ill Page 617 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Here's The AOL Column That Got Bill Simmons Hired By ESPN, In Which He Calls The ESPYs A "TV Holocaust"
ESPN's initial courtship of Bill Simmons has the air of an urban legend. Simmons wrote a column excoriating the bloated and self-congratulatory ESPY Awards, and that column was rapidly forwarded around Bristol, putting the Boston Sports Guy on ESPN's radar. Much like Aeschylus's lost plays, the ESPY...

Pat Burrell Is Retiring, But "The Machine" Just Might Live On
MLB Trade Rumors had it first, and noted rich guy Jon Heyman confirmed on Twitter: Pat Burrell is retiring. The thumping, lumbering outfielder posted a .253/.361/.472 line in 12 MLB seasons, most of them with the Phillies. He had ranked 25th among active players in home runs. He won two World Series...

The Prospects For Craig James's Senate Campaign Are Getting Even Worse
"He is by far one of the most hated men in West Texas." Now that's a catchy campaign slogan. [The Post Game]...

Lefty Driesell Is Mad Because Maryland Named Its Court After Gary Williams
Gary Williams retired after last season as the winningest coach in the history of Maryland basketball, a 22-year run that included a national title in 2002. The school has named its court at the Comcast Center after Williams, but not without an objection from Lefty Driesell, who coached the Terps f...

Oddibe McDowell's Water Bill Has An Additional Year-End Fee Of $90
We can't think what else the disproportionate $89.55 "miscellaneous" charge could be....

"Cundiff" Is Already Being Used As A Verb
Kansas Jayhawks fans adapted their free throw distraction techniques to fit current events, as Billy Cundiff's name appeared behind the basket during last night's tilt against Texas A&M....

Why The Giants Targeted A Player Prone To Concussions
The day after a conference championship game, there is an avalanche of coverage, usually sticking to the main storylines. But other than this New York Magazine story, it's odd that no one had made much of a fuss over two Giants saying they specifically targeted Kyle Williams because he had a history...

The Giants Went After Kyle Williams Because He Had A History Of Concussions
On NYMag.com, the splendid Ben Wallace-Wells takes a look at fumblin' Kyle Williams and the Giants' strategy. "They'd targeted Williams for extra violence because they knew he had suffered several concussions in the past, and they think it worked." [NYMag]...

Billy Cundiff Rushed His Kick Because Of An Error On The Gillette Stadium Scoreboard
We're doing a season-long NFL roundtable with our friends at Slate. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries....

"You Don't Have To Worry About Me Jumping Off A Ledge": An Interview With Billy Cundiff
We're doing a season-long NFL roundtable with our friends at Slate. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries....

Why We Scapegoat
Because Billy Cundiff exists, Ravens fans don't have to come to terms with the fact that one of the best rushing teams ceded the turf to one of the worst. Or that they could only turn three New England turnovers into six points. Or that their offensive line turned to soggy swiss cheese at the merest...

Tennis Players Bill Simmons Would Do: Another Classic From The Secret Sports Guy Vault
It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. After seeing last week's newly unearthed column from Simmons's AOL Digital City days, a reader sent along another Boston Sports Guy entry rescued from the dustbin of history. If you've got any old Simm...

What Went Wrong On Billy Cundiff’s Missed Kick?
We're doing a season-long NFL roundtable with our friends at Slate. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries....

This Is The Bill Walsh Coaching Tree On A Man's Ass
The ass you are looking at belongs to a 35 year-old intern for The Don Geronimo Show on 1140 The Fan out in Sacramento, California. Earlier in the week, the show posed the question "What would you do for NFC Championship game tickets?" Logically, the intern responded that he would get a tattoo of t...

Florida Law Requires Stadiums to Shelter Homeless On Off Nights; Not A Single One Has Complied
As is the case in most cities with professional franchises, the buildings that host Florida's professional sports teams have been built with the assistance of taxpayer contributions. It's played off as a symbiotic relationship (new stadium means new jobs, more revenue coming in, etc.) but most of t...

Don't Hire Bill Belichick: TV Network Heads Are Shockingly Stupid
The conventional wisdom is that Bill Belichick is the greatest football coach in the history of the world. On this point, conventional wisdom may be right. Who knows, or cares really, it's all so subjective. What is not subjective is that Bill Belichick is one of the greatest football coaches in th...

Ryan Miller: "Nope."
Yeah, it's late, but holy crap did you see the save Ryan Miller laid on Tanner Glass last night? Glass is all like "that's going in" and the Jets are like "yeah!" but Miller is like "oh hell no" and flings that thing out of there, presumably accompanied by a whip-crack sound effect, and Jason Pomi...

This Game-Winning Dunk Is The Best (And Maybe Only) Finish To A D-League Game You've Ever Seen
The Springfield Armor defeated the Maine Red Claws at the buzzer last night, thanks to an air ball and an athletic guard out of Wake Forest named L.D. Williams....

"The Fans Would Throw Little Tinfoils Of Hash At Me": A 1980 Interview With Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Baseball's Stoner Evangelist
The folks at The Golden Sombrero alerted us to this wonderful piece of baseball history: a 1980 High Times interview with pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee in which Lee holds forth on drugs, Bowie Kuhn, race, reincarnation, drugs, drug use, drug abuse, which drugs Expos fans threw to him in tribute, eatin...

The Sports Guy Before ESPN: A 2000 Bill Simmons Column Is Unearthed
It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. The formative years of one of the country's most successful sports writers are lost forever, all because AOL Digital City preserved nothing. But even then the "Boston Sports Guy" had fans devoted enoug...