An unusual path to the NFL

I remember a running back for the Denver Broncos a few years back had a similarly strange path to being in the National Football League, but I can't remember his name.

But I'd say that is one of the only, if not the only, people with a similar story as Ahmard Hall, the fullback for the Tennessee Titans:

A fourth-year NFL veteran, Hall, 30, served four years in the Marines, with tours of duty as a sergeant in Kosovo and Afghanistan, before resuming his football career as a walk-on at Texas in 2004. He secured a spot on the Longhorns' roster by writing a letter to Mack Brown, and the Texas head coach was so impressed by the impassioned missive that he waived a school rule stipulating that walk-on candidates had to have played organized football within the past 24 months. Hall signed with the Titans as a free agent after no team selected him in the 2006 supplemental draft.

Afghanistan war veteran, turned Texas Longhorn, turned undrafted player, turned NFL regular. Not exactly the same career path as Peyton Manning.

The story of Todd Walker

I think that I have read at least fifty stories just like this one, and they never get old. Someone stepping up and doing something to selflessly help others through sports.

This time, it is 47-year old Todd Walker from Oakland, California. From ESPN:

He told Jaee Logan's family he was going to make a difference. He was going to use football as a teaching tool to save these kids. He started the Junior Bears program along with head coach Herbert Miller, and they set out to teach football and life.

And so, for the past several years, with the permission of the parents, Walker has taken his players on a field trip to the funeral home. He teaches the reality and finality of death to kids who are desensitized by television and video games and the streets outside their homes.

Manny Pacquiao's strange entourage

Manny Pacquiao is arguably the best boxer in the world, perhaps on his way to becoming one of the greatest of all time. If he wins in a welterweight title bout tonight against Miguel Cotto, he will be the first boxer to win championships in seven different weight classes.

Yet, the most interesting thing that I have read about him so far is this piece from the New York Times. It describes Pacquiao and his entourage. They have some... strange arrangements.

“They’re all competing to be golden boy for the day,” said Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer. “Clean his pool. Take his shoes off. They will do anything for Manny Pacquiao.”

Roach paused, unable to suppress his laughter.

“I’m telling you,” he continued, “the funniest thing is, whoever is on the best terms with Manny at that moment sleeps closest to him, at the foot of his bed.”

Tony Kornheiser, on Pardon the Interruption yesterday, said that Pacquiao's entourage makes Vinny Chase's entourage on the HBO show... um, Entourage, look like nothing.

Jemele Hill ignores that everyone hated Isiah Thomas

Jemele Hill, writing about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird's book, mentions that Johnson led the charge to keep Isiah Thomas off the 1992 Olympic basketball team (everyone knows them as the Dream Team). Yet, she ignores one salient fact in this: No one like Thomas.

Thomas played on one of the most unlikeable teams ever (the "Bad Boys") and almost no player on any other team liked him.

CNBC writer: American who won NYC marathon not American enough

Umm... what the hell.

From CNBC:

It's a stunning headline: American Wins Men's NYC Marathon For First Time Since '82.

Unfortunately, it's not as good as it sounds.

Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he's not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

Yeah, he's only "technically" an American because he's only "technically" been a citizen since 1998.

Kefleighi was born in Eritrea.

As with CBS late night talk show host, Craig Fergusion, he is American on Purpose.

Stephon Marbury is weird #NBA

According to ESPN, Marbury was kicked out of his courtside seats at a New York Knicks game when they found out that he didn't have tickets for the seats he was sitting in.

But Marbury had even more bizarre behavior at Madison Square Garden:

Adding to the bizarre scene, Marbury pulled out a video camera shortly after arriving and began shooting the live action, at one point standing up -- thereby blocking the view of the fans behind him -- while play was ongoing.

Marbury is... just weird.

Why the NY Times doesn't cover boxing

An interesting exchange of e-mails between HBO's Larry Merchant and Tom Jolly, the sports editor for the New York Times, on why the New York Times rarely, if ever, covers boxing.

I have to say, though, some of the excuses are good:

Most bouts are on Saturday night and our final edition for the national edition goes to press at 11 p.m. The final local edition closes at 12:30. The most noteworthy of the fights were included in briefs for those last papers, and all of the results appeared in our wire feed on nytimes.com/sports.

And some are bad:

We’re willing to [report on a Saturday match on Monday] if it’s a bout that transcends the core fan base, but there haven’t been many such fights since Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield passed their prime.

Manny Pacquiao anyone?

An interesting read nevertheless.

So Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog #NFL

Jets QB Mark Sanchez ate a hot dog on the end of the bench during a 38-0 blowout over the Raiders on Sunday. And, somehow, this exploded into a mini controversy, with the folks on Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn and various talk radio stations lambasting Sanchez for the sin.

Now, ESPN is reporting, Sanchez donated 500 hot dogs and 500 hamburgers to a local homeless shelter. Which is never a bad idea.

But, seriously? People care about this?

*sigh*

Tennis great Agassi used meth

Andre Agassi, considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, also used meth according to an upcoming autobiography.

"Those excerpts contain revelations about Andre's use of crystal meth when he was a tennis player," said Paul Bogaards, director of media relations at Knopf, a division of Random House.

As an aside, the use of meth has been linked to hair loss.

Tip o' the hat to @dcm.

Why do people care about Brett Favre?

The New Yorker tries to dig into this maddening phenomenon.

My two cents?

It's like a bad habit. You know that it's bad for you. You know that nothing good is coming from it, but you just can't help yourself.

Case in point: More people watched his Monday Night Football game between his new team (the Minnesota Vikings) and the team that he was on seemingly forever (the Green Bay Packers) than any other cable program -- ever.

It was the highest rated show of the week, despite being on a cable network (albeit a cable network that is on every single basic cable package in the country).

Why? Two words: Brett Favre.

Why do we care so much about Favre? Maybe we'll never know -- but for as long as he puts on that helmet (for whichever team it is), we'll still be watching.

Strip hockey

From ESPN:

In an effort to inspire more team unity, Lightning players competed in a post-practice game of strip shootout, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

Players faced off in a series of shootouts, forced to lose a piece of equipment every time their attempt was thwarted.

Those wacky Canadians (I just assume a good percentage of the team is Canadian).

Inside the wacky world of the kickball world championships

From ESPN's Jemele Hill:

To say this ain't fifth-grade kickball is like saying Malcolm Gladwell is just a little bit smart. At your average rec league tournament, you do not see a team from New Mexico playing in green wigs as if they're straight out of a Dr. Seuss book or doing a team dance that's a cross between the Macarena and the stanky leg. You do not see men big enough to have played college football wearing bumblebee costumes (complete with antennae and wings) and feather boas. You do not hear the national anthem sung by a man who makes William Hung sound like Luther Vandross. You don't have a couple getting married in their kickball uniforms after their team -- which has a name that can't be mentioned here -- was eliminated from the tournament.

I played in a kickball tournament in New Mexico a few years back -- we made it out of our group, but lost in the first elimination game. In that game, we had a player ejected and a near-fight -- not joking. Kickball is serious business.

Some ignorant KC Chiefs fans on Facebook

Further down the line, a voice of reason:

Wow. There are some ignorant rednecks subscribed to this feed. Look, face the fact that our country has an increasing Spanish speaking population. If it bothers you unsubscribe and stop making Kansas and Missouri look as intolerant and backwoods as the rest of the country already views us.

On Rush Limbaugh and why he can't buy the Rams

Rush Limbaugh is out of a bid to be a minority (irony!) owner in of the St. Louis Rams.

And over at The Corner at the National Review, Kathryn Lopez unveils this gem:

Rush Limbaugh is not an acceptable sports investor because of his politics. How else to interpret the state of a sports world where Keith Olbermann can be on Sunday Night Football and Rush Limbaugh's hard-earned money can't be spent as a partial owner of a team in a sport he loves?

First of all, it isn't his politics. The Center for Responsive Politics looked into where the political money from the National Football League (NFL) went to.

And many of the owners that made political donations were, well, conservative. Dean Spanos, the owner of the San Diego Chargers (I'm typing this from the San Diego airport, actually) was a bundler for John McCain.

Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, has given $199,000 to Republicans and $1,500 to Democrats.

Robert McNair, the owner of the Houston Texans, has given lots of money to Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, James Inhofe and Rudy Giuliani.

In other words, you can be conservative and be an owner; in fact, if you look at the percentages of money given to Republicans versus Democrats for most teams (the Rams, ironically, are one of the exceptions to this rule), Republicans got more money from NFL people than Democrats did.

As for the Keith Olbermann comment (he's the new bogeyman of the Right), did Lopez forget that he already had his chance to be an NFL commenter?

Limbaugh had to resign after this gem on ESPN's NFL Countdown pre-game show:

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well," Limbaugh said. "There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

McNabb, according to the Philadelphia Eagles website, "is the Eagles all time leader in pass attempts, completions, yards and TDs."

The previous three seasons, the Eagles had been to the playoffs three times and the conference finals twice in a row. In 2003, the year where Limbaugh made his idiotic statements, McNabb again led the Eagles to the conference finals. The next year, they made the Super Bowl.

In other words, not only was Limbaugh's "analysis" of McNabb wrong, it was just plain race-baiting for no reason.

So why can't Limbaugh be "partial owner of a team in a sport he loves" as Lopez asked?

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell put it best:

"I have said many times before that we are all held to a higher standard here," the commissioner continued. "I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about. I would not want to see those kind of comments from people who are in a responsible position within the NFL. No. Absolutely not."

In other words, Rush Limbaugh is not the sort of person the NFL wants to associate itself with. It's as simple as that.

Highlights from the USA - Honduras game

The United States of America vs Honduras game happened Saturday night, but odds are that you didn't see it. Why? It was on closed circuit TV only in the United States. Yeah, dumb.

But here are the highlights from the best game you never saw, unless you watched it on an internet stream.

Golf, Rugby new Olympic sports for 2016

So reports ESPN:

After more than a century on the sidelines, golf will return to the Olympics at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Rugby, last played in 1924, is coming back as well.

Both were reinstated for the 2016 and 2020 Games after a vote Friday by the International Olympic Committee. They are the first sports added since triathlon and taekwondo joined the program for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Yet baseball is no longer an Olympic sport.

Confessions of a MLB ball hawker

Crazy.

Hample is a pro. He carries a cap for the home team and the visitors (more on that shortly). He has a streak to maintain (at least one ball per game attended since 1993), a reputation to uphold (he's written a book about ball-snagging, which essentially makes him the Dan Brown of books about ball-snagging) and an ongoing competition to win (he's currently in first place in an online ball-snagging league, and yes, there actually is an online ball-snagging league).

I've been to a number of minor league baseball games and two major league baseball games in my life, and I've never really been close to snagging a ball. The closest I've come is when I was at batting practice before a San Diego Padres game in 1998.

It was a game where Mark McGwire hit a home run (I remember two home runs, but apparently he never hit two home runs in a game while in San Diego in his 70 home run season, so my memory must be mistaken) -- but it was in batting practice where McGwire hit a blast to left field that was directly at me -- but five rows too far beyond me.

That wasn't his gut

From ESPN's recap of the Los Angeles Dodgers' 3-2 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Divisional Series:

A sinking line drive sailed through the chilly evening air toward Matt Holliday. All he needed to do was make the catch and St. Louis would have a series-tying victory.

Instead, the ball smacked him in the gut and dropped to the grass -- and the Cardinals never recovered.

I was watching the game, and I can assure you that the ball didn't hit him in the gut, but a little bit more... sensitive area.

There's video at that link above.

Newly found Babe Ruth footage excites baseball afficianados

A cool story from the New York Times:

Babe Ruth has struck out looking. Displeased, he leans on his bat, right hand on his hip, and looks back at the umpire. He utters something that can only be imagined. Lou Gehrig, on deck, leans on his bat, too, as if he has seen this act before. Ruth finally shuffles away, head turned to the umpire, dragging his bat through the dirt.

The scene, along with eight seconds of footage never publicly seen of Ruth playing the outfield, was part of an 8-millimeter film found by a New Hampshire man in his grandfather’s home movie collection. It provides a rare look at Ruth, a showman even in defeat.

Cool stuff. Head over to that link to see the video.

Get pumped for 30 for 30

ESPN is doing something crazy for it's 30 year anniversary -- doing 30 sports documentaries about 30 sports stories in the past 30 years.

And if this doesn't get you pumped for it... then there's something wrong with you. The first one airs on Tuesday October 6,so set your DVRs.