7:30 PM Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Cortez Kennedy said how during his Miami Hurricanes days, teammate Randy Shannon would stay in his apartment & watch the refrigerator to keep Kennedy from eating late at night.
Eric Prisbell and Steve Yanda of the WASHINGTON POST report that as part of a current Maryland Circuit Court case, Michael Beasley recently revealed stunning details about his recruitment to Kansas State and one year-stay at the school.
In a counterclaim filed late last month by attorney Mark A. Smith on behalf of Beasley against his former NBA agent Joel Bell, the ex-Kansas State star reported in Montgomery County Circuit Court documents that former Kansas State basketball head coach Bob Huggins hired Beasley’s ex-AAU Coach as an assistant coach for the Wildcats essentially in exchange for Beasley attending the school.
After (former Beasley AAU Coach) Hill had worked for Charlotte a couple of years, on information and belief, Bob Huggins of Kansas State wanted Beasley, so he offered Hill an assistant coaching job at Kansas State with a salary that ended up being in excess of $420,000. Hill took the job, and Beasley went to Kansas State.
Beasley also submitted to the Maryland Court that the founder of the AAU team he played on before attending K-State, Curtis Malone, was a “runner” for NBA Agent Bell. Beasley further asserted that Malone - via Bell - bankrolled Beasley’s mother’s move to Manhattan so she could be close to her son - among other things.
The simmering controversy over the source of allegedly inaccurate, recent media reports detailing sordid behavior by West Virginia coach-in-waiting Dana Holgorsen boiled over early Tuesday morning on Chris Mueller’s overnight radio show on KDKA-FM in Pittsburgh.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE reporter Colin Dunlap, who served as West Virginia football beat reporter for the Post-Gazette last season, told Mueller that Stewart called him on December 18, 2010, three days after Holgorsen was hired as Stewart’s future replacement, to request that Dunlap “dig up dirt” on Holgorsen.
The following are excerpts from Dunlap’s remarks early Tuesday morning (June 7, 2011) on KDKA-FM about the phone call between the two:
“It was actually my birthday, December 18, it was the day he (Stewart) was going to the bowl game because I distinctly remember there was a coaches convention in Pittsburgh with high school coaches. He was (then) flying from Pittsburgh down to Orlando to the bowl game for pre-prep work … “
” … He (Stewart) tried to flame-throw the guy (Holgorsen) in December by calling me and at least one other reporter because the reporter and I discussed it. He said, ‘can you get the word ’scumbag’ tattooed on the front of the sports page?’
“‘(Stewart said) you need to dig up this dirt. You need to get it out on this guy.’ And I said, ‘hey man, I’m not a part of some witch hunt.’”
“… If you want to go look at my cell phone records you can, I don’t need to hide from it. The conversation happened the day he (Stewart) was driving to the airport from the high school coaches convention in Pittsburgh. He was on his way to Orlando. (WVU assistant coach) Dave McMichael was in the car with him. The conversation happened.”
In recent days, speculation that Stewart’s wife or the coach himself was the source of a damaging, and allegedly inaccurate portrayal of Holgorsen written by HUNTINGTON HERALD-DISPATCH reporter Chuck Landon on May 28 has continued to grow.
In the piece, Landon reported:
Holgorsen has reportedly been involved in at least three and, perhaps, as many as six alcohol-related incidents in the last six months, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.
That’s right, six.
The first five were hushed up, but the sixth incident at Mardi Gras Casino in Cross Lanes on May 18 has blown the cover off Holgorsen’s embarrassing antics. Nitro police were called to the casino at about 3:20 a.m. on May 18 to remove an apparently intoxicated customer who didn’t want to leave. Holgorsen was asked to step outside, sit on a bench and await a taxi. No charges were filed.
Four days after Landon’s report, and a previous hit piece in the WHEELING (WV) NEWS-REGISTER titled, “Holgorsen embarrasses Entire State“, the CHARLESTON (WV) DAILY MAIL reported that WVU officials claimed both hit pieces were rife with “blatant inaccuracies.”
West Virginia University is searching for anonymous contributors to newspaper stories it says contain “blatant inaccuracies” about the football team’s head coach-in-waiting and offensive coordinator, Dana Holgorsen.
The timing of WVU’s internal inquiry, which is a normal procedure in response to such incidents, coincides with a pause in the concluding phase of Coach Bill Stewart’s separation agreement with the university.
Two sources said the contract has been awaiting signatures for weeks but has been tabled as the athletic department determines who has and has not participated in fabricating stories about Holgorsen and compromising the coaching transition.
Might Dunlap’s remarkable revelation of Stewart’s personal request that he “get the word ’scumbag’ tattooed on the front of the sports page” in a seeming desperate bid to smear Holgorsen soon transform that “pause” into “cause“?
I was wondering what possibly could have been in the water supply yesterday as first Bill Belichick, and then Rich Rodriguez began crying during their respective press conferences. Could the Michigan coach really be that broken up over allegations that he’s violating NCAA practice rules?
Then comes news that our maize-and-blue man in charge is being sued for a condominium deal gone sour in Blacksburg, Virginia. And not only that, Rich was recently served a summons right in the Wolverine football offices. Yeah, that always makes me cry.
College football fans will likely recall Matt Vasgersian’s epic call of Owen Schmitt’s touchdown in West Virginia’s upset win over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. As the burly Schmitt barreled down the sideline en route to a long touchdown, Vasgersian yelled, “Like a runaway beer truck!”
(This isn’t a mugshot, but whatever his mugshot looked like is undoubtedly inferior to this.)
It was an iconic nickname in an era where so few are spontaneous and evocative, and one that stuck with him as he joined the NFL. Spontaneous and evocative, yes, but now, extremely unfortunate.
• Soon-to-be newlyweds Kendra Wilkinson & Eagles WR Hank Baskettare expecting a baby. On the other side of the spectrum, Barry Bonds’ wife demands a divorce.
All right kids, it’s time to take out your WTFmeters. This is not a drill. I think we’re about to hit Ludicrous WTF.
(Can’t you put some, um, foundation on that?)
Yes, that’s West Virginia (via KSU and, most notably, Cincinnati) head coach Bob Huggins. He’s traded in his gold suit for two black eyes, it seems, which hardly seems like suitable attire for the banquet he’s attending.
Wrigley Field will now host the Captain Morgan Club (a restaurant) and the Smirnoff Patio and provide lovely mixed drinks to the fans that like to do a little drinking around 10 am at home and then ride the El to Addison and start downing car bombs around 11:30 am for a 1:20 pm start.
Also gratuitous: the entire 2008-2009 NCAA women’s basketball season. The University of Connecticut Huskies won their 39th straight game by double-digits to complete their undefeated season and claim the nation’s crown.
Stanford University of Louisville kept this game competitive for about as long as you’ve been reading this article thus far, which still might be the best effort of the year for a UConn opponent. This could be the point for a snide joke about going pro in a little something we call life, but these young women are already professional assassins. Yikes.
We know the short-lived hole in the media filter (and the filter on media members themselves) caused by Twitter will soon close and leave us with more canned responses and layers of personal marketing protection. As we speak, there are businesses springing up around the management of social spaces and new media integration and other phrases that dampen the soul.
For now, though, we live in truly awesome times. Example: Bill Stewart (West Virginia’s head football coach and the antithesis of R-Rod) has been carrying on like a blessed fool on Twitter, including how he threw all the kickers out of a meeting or how he gets so fired up by Chubby Checker that he sprints into practice at 4:15 am.
Go like this, Coach Stewart. Go like this all morning long.
Stan Kasten, president of the Washington Nationals, went on Philly radio and told Phillies fans just how much they were welcome to fill those increasingly empty seats at Nationals Park, having apparently forgotten that D.C. sports fans survive the surprisingly harsh winters by burning compressed carbon logs of their own hate for other teams. You’d think Stan Kasten had bigger fish to fry, frankly. For example, Dmitri Young just called Stan Kasten’s house because he heard Kasten’s hosting a fish fry.
Senator Ted Kennedy threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park on Opening Day. Senator Bill Frist saw this video and declared Kennedy alive and well, raising his batting average to .500.
The San Diego Padres have one chance at a title: Miss California Carrie Prejean (a former “Deal or No Deal” model) will be competing for the Miss USA title in Vegas on April 19th and she’s a former member of the Padres’ “Pad Squad”. It’s good that she’s no longer with the organization or Becky Moores might demand weekend visitation rights.
As always, sports governing bodies’ petty infighting makes for complicated reading. Therefore, please forgive us an analogy: baseball couldn’t hook up with softball to make a 2016 Olympics baby, so they’re slumming with women’s baseball to try to reproduce a “women’s component to its bid to get reinstated for the 2016 Olympics“. (The IOC is loathe to add a boys’ sport without adding a girls’ sport as well.) Of course, the idea might go over better if there were more than a thousand high school girls in America that played baseball, much less in other countries.
Then again, maybe this would all be helped if these sports governing bodies weren’t so monochrome in their leadership that one expert found that the “whiteness is distressing.“
If you are only going to hit one basket in a game, hitting the shot that sends your team to the NCAA Tournament is good time to do it. And that’s just what Robert Morris University guard Dallas Green did (not the former big league manager), picking up a loose ball and draining a baseline jumper with 2.5 seconds left to give the Colonials a dramatic 48-46 victory over Mount St. Mary’s to win the Northeast Conference Championship.
But as exciting as the final three seconds or so were, the first 39 minutes and 57 seconds were just as ugly. As in, “hey, look, ‘Sports Soup’ is on!” bad. The second half was pretty rough to watch, and that was a huge upgrade over the first half: the halftime score was 19-19, and the leading scorer for the game was RMU’s Jeremy Chappell (seen below celebrating) with 15 points.
But in the end, it was Green who provided the heroics. Which rubbed his opponents the wrong way:
Mount St. Mary’s guard Jeremy Goode was particularly stung that Green — a player who even Robert Morris coach Mike Rice admitted was the fifth option on the play — was the player who hit the decisive shot.
“It hurts more,” Goode said. “You’d rather see a guy who makes shots the whole time he has been here make the game-winner. Not [Green] though.”
I’m sure that Green is going to be very upset about those comments…as he and his teammates prepare for the NCAA Tournament, while the Mount St. Mary’s team prepares for a long off-season. But based on the game last night, I doubt that Green or that rest of the Robert Morris team should be game planning for more than one game.
There was another ticket punched to the Big Dance last night which also ended in dramatic fashion. Portland State squeaked past huge underdog Montana State team (who finished the season 14-17) to win the Big Sky Championship. The Vikings also used a last-second shot to clinch their spot, as Julius Thomasdunked with 3.5 seconds left for the winning points in their 79-77 victory. Hopefully they can avoid being a No. 16 seed again, like they were last year before getting thumped by Kansas.
(And about the crash that killed “Mask” Lewis: the police are now looking into street racing as a cause of the accident, and it turns out that Lewis had at least eight traffic violations since 2001, including a DUI.)
Mel Kiper Jr. apparently hates Jay Cutler something fierce, according to RUMORS AND RANTS, who have transcribed his diatribe on the suddenly-maligned Denver (for now) quarterback. Not only does Kiper say that the media hype around Cutler was so ridiculous “I had to run to the bathroom quick. It was making me ill,” - I assume he checked his hair after throwing up - he also compares Cutler to He Who Must Not Be Named (Jeff George).
The LOS ANGELES TIMES says that the LAPD are re-opening the case of Howie Steindler, the boxing trainer who was the inspiration for Rocky Balboa’s trainer Mickey Goldmill and was murdered 32 years ago (and not by the angry words of one Clubber Lang.)
San Jose mayor Chuck Reed tells MSNBC that the “odds are better than 50/50” of the A’s relocating there from Oakland. Of course, MLB would still need to remove territorial rights to San Jose from the Giants, which is probably why A’s owner Lew Wolff was - as SHYSTER BALL notes - sucking up to Bud Selig last week.
Venezuela defeated the US 5-3 in the World Baseball Classic in a fairly meaningless game (both teams had already made the quarterfinals), despite what ESPN chronicles as simmering tensions over President Hugo Chavezthreaten to boil over for the team and its fans.
FOOD COURT LUNCH breaks down some SABRmetric terms you probably don’t know, like Spouse Slugging (leaders include Brett Myers and Elijah Dukes) and Scrappiness Index (David Eckstein).
The ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION says that tickets to the ACC Tournament, once one of the toughest to get in all of college sports, are now yours for the taking as the event is not a sellout, with almost 10,000 seats remaining unsold.
Hey, remember when Notre Dame was everyone’s trendy pick for a Final Four dark horse? Perhaps everyone meant NIT Final Four, as that’s where the Fighting Irish are heading after getting bounced from the Big East Tournament by West Virginia.
Here’s something that will make your day, Michigan fans. With an unemployment rate of over 10% in your state, you might not have job, but your football coach is doing pretty well for himself. Michigan paid $6.6 million to compensate Rich Rodriguez for winning three games in 2008.
In addition to the $2.5 million he made in salary and other compensation, the university kicked in an additional $4.1 million to cover part of the buyout Rodriguez owed his former employer in West Virginia. The athletic department is separate from the rest of the school financially, but that’s still a lot of dough for not much return.
Suddenly it was 2002 all over again for the Lakers vs. Kings rivalry last night in Sacramento. The Arco Arena crowd was hooting and hollering and the Maloofs were acting like giant cheeseballs, high-fiving, bear-hugging and giving lap dances to anyone within reach. Sacramento temporarily forgot how lousy they are in delivering a 113-101 beatdown of Los Angeles that really wasn’t that close. Wake up the echoes of Vlade and C-Webb, indeed.
What the game came down to was defense, specifically the Lakers’ total lack of it. They were unable to stop the high pick and roll, leaving the Kings with huge lanes to the basket to score or dish for threes. This is not a good sign for the Lakers going into tonight’s game against Steve Nash and the Suns, even if Shaq isn’t playing.
That’s three bad performances in their last four road games against average to awful teams (Indiana, Washington, Sacramento), which should be enough to silence any talk about 70 wins. But before Lakers fans go calling their therapist for a new prescription of Zoloft, they should remember that the team is still 17-3.
Meanwhile in Cleveland, a legendary Cavaliers superstar reached a huge career milestone. Congratulations to Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who had set the franchise record for career rebounds in the team’s 114-94 rout of the Toronto Raptors. And oh yeah, some guy named LeBron James tried to horn in on the Big Z’s big night by setting the team’s career mark for steals and chipping in with 31 points.
Other sports news to read while you consider calling in gay to work today:
Apparently, about the worst thing you can do in England is tell someone they look like Manchester United star Wayne Rooney. THE SUN reports that drunken slur in a taxi line led to one man’s death while the Rooney lookalike is currently facing manslaughter charges.
The DETROIT NEWS has word that big-mouth former Michigan QB and mediocre MLB player Rick Leach thinks that former Wolverines coach Lloyd Carrshould “support” the guy who replaced him, Rich Rodriguez.
An Australian politician rues to the HERALD SUN that having soccer players overstay their visas and apply for asylum is one of the risks of hosting the Homeless World Cup.
The WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL notes that Ted Turner and TBS have been found guilty of a breach of contract in the sale of the Atlanta Hawks and Thrashers and ordered to pay $316 million in damages. Turner immediately protests that this “was nothing like an episode of Law & Order.”
A good hint for coaches: don’t tell the press that it’s impossible for your team to win a game against your No. 1 rival, and Real Madrid’s Bernd Schuster said ahead of his team’s game against Barcelona. Not surprisingly, the NEW YORK TIMES reports Schuster’s been sacked. Also, don’t believe any rumors that Stephon Marbury is heading there to be the next coach.
20 years later, Billy Ripken talks to CNBC’s Darren Rovellabout his infamous baseball card. He still gets recognized “a couple of times a week” because of it - three guesses what people call him. Hint: it rhymes with “duck race.”
The latest name to enter the CC Sabathia Sweepstakes? The San Francisco Giants, who apparently weren’t burnt badly enough by Barry Zito to swear off big money pitchers. But Giants’ GM Brian Sabean tells the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS his team is just a “fallback” option if Sabathia doesn’t sign with the Yankees.
Remember when Texas Tech QB Graham Harrell said there was a “great chance” that Mike Leach wouldn’t be back coaching the Red Raiders next season. Turns out he’s changed his mind, says the AP (via the SEATTLE TIMES).
