we Page 473 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Here's Patriots Owner Bob Kraft Helping His Girlfriend With Some Kind Of Weird Audition
Well, this isn’t something we ever thought we’d see. Here’s 32-year-old occasional actress Ricki Noel Lander, better known around Boston as the close “pal” of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and she appears to auditioning for the role of “Mary Elena” in something that requires her to be in a bikini....

Throwing A Baseball At 90 Percent Speed Of Light Would Kill Thousands
The artistically inclined folks over at XKCD (authors of one of my favorite web comics ever) devoted one of their What If? segments today to the logically insane yet weirdly interesting scenario of what would happen if someone pitched a baseball at 90 percent the speed of light. Using actual science...

Steve Zakuani Returns To Action 15 Months After Gruesome Injury, Embraces The Man Who Pulverized His Leg
Sounders winger Steve Zakuani wondered if he'd ever play soccer again in the months after a brutal sliding tackle from Colorado midfielder Brian Mullan in April 2011 snapped both lower bones in his right leg. (Here's video of that incident, for those of you with strong and empty stomachs.) More t...

Did An ESPN Anchor Need To Apologize For An Astros "Trailer Park Day" Joke?
Car seats are used to safely secure children inside of automobiles. They are not baseball gloves and should not be used for such a purpose. When SportsCenter showed the highlight of a Houston Astros fan attempting to utilize such a device for exactly that, an exasperated Bram Weinstein asked, "Is ...

Fans, Players, And Broadcasters Alike Freaked Out When Lightning Struck Rangers Ballpark In Arlington
Mother Nature dropped by Rangers Ballpark unannounced last evening, unleashing a thunderclap at the Rangers-Twins game that evacuated the bowels of all in attendance. Twins outfielder Denard Span claimed "That's the loudest noise I've ever heard. I thought Jesus was comin!" on his Twitter account, ...

Umpire Sam Holbrook Tossed Zack Greinke After Just Four Pitches Last Night
On the off chance you thought a new day had dawned, here's some bad news: umpires are still assholes sometimes....

Portland Man Running For Mayor, Punching Pick-Up Basketball Opponents In The Balls
I should clear something up. Democrat Jefferson Smith (pictured, right)* has denied punching any pick-up basketball opponent in the balls. His opponent yelled "You just punched me in the balls!" and Smith replied "I punched you in the thigh, not the balls." So, in the interest of fair and balanced c...

Associated Press: Oklahoma City Thunder Sign Brian Westbrook And The Guy From <em>27 Dresses</em>, Serge Ibaka Excited To Play Them In Olympics
Oklahoma City Thunder power forward Serge Ibaka will be playing for the Spanish national team at this year's summer Olympics. Today, the Associated Press published a relatively mundane story about Ibaka's belief that his Spanish team has the talent to compete with the U.S. team....

Tom Cruise Vs. Werner Herzog And Adventures In Perilous White People Tourism: It's Time For Trailer Hitch
The summer movie world is in a bit of a lull right now: Spider-Man showed up in time for July 4, Savages sneaked in just under the "Blake Lively Being Double Teamed-Themed Festivus Day" holiday wire and now everyone's slowing their roll for a couple of weeks until The Dark Knight Rises opens. Which ...

This Is A Really Unfortunate Trading Card
You know those game-worn jersey trading cards, with a swatch of cloth cut from a player's uniform? They have those for pro wrestling too. Usually not sweaty spandex, thankfully. Like this 2001 Chris Jericho "event-worn t-shit" insert, with a couple square inches taken from precisely the wrong spot o...

The 76ers Will Release Elton Brand, Claim First Place In The "Saddest Offseason Maneuver" Rankings
Yesterday, we asked you to join us in a discussion on what NBA offseason move has been the saddest. At the time, Rashard Lewis being traded for Emeka Okafor and Trevor Ariza held the top spot in the Sadness Rankings, but that was quickly surpassed by the Knicks signing Jason Kidd....

A Rich History Of Games Played Without An Audience
The mid-Atlantic storms last weekend weren't severe enough to derail the AT&T National, but they were enough to keep fans away. All of 'em, actually, per the tournament's decree. So Stefan Fatsis, on this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, went looking for other great moments ...

Court-Ordered Community Service With Big Van Vader: 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 wrestlers past or present, e-mail us, subject line "Virgilbag."...

Better Know An Umpire: Joe West
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year. (All cumulative statistics are through the 2011 season, unless otherwise stated.)...

Better Know An Umpire: Hunter Wendelstedt
Welcome to Better Know An Umpire, an effort to educate ourselves on the human elements who have ultimate decision-making power over some 2,500 Major League Baseball games a year. (All cumulative statistics are through the 2011 season, unless otherwise stated.)...

The Time I Got Stool Softener For My Ear Because My Earwax Was Stabbing My Brain, And Other Poop Stories
Hello, little lambs. It's me, some lady! You might remember me from yelling about vagina over at Jezebel, or from that time one year ago when Drew went on vacation and I wrote a weird Funbag about banana phones and jism. Can you believe it's been an entire year? ME NEITHER. But now Drew has up and l...

Who Are Golf's "Invisible Man" Guys?
A bizarre scene is unfolding at today's third round action at the AT&T National. After violent storms uprooted several trees (including a 75 foot tree falling across the fairway on 14) and delayed play, the course has been overrun by thousands of "Invisible Man" guys....

Didn't We Just Do This? <em>The Amazing Spider-Man</em>, Reviewed.
1. The Amazing Spider-Man is less a reboot than a recital. It's professionally made and competent and sincere and well-acted, but it never quite overcomes the nagging sense that there's no reason for it to exist. Well, actually, there is a reason: Sony, to keep the rights to the character, needed to...

Is <em>USA Today</em>'s Veteran Gambling Guy Buying Twitter Followers?
Remember our old friend Sarah Phillips, the internet huckster and former ESPN columnist? One of her many tricks, we learned, was to buy followers on Twitter—a new scheme for a new era. The more followers you have, the more influence you can claim to have. In a monetized social-media landscape, the T...

Why Bernard James Should Be Your New Favorite NBA Player
The first round of the 2012 NBA Draft was a surprisingly dramatic affair, with one NBA scout equating most all pre-draft analysis to "blowing smoke up each other's asses for weeks." But the best story, arguably, came near beginning of the second round when Florida State center Bernard James was se...