ah Page 409 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

<em>Sports Illustrated</em> Senior Writer Calls ESPN A "Cesspool," Unethical
Well, surprise, surprise. ESPN finds itself in yet-another dust-up with its journalistic practices....

Brandon McCarthy Took A Line Drive Right Above The Ear
It has not been the smoothest of 2012s for Brandon McCarthy, the talented Oakland starter. After a number of injury-plagued seasons, McCarthy began the year as the Athletics' opening day starter, only to hit the DL with a shoulder strain in May. A June return proved too soon, and he went on the DL a...

20-Year-Old Soccer Player Gets Pulled From Stands, Suits Up For Scottish National Team, Scores Dramatic Game-Tying Goal
You hear about improbable debuts in sports all the time, but anybody else's story would be hard-pressed to top that of Sarah Crilly. Last week, the 20-year-old university student, who plays for club team Hamilton Academical, was sitting in the stands watching Scotland's national team play an exhibit...

For Only $1000, You Too Can Own A Small Amount Of Water Mo Farah Probably Didn't Sit In
Remember Mo Farah? He won gold for Great Britain in the men's 5000m and 10000m races at the London Olympics, everyone in the UK totally freaked out, and then he ran away from some stuff....

Graham Gano Wins Redskins Starting Job, Gets Cut A Day Later
Yesterday, the Redskins cut veteran kicker Neil Rackers, seemingly handing the job to Graham Gano. Great news for Gano, a fourth-year player whose starting job has never been secure thanks to a niggling habit of, um, missing. Gano was technically perfect on field goals this preseason, considering he...

Joe Paterno/Penn State Defenders: Here's Your Chance To Make Your Case
As tends to happen now whenever we write about Penn State, the discussion below our post Wednesday about Graham Spanier and the Freeh report quickly filled up with Penn State supporters responding with varying degrees of anger. (Some exchanges were ultimately reasonable; others were not.)...

Here Is Former Penn State President Graham Spanier's Response To The Freeh Report
As we told you yesterday, former Penn State president Graham Spanier launched a media offensive that began with a press conference during which his lawyers excoriated the Freeh report and its findings. Later, the New Yorker published a Q&A with Spanier, and Josh Elliot did an interview with Spanier ...

Press Conference By Lawyers For Former Penn State President Graham Spanier Was An Exercise In Bullshit
As expected, the blame-shifting from those at Penn State implicated by the Freeh report has begun. Lawyers for Graham Spanier, the university president fired last November in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, held a press conference in Philadelphia this morning to try and explain their client'...

Wait, The Chiefs Managed To Keep Tamba Hali's Arrest Hidden For This Long?
Earlier today, the NFL announced that Chiefs OLB Tamba Hali will be suspended for one game and lose two game checks. That was all the detail we had. The league's policy clearly dictates four games for performance-enhancing drugs, so it wasn't that. Greg Aiello said the violation "isn't defined speci...


Counterpoint: Aw, Screw Ryan Lochte
Yesterday Sean headed off the typical pile-on after an athlete misstep by contextualizing Ryan Lochte as, rather than the preeminent dumb jock of our time, just the latest in a long line of tacky and oblivious athlete-mannequins that have always been around. Not a parable, not a lesson—just another ...

Red Sox Player Mutiny Now Kelly Shoppach's Fault Somehow
The New York Daily News features a screamer of a headline this morning: "Adrian Gonzalez off the hook as NY Mets' Kelly Shoppach takes fall for Boston's text mutiny." Oh, weird! I guess, contrary to the report from Yahoo, it was not "Adrian Gonzalez, texting on behalf of himself and some teammates,"...

What To Make Of Ryan Lochte
"It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it."...

Red Sox Player Mutiny Continues Apace
Injured pitchers two-fisting around the clubhouse! Stabbing the manager in the back! Fans who can't even mourn Johnny Pesky with their pants up! Can it possibly get any worse for those fourth-place Boston Red Sox?...

Yup, That's A Kansas City Chiefs Glass Eye
Spotted over at Arrowhead Addict: the last thing a Raiders fan sees before he dies. Steve Graham, 58, lost his right eye in a dart accident when he was a kid, but only a decade ago did he decide to give the real estate to a Chiefs logo....

Massive 12-Year-Old Too Big For Pee Wee Football, Too Bad At Football For Middle School Football
KDFW reports on the story of Elijah Earnheart, who at the tender age of 12 is already six feet tall and weighs nearly 300 pounds. Elijah wants to play football, but because of his size, he's been banned from his Mequite (Texas) Pee Wee team. Once you get the giggles out over the Fox screengrab of po...

Catching <em>Phantom Of The Opera</em> With Vince McMahon: More Wrestler Run-Ins
Inspired by the saga of "Wrestling Superstar Virgil," we continue with readers' encounters with the titans of the squared circle. If you've had your own run-in with pro wrestlers past or present, e-mail us, subject line "Virgilbag."...

French Soccer Stars Will Face Charges For Sexing 16-Year-Old Prostitute
Bayern's Franck Ribery and Real Madrid's Karim Benzema got into a spot of trouble in 2010, when a Paris prostitution ring was busted and their names popped up in a little black book. Even worse, it turned out they had paid for sex with then-16-year-old Zahia Dehar, who, in the players' defense, didn...

Watch BBC Announcers And Commentators Go Berserk As Mo Farah Won Gold In The 5,000 Meters
Mo Farah scored a royal double for Great Britain in winning the 10,000m and today's 5,000m, and the importance of his win can really only be understood through how their media covered the event. Here, then, is the final 150 meters of his race, with isolated cameras on announcer Steve Cram and the...

Saudi Arabia Had A Female Track Athlete Run Today
Sarah Attar was born and raised in California, and she attends Pepperdine University, where she's on the cross country and track and field teams. But her father is Saudi Arabian, and she has dual citizenship, so she competed for the Saudis at the Olympics, qualifying under a clause that aims to expa...