at Page 1997 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Andy Roddick's Acting Debut Was A Razzie-Worthy Performance
I'm sure athletes get asked to act in all sorts of TV shows, but it's up to them to actually agree to do the show. So it was that a 20-year-old Roddick found himself making his TV debut on a tennis-themed episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch back in 2002. It's important to note this happened years...

Minnesota Governor Says Football Players Get Arrested Because They're Basically Soldiers Returning From War
It's hard to understate how shocking Adrian Peterson's arrest is in Minnesota. It's just a misdemeanor, for a weird sole charge of resisting arrest, and the details of the incident sound less than damning, but this is AP. All Day. Purple Jesus. Peterson has never had even a whiff of trouble, and by ...

This Summer League Dunk Required Massive Balls
You may never hear the name Angelo Sharpless again, but for two seconds and an eternity on Youtube, he was The Man. He plays guard for DII Elizabeth City State University, and pulled off this massive throwdown at the Ben Wallace Pro-Am league in Richmond, Va. (Like all summer league dunk videos, i...

Dhani Jones Took An Incredible Photo Of A Storm Consuming New York
Did you know it's raining hard over here on the East Coast? You probably did, because your East Coast friends on Twitter won't shut up about it. But when you've got a picture this good, it's okay to share....

Seven Times As Many People Watched A Rambo Movie in Spanish As Watched Major League Lacrosse. Sports TV Ratings, In Context.
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using a telev...

Matt Barkley Says He Would Have Been Drafted Before Robert Griffin III
Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: Barkley says he goes second, after Luck—but before RG3....

Will Clark Saved The Giants, And I Missed It
The Hall of Nearly Great hits web shelves today, and it's a bargain at $12. It has 42 terrific writers—heavyweights such as Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski, and Deadspin folks, too: Owen Good and Will Leitch—with essays on the nearly great players they love. You can read about Brad Radke, Andy Messersmi...

Sure, God Made The Universe. But Can He Coach An American Marathoner To Olympic Gold?
March 29 was a busy day for Ryan Hall, the fastest American marathoner ever. He was 137 days and roughly 2,100 miles of road training away from representing the country in the London Olympics. He had to be up early for drug testing....

Here Is The Inevitable Photo Of Pedobear Posing Alongside The Joe Paterno Statue
The attached photo was snapped and sent into us by an anonymous tipster. Yes, that is a person in a Pedobear costume standing mockingly next to the Paterno statue. We present it to you without further comment, although we are rather impressed with the lighting....

Bruce Wanes. <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>, Reviewed.
1. The first two Batman films from director Christopher Nolan were so transcendent, so ambitious and challenging and grand, that The Dark Knight Rises feels like more of a disappointment than it should. The first two movies, especially The Dark Knight, were miracles, an impossible combination of uni...

Jerry Sandusky Scandal Reminds Columnist Of That Time He And The Rest Of His Nebraska Town "Sorta Did A JoePa," Too
This handsome stalk of corn is a guy named Les Mann, longtime columnist for the Daily News in Norfolk, a town of 24,000 in northeast Nebraska. He's been following this Penn State scandal pretty closely, and now he has something to get off his chest. His story begins with a phone call from some "twer...

In Desperate Bid To Be Down With The Youngs, <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Uses Instagram Photos In This Week's Issue
Oh boy. We've seen this before. Magazines are a bit of a crossroads, so in order to either (a) appeal to a younger audience or (b) to try to "engage social media," or whatever jargon-laden or ham-fisted way they want to describe it, they do little experiments....

Some Odd Pro-Joe "Vandalism" At The Paterno Statue
On Thursday, the release day of the Freeh Report, some Penn Staters gathered and left tokens at the Joe Paterno statue. One of them was the most levelheaded commentary we've yet seen—a note reading "Remember: He was a Man. Not a God!!" (You can see the original at Onward State.)...

Bristolmetrics: Joe Paterno Rescues ESPN From The Most Boring Week In Sports
When last we met, ESPN spent a bunch of time outside the Big Four sports, Euro 2012 got wall-to-wall coverage, and we all found out that the Sunday edition of SportsCenter is the one to watch (if you have to). What would this week bring?...

Reds Analyst Chris Welsh Ransacked Don Cherry's Wardrobe
If there's anything a sports commentator can do to prove he (or she) is grounded and sane, it's to wear a ridiculous outfit. After all, it works for Craig Sager and Don Cherry. So here's Fox Sports Ohio Reds analyst Chris Welsh sprucing up his usual outfit with a colorful number we're not quite sur...

Pete Rose Gets His Own Reality Show, Promises It Won't Be "Classless"
For anyone who doesn't actually remember seeing Pete Rose play or what his star was like before he completely threw it away by gambling on baseball, all they're going to remember of him was that he was some guy who autographed baseballs with weird inscriptions, got caught using a corked bat 25 years...

Porn Star (And Official Gronk Friend) Bibi Jones Emotionally Announces Her Retirement
Two days ago, we learned that the Patriots were requesting that all things Gronktastic kindly come down a notch or 10. Now, we get word that 20-year-old porn star Bibi Jones, made famous by her now-infamous midseason pose with the Gronk himself last October, is bidding a tearful and emotional good...

Report: Penn State President Passed On Sweeping Reforms In 2004
The entire Penn State/Jerry Sandusky scandal is sickening in every way, but any time phrases like "could have prevented" get thrown around makes the whole thing especially horrifying, and ESPN's Don Van Natta Jr. has uncovered one of those very stories, dropping a bombshell tonight that in 2004, the...

Bernie Williams Was Selling Some Cupcakes In Our Neighborhood, So We Stopped By And Said Hello
We got word earlier today that five-time All-Star Bernie Williams was making a charity appearance at Georgetown Cupcakes on Mercer Street here in SoHo and immediately hopped into action. I set out with my fellow intern Isaac to see if we could meet Bernie and purchase some delicious confections. Th...

Whoa, We're Halfway There: The Grierson & Leitch Top 12 Movies Of The First Half of 2012
Shockingly, we are more than halfway through 2012. (It's a backloaded year: Olympics, election, total global catastrophe—all stacked up from late July on.) As always, the best, most "prestigious" movies won't be released until November or December, because the people who vote on the Oscars are senil...