiating for Ramirez.
“We love Manny Ramirez,” McCourt said, “And we want Manny back, but we feel we are negotiating against ourselves. When his agent finds those ‘serious offers’ from other clubs, we’ll be happy to re-start the negotiations.”
Perhaps more significant is McCourt’s line that he feels Los Angeles will now start from scratch. What exactly does “start from scratch” mean? Will the Dodgers call Boras’ bluff and scale back offers to less money for a single year deal? And what will Ramirez do if he’s facing a deal three years short and $5 million lower per year than he was expecting in the offseason? Does anyone really think he’s going to kill himself playing for a deal he feels will “disrespect” his talent?
The answer to both the yes or no questions is probably “no”, with a solid “who knows” when you consider Ramirez’s potential reaction to what he figures is a bad deal. Regardless of how it turns out, Thursday’s developments are bound to be bad news for Dodgers fans. The only question is just how damning it will be for the team’s hopes in 2009 and 2010.
Of course, L.A. fans could have it worse: They could be in Chicago, one of America’s foremost sports towns that happened to lose two living legends in the same day. According to the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, legendary Bulls player and broadcaster Johnny “Red” Kerr died Thursday of a long battle with prostate cancer. Kerr did just about everything in his career, winning an NBA title (with the Syracuse Nationals, the only one that team would ever earn), becoming an All-Star, coaching the Bulls, working in Chicago’s front office and, perhaps most memorably, providing some of the country’s most captivating color commentary.
It’s far too easy to call Kerr Chicago’s basketball answer to Harry Caray, but that’s not fair to either Windy City legend. Yet perhaps it’s fitting that Kerr used the first name Red. He may not have built the Bulls the way Red Auerbach did the Celtics, but he might be almost as important to the franchise.
Yet things got even worse for the Bulls on Thursday, with fellow Chicago basketball legend Norm Van Lierfound dead in his home at age 61. There’s no word of what killed the former Bulls guard turned pregame and postgame commentator, but it took his current colleagues at COMCAST SPORTSNET to search him out at his apartment, where he was pronounced dead.
As with Kerr, “Stormin’ Norman” wasn’t a perfect role model for Bulls future, past and present, but his competitiveness was unrivaled. That in itself made him a compelling figure, and his swagger never hurt, either. Just check out the interview below from MOUTHPIECE SPORTS last year, and you start to see why Bulls fans loved him so much.
Just when you thought the NFL might bring some fiscal sanity back to professional sports, Redskins owner Daniel Snyder does his best Steinbrenner and blows a ton of cash locking up DeAngelo Hall. Six-years, $54 million? For DeAngelo Hall? Really?
Since when did Shaquille O’Neal profess interest in soccer? Evidently Steve Nash’s influence is really rubbing off, as we can see in the video below:
Bob Huggins finally made it back to Cincinnati, but the Bearcats were all too happy to prove that you can’t keep a good team down. In this case, that good team proved to be Cincinnati.
This Washington win may actually prove to be a pretty decisive Pac-10 matchup, too.
Wait a minute, the U.S. is missing out on a medal because some dude lost his start number? You have got to be kidding.
Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo has a float in his honor at Portugal’s Karneval, and it happens to make light of his manhood by showing him smoking naked woman while a testicle sticks out of his shorts. We wrote all that to clear up the picture below:
If he’s just going to stay in Milan, what good is all this U.S. marketing doing for David Beckham? It’s not like the Milanese care about Kevin Garnett.
Move over, Madonna. Alex Rodriguez has got himself a new celebrity soulmate.
Yes, while the world still reels in delight from the news that Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson are shopping for rings, we have another new budding romance to report. I’m sorry, did I say romance? I meant bro-mance. It seems that A-Rod has developed a new crush, and it’s New England Patriots quarterback/supermodel wrangler Tom Brady.
