By one estimate, 60 to 80 percent of NFL marriages end in divorce, and other sports have comparable rates. That's no surprise, considering the factors in play: a culture of infidelity, being away from home all the time, trophy wives and jersey chasers.

It's a tough life to sustain a marriage," said Raoul Felder, a celebrity divorce lawyer who represented the former wives of Mike Tyson and Patrick Ewing. "There's a maximum of temptation and lots of money floating around. It's a bad brew."

But more surprising is that most sports marriages seem to end after the player has retired. In those cases it's tempting to assume that the wives discover that they might have gotten hitched for reasons other than their husband's company. But anecdotally, it's more likely that it's the athletes become something other than the men they thought they married.

Steven Ortiz, an associate professor of sociology at Oregon State, interviewed 47 wives of professional athletes for a study. He found that wives had to adjust to their husbands' spending more time at home, that they missed team functions and community events and that they bore the brunt of the transition.

None of this is to say that there aren't perfectly happy couples in the sports world, or that they don't have the right to jump into doomed relationships just like the rest of us. But someday the game will be gone and the money will dry up, and athletes and their wives need to make sure they're getting the companionship they need and deserve.

Taking Vows In A League Blindsided By Divorce [NY Times]

Her name was Corinne Griffith and her looks and references to Muleshoe and pigeons sort of call to mind Zooey Deschanel, or maybe that's just us:

The way Corinne Griffith tells it in her 1947 book "My Life With the Redskins," it was her idea to move the team to Washington. She relates the story of dining with her friend Damon Runyon, sportswriter and author of "Guys and Dolls," his wife, Patrice, and Marshall at a restaurant in New York in the fall of 1936, and explaining why the team would be welcomed in Washington: "You see, Damon, there are so many displaced citizens in Washington, from places such as Muleshoe, Texas; Ekalaka, Montana; and even Beverly Hills, California. Most of these are alone in Washington with nothing to do on Sunday afternoon other than sit in parks and feed the squirrels and pigeons. I am convinced that if the team should move to Washington, it would give these same an opportunity to expend some of their surplus energy."

You have to remember, this was before digital video recording technology required Beltway area residents to spend Sunday afternoons watching the Sunday morning political talk shows they hadn't watched on Sunday morning. Also it was probably before the Beltway.

Anyway Marshall was a shrewd businessman who did not even pay his team for the hundreds of exhibition games he hauled them around playing with such teams as the "Akron Awnings." (Funny how we kept around such names as Redskins and Indians and bullets and stuff when there were already perfectly inoffensive names people had thought of like Akron Awnings.)

But Marshall had a big weakness that eventually got the best of him: he was a huge crazy racist! Eventually his longtime commentator and 25% owner of the franchise Harry Wismer started complaining about how his refusal to draft black players was hurting his investment in the team. Then Wismer made off with his wife, he suspected! She wrote him:

Dear George,

... I have always kept myself unspotted from any gossip because I have led as clean a life of anyone leading, and I am certain that you, above all people, know just how decent I am. So, don't say again I can do "anything with Wismer I see fit". I am not interested in Harry and Harry is not interested in me.

You are always letting your hate of Wismer ruin you. Hate always does. But Heaven knows there is no reason to hate me. When you insisted I marry you, I married you. When you insisted for years on a divorce, I divorced you. What more can you ask? And may I repeat, please get someone around you whose thinking is correct. With your ability and my right thinking you became a great success. Now you are surrounded with such degenerate, unprogressive thoughts that you are fast becoming a failure. Come on now, get your good thinking cap on and do the things you are capable of doing — now!

And don't ever again accuse me of chasing with Wismer. To begin with I don't "chase". I am the old-fashioned type that believes in letting men chase me. Remember?

Somehow I was not surprised to learn at the end that this story was co-authored by a husband-wife writing team. But not before I learned this charming tidbit about the team's old policy about smoking while on the road:

Smoking:

The club has strict rules about smoking in or around the dressing room or practice field ...

Ash-trays are plentiful in your rooms. Be sure to use them ... not the floor. Remember: It's somebody's mother or wife who has to clean up.

***

Awww, today it would just be "some illegal"!

If they do that sort of thing with urine. Drinking is more my thing, which is obviously how A.J. and I got to thinking this was a good idea. So anyway: I "sound" this way (so to "speak") because I am the least qualified person ever to blog about sports. This is in part because I never played any, and in part because my parents always seemed to be monopolizing the TV with this Masterpiece Theater bullshit, and mainly because I'm a girl. I do have a fun story about getting hit on by a young LeBron James I will tell you this weekend, because there was a time I followed sports when I lived with this dude and had a job writing about the footwear industry, but basically my interest here is in broadening my horizons. I have written about many topics in my career as an actually-paid blogger — and if you were wondering, I am being actually paid by Talking Points Memo at the moment — but I feel like the financial crisis has sort of gotten me into a rut, where I've just started to feel like I can't have a drink without also delivering one of those credit default swap soliloquys, wait that is not a word oh who cares, and anyway, I am hoping that learning about this inspiring new topic will have an effect somewhat akin to how normal overworked people would, say, "go outside" or "read a whole novel" or something. Yeah, one day I'll figure out how to do those things too. In the meantime, help me blog for you. No topic overstretches the limits of my abilities to dispense comprehensively ignorant commentary. You can reach me on the tips line or, for that personal touch, here.

At times, it can be a manic, brilliantly disgusting voice, but definitely better than many of the ape-fisted hacks that currently make up your mainstream media sports writing community. Your first special guest editor tomorrow is a woman some of you might be familiar with: Moe Tkacik. Yes, one of the original Jezebel-cum-Gawker-cum-unemployed writers is bored enough (and masochistic enough) that she volunteered to spend a Saturday with you maniacs. What does she know about sports? Well she did have an odd obsession with the 2002 Sacramento Kings. Okay!

So she will be on tips tomorrow, but she also requests that you, genius commenters, supply her with any and all updates about what's going on in the sports world. Give her positive reinforcement at all times. Please don't send her pictures of your genitalia or dead animals. That's not nice. Email her here. Plus! The presence of Moe should mean that some of the delightful Jezebel commenting community could pop by. What could possibly go wrong?

I hope this goes as well as the other time a special guest editor posted on Deadspin. Yeesh.

And, so you know, there are more of these coming. Quite a few people — many you know, and love to hate — have expressed interest in participating. I will keep you updated.

Do the best you can.

Here's the offending graph:

"Candace Parker is beautiful. Breathtaking, really, with flawless skin, endless legs and a C cup she is proud of but never flaunts. She is also the best at what she does, a record-setter, a rule-breaker, a redefiner. She is a woman who plays like a man, one of the boys, if the boys had C cups and flawless skin. She's nice, too. Sweet, even. Kind to animals and children, she is the sort of woman who worries about others more than about herself, a saint in high-tops."

Okay. A couple of mentions. The SJ crew loves getting self-righteous about stuff like this and this time it took a nine-page discussion on the forum to figure out the significance and appropriateness of Candace Parker's breast size.

•" How did her cup size even come up? Did the writer ask or did Parker just volunteer it? Either way, that's weird.
I covered women at in a BCS conference for years. I'd have never even considered ask about their physical attributes like that — and they certainly didn't bring it up."

• "Talking about size her bra is reduces a great women's basketball player to nothing but a sex object. It's ridiculous."

• "This is why I don't get this magazine at all, and every issue reinforces my confusion. They put this beautiful woman on the cover, elegant and pregnant and cool.....but they can't resist the gratuitous boob reference. If Parker 'never flaunts'' her breasts, why did Glock have to flaunt them for her?"

• "If she's such a great athlete, there's no need to talk about her cup size. This isn't Maxim or FHM. Talking about her flawless skin is fine - and spot-on. You can describe how beautiful she is without going into the discussion of bras."

• "It's a double-standard that a female writer can write about such personal attributes and get a pass for the most part. If a male writer made such a reference, he'd be called sexist and drilled by every feminist organization out there."

You get the idea. It seems most of the SJ people are either anti-boob reference or incensed that if a man wrote this opener, he'd be shredded for it (duh).

For a follow-up, maybe someone should figure out if Parker was a C-cup before or after the pregnancy. Because if she's a D-cup now, that's definitely probably worth three mentions in a lede paragraph.

How do you feel about Candace Parker's C-cup being referenced in the lede? [SportsJournalists.com]

Caitlin Davis and an unidentified pal appear to be writing on the unconscious prank victim and the words “penis,” ‘I’m a Jew’ and a pair of swastikas are clearly visible on his face, neck, arms and torso....[T]eam owners Bob and Myra Kraft are huge in the Anti-Defamation League and, while Caitlin might have been given a pass on the penises, the swastikas were a no-go.

I had many not-so-pleasant email conversations with Ms. Davis yesterday regarding this post, however she did insist that photos featured were taken out of context and claims she didn't draw anything on the individual. Obviously, she was concerned for her part-time job as a Pats cheerleader and the subsequent embarrassment that comes with having those pictures splashed across the internet. It's unfortunate that this did happen to Caitlin and I do think the Patriots are being a little oversensitive, especially if she wasn't the person who penis-and-swastika'd up the poor kid's body. But...as we've seen many, many, many times before, professional (and college) sports organizations are cracking down on how their cheerleader squads' public image.

To sum up: Caitlin Davis was just being a 19-year-old — albeit one who works for one of the most popular and successful sports franchises in the world — and is most likely not an Anti-Semite or a horrible human being. Caitlin has sworn vengeance against Deadspin — as did her equally unhappy boyfriend, who is currently deployed in the military — so we'll see if this story takes an even stranger turn that it already has in the coming months. Hope not.

Caitlin Davis' Life Is Not So Cheery Now [BH]

From the site:

The children of the US America are in deep trouble. Because some people out there don't have maps. Such as South Africa. Therefore, you must email us maps to make it better. EMAIL: maps AT mapsforus.org. Our views of Attack of the Show's webpage will encourage our children to believe that there is a future outside of Asia. A future with maps. And such. South Africa.

My favorite map on there so far is the Mt. St. Helens Park/Road Access map, one which I have actually used. And the comments section is fun as well.

Meanwhile, Ms. Upton appeared on The Today Show on Tuesday to face the super-heated journalistic tribunal which is a Matt Lauer interview. And she did quite well (ding!). For our children.

Maps For Us.org
Miss Teen South Carolina Has Discovered The Map To Our Hearts [Deadspin]
Miss Teen South Carolina On The Today Show [YouTube]