ill Page 637 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Bills Fan's Cock 'N' Balls Make The Newspaper (SFWish)
Check out junior in the Posluszny jersey. Now check out his crotch, you pervert. At least it's Buffalo, so he can always have the "it was cold" excuse....

Shaq Has Not Yet Tweeted About Alleged Involvement In Kidnap/Robbery/Sex Tape Case
TMZ reports that recent retiree and otherwise loveable human Shaq may be involved in a case that has seven Crips gang members "charged with robbery, kidnapping and other crimes" in their attempt to secure a tape that (allegedly) contains security footage of then-married Shaq having sex with other wo...

Serena's Comeback Tally: One Win, One Smashed Racket, And Almost A Broken Nail
Serena Williams knocked off Tsvetana Pironkova in the first round at the Eastbourne Tennis Tournament today, 1-6, 6-3, 6-4. There were two very good signs in the scandal-stirrer's first return to professional tennis in over a year: the first was that she won, despite a rough first set, and the sec...

Elaine's Was A Dump, Or The Grantland Fallacy
ESPN's Professional Southerner Wright Thompson used his space in Grantland to write a loving meditation on Elaine's, the now-defunct bad New York restaurant mainly known to people under 45 as a Billy Joel lyric. This made Thompson at least the third member of his little circle of sportswriting buddi...

Your Mavs/Heat Game Six Open Thread
Nobody has the flu tonight. So we're told. Dallas leads 3-2 going on the road, just like the world champion 2010 Celtics. This ain't over, not yet, at least. Bienvenido a Miami....

Watch Man U's Gary Neville Throw A Truly Terrible First Pitch At A White Sox Game
Gary Neville, who played right back for England and Manchester United for perhaps forever, before retiring this year, was in Chicago on Thursday night to throw out the first pitch before the White Sox-A's game. Man U and the Chicago Fire will be playing a friendly shortly. He and his 400 caps are ...

Bill Plaschke Tries Bill Simmons On For Size
With today's game six preview column, Plaschke has entered the pantheon of writers who write like Bill Simmons....

Joe Buck Is Not Announcing Phillies Game Today, But The Fans Still Hate Him
This comes via Hickey (the photographer is @roscocosmopeco), your usual weekend landlord, whose Twitter pal is rocking this shirt at today's Cubs-Phillies affair. The only problem is that Kenny Albert, not Buck, is announcing the national game for Fox....

And This Is Why We Need Grantland
If you haven't yet read Charlie Pierce's Grantland essay about his time at The National, you should, and not just because it's Pierce hanging out in Bill Simmons's house, and not just because it's the best appreciation of the much-appreciated National you'll find. You should read it because it's ess...

How An MLB Umpire Helped This Kalamazoo Wiffleball Team Win Its Game
The Kalamazoo Wiffle League is the No. 1 competitive wiffle league in the nation, one of its players tells me. This becomes apparent when you see Steve Everett's leaping catch below, and even more so when you see the lengths the wifflers went to verify the call. At stake were the tying runs in the l...

Bill Simmons, Number One Bruins Fan
From the AP photo wire tonight. Here's your keepsake commemorative ESPN.com version:...

Please Take Ozzie Guillen's Belt And Razor Away From Him
You might as well take his BlackBerry too. Because the White Sox's eccentric manager is having some kind of existential meltdown today and figured he should share....

Now Detroit Also Wants To Hire Isiah Thomas
Yes, the story's from Chris Broussard, so we should take it with a Dead Sea's worth of salt, but it looks like things might get a whole lot worse for the poor folks of Detroit....

Pop Cultural Oddsmaker: What Will Be The First Column On Grantland?
The countdown clock says we're mere minutes away from launch of the most heralded website subsection named for a long-dead hagiographer since Salon's ill-fated ÆlfricOfEynsham.com. We couldn't be more excited, because they've gathered a lot of talented people, many of whom haven't yet had the proper...

BCS-Made Millionaire Defends The BCS, Doesn't Think Players Should Be Paid
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: Bill Hancock objectively thinks the BCS is the best system....

A Long List Of Sports Figures Who've Also Claimed Their Twitter Was Hacked
As soon as Rep. Anthony Weiner first acknowledged his roiling Twitter-bulge scandal with a desperate "I've been hacked" defense last week, we knew he was guilty. "I've been hacked" is the first refuge of a cock-Tweeter. Weiner isn't the first to mistakenly send a private Twitter flirtation to a rel...

Shaq Calls Dwight Howard Beef "All Marketing," Newspaper Wonders If Cop-Out Is Attempt At Marketing
The Orlando Sentinel has spent some time today getting to the bottom of that beef we all forgot ever existed because it centered around a nickname and involved the two NBA players most closely related to Dennis the Menace, and is thus more of a semi-competitive thumb war than anything resembling tru...

Even As A Cub Reporter, Bill Simmons Was Dropping Annoyingly Precious Pop Cultural References
Anyone who pays even passing attention to sports journalism is familiar with Bill Simmons's populist everybrah schtick. No need to dwell on how to write like an over-caffeinated 17-year-old. What's worth noting is that Simmons has always been writing that way. He's stayed true to himself. He was Th...

Only 2,752 Minutes Until Grantland Launches, Give Or Take
As you're no doubt aware from ESPN.com. We'll have more on this breaking countdown later....

West Virginia's Toxic Circus: The Boozer, The Lame Duck, And The Vengeful Coach's Wife
West Virginia's coaching situation is, to put it as mildly as we can, a total clusterfuck. Whoever in the athletics office thought it would be a good idea to hire Dana Holgorsen as head-coach-in-waiting, while still keeping current coach Bill Stewart around for another year, ought to find themselves...