Here is a video from earlier this year of the lovely Maria Sharapova winging a football in preparation for Israel in Fed Cup 2008. The Israelis must have been a formidable group (just in case you're interested). I don't follow tennis, but I watch enough football to know that one of the world's best tennis players has a better arm than Rex Grossman or Kyle Orton, and better hands than anybody listed on the Bears' depth chart at wide receiver.
Sure, that sounds like a knock on the current crop of "skill" players on the roster (and maybe it is). But the fact that a professional tennis player looks more comfortable throwing and catching a football than a group of guys who get paid to throw and catch a football ... well, let's just say 2008 probably won't be the year the Bears make it back to the Super Bowl. Luckily, the running game is shaping up nicely.
There's a good series of online videos called Interviews 50 Cents in which ordinary people sit down and have conversations about their lives. This installment features a player in the Independent Women's Football League, talking about what women's tackle football is like:
There are some moments of unintentional humor, such as the interview subject referring to a team as the D.C. Divas, only to have the interviewer mishear her and ask incredulously, "D.C. Beavers?" And there's the interview subject explaining how she sacked the opposing quarterback because, "I just pushed my way through the hole. I'm supposed to go through the A hole."
Snickering aside, though, I think it's great that there are organized leagues for women's football. The IWFL has a slate of 15 games Saturday. Might be worth checking out.
Our Hollywood stop ended on a fun note. Toward the end of the game someone noticed Terrell Owens outside our dugout. We spent five minutes debating if it was really him or a look-a-like, but then we saw him sign an autograph and we all got excited. He came onto the field after the game and a few of us bugged him for autographs and pictures. He was really nice and honored all our requests.
You can see the photographic evidence here. (I'm particularly fond of the Don Zimmer pic -- he's a good foot shorter than the two Olympic team members in the shot.)
As Tim MacMahon notes on the Cowboys Blog, Owens is "an equal opportunity sports enthusiast while relaxing in the Sunshine State." In addition to softball, he's also a big volleyball fan, apparently. The best part of the Page Six item is that Owens was allegedly "overheard discussing a modeling career for himself." It sounds like a bit much, but in a wholly believable, "yeah, I could see T.O. saying that" sorta way.
It turns out that Patriotgate isn't the only example of a team accused of stealing signs. The Chinese women's national soccer team is facing accusations of its own.
The day before their match with China, Denmark team officials found two men with video cameras sitting behind a two-way mirror in the hotel conference room where the team was about to hold a strategy meeting.
"It's like a spy movie," Danish team press officer Pia Schou Nielsen said Thursday. She said the men were Chinese, although Denmark coach Kenneth Heiner-Moller told reporters he did not know their nationalities.
Somehow I think this one is going to get a bit less attention in the media than the Bill Belichick scandal, mostly because I think the average American sports fan cares just a little bit more about the NFL than the Women's World Cup.
But while I find the "everybody does it" defense that some Patriots fans have offered rather unconvincing, it is interesting that we've learned just today that both women's soccer and Formula One have spying scandals of their own. I don't think everyone does it, but I think spying in sports is a lot more prevalent than I realized three days ago.
She's Holley Mangold, younger sister of Jets center Nick Mangold, and if you're not familiar with her story, here she is on the field and at home:
Mangold is, according to her coach, one of the team's strongest offensive line players. And as she prepares for her senior season at Alter, which made it to the state championship game last year, she has a few small-school college coaches interested in her services. I wouldn't want to line up against her.
Yesterday Deadspin brought you the news of April Fowlkes, an offensive lineman (err, not exactly an offensive lineman) for the Detroit Demolition of the Independent Women's Football League. Fowlkes made a citizen's arrest this week, using her 300-pound body to pin a thief against the car he tried to steal.
The best news in all this, though, is that the Detroit Demolition have an outstanding YouTube highlight video, with original music and everything:
About halfway through the video you can see Fowlkes, No. 70, throw a block. The Lions need to sign her.
"It's kind of hard for me as the mom - I'm with Cole probably 99.9 percent of the time - to open a magazine or read a newspaper article with Matt saying, Oh, I love being a dad. I love changing diapers. I love doing this. I'm like, Wait, what?' " said Cameron... "I'm doing all the work, but he gets all the credit for it."
[Leinart] "comes and goes whenever he wants," Cameron said.
"I don't want to sit here and bad-mouth his lifestyle, but it is hard because we are different people. He likes that Hollywood stuff and I don't like that and raising a kid together, you have to work together as parents, but we're so different," Cameron said.
"It's hard, but I have to raise Cole to be a strong, secure kid so he knows what's right and wrong, what's good and bad and what really matters in life, which isn't what's going on in Hollywood or who's dating who."
This is a personal matter between Cameron and Leinart -- except that Leinart chose to make it public by bragging about what a devoted father he is. If he was lying, he deserves public scorn. Skipping out on parenting responsibilities so he can hang out with Nick Lachey might make Leinart famous, but it shouldn't make him popular. Sorry, No Photos Hat tip: Sports by Brooks.
Serena Williams serves up some fast times with a tennis racket and some yellow felt, but can she get up to speed in a race car?
We'll find out tonight when she and 11 fellow celebrities dreaming of life in the fast lane join six NASCAR drivers in the new reality show, "Fast Cars & Superstars -- The Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race."
In tonight's first episode, Kurt Busch pushes NFL Hall of Famer John Elway to the limit in the cars.com car, Surfer Laird Hamilton confirms that nothing scares him and Williams screams her way to shattering her own personal challenge.
The show will explore the interaction of top young stock car drivers with stars from the world of sports, music and entertainment, featuring drama and competition on and off the race track. In each episode, viewers will watch celebrities train with a Gillette Young Guns driver.
"Fast Cars" culminates with a one-hour finale where the celebrities will be coached from the pits by their Gillette Young Guns instructors and compete against each other during a time-trial race.
The series will be hosted by ESPN anchor Kenny Mayne and co-hosted by former Cleveland Cavaliers center and current ESPN NASCAR analyst Brad Daugherty.
*Sigh*
Can't ESPN give Daugherty a job in a sport he knows?
I don't think anyone understands sexism in the world of sports better than New York Daily News columnist Lisa Olson. In 1990, when Olson was a 26-year-old reporter for the Boston Herald, three New England Patriots players sexually harassed her, making lewd comments and fondling their genitals inches from her face. When Olson went public about it, she received threatening phone calls and was called a "bitch" by then-Patriots owner Victor Kiam.
it's forced us to ask the hard questions, like what's on our iPods? Can 50 Cent stay? How about Eminem? Most important, what sort of slippery slope are we navigating when we attempt to censor offensive words rather than ignore them?
I think there are two salient points here. One is that question of why so many people who denounce Imus don't object to the same words being uttered in music or movies. I touched on that regarding Snoop Dogg yesterday.
The other is whether we're too quick to silence language that we'd be better off engaging in debate -- or simply ignoring. Did Al Sharpton really make the world a more tolerant place by getting Imus off the air? Maybe. But to paraphrase Thoreau, instead of studying how to make it worth CBS's while to silence Imus's offensive comments, Sharpton should have studied rather how to avoid the necessity of hearing them.
In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the status of Bears coach Lovie Smith and Colts coach Tony Dungy as the first black coaches to lead a team to the brink of an NFL title was frequently discussed. So now that we have another story at the intersection of race and sports, Smith and Dungy have been asked to weigh in.
Speaking about Don Imus calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos," Smith said,
"As a father, this incident bothers me in a profound way. We -- the black NFL head coaches -- can relate to the Rutgers women, just as we can relate to our own daughters. We need to pull together as a country and keep this kind of hurtful language out of the public discourse."
Dungy added,
"This incident has caused more pain to us than any other racially insensitive incident in our industry that I can remember. "As a country, we can do better than to have such demeaning comments on the airwaves. . . We need to move toward a more civil society built on respect, not degradation, built on thoughtfulness, not carelessness. We can do it if we put our minds to it."
I like what both men had to say, especially Dungy. However, I think Dungy could take a big step on the thoughtfulness front by reconsidering his thoughts about sexual orientation.
It turns out that 
Remember how Cardinals quarterback 
Serena Williams serves up some fast times with a tennis racket and some yellow felt, but can she get up to speed in a race car?
I don't think anyone understands sexism in the world of sports better than New York Daily News columnist Lisa Olson. In 1990, when Olson was a 26-year-old reporter for the Boston Herald, three New England Patriots players sexually harassed her, making lewd comments and fondling their genitals inches from her face. When Olson went public about it, she received threatening phone calls and was called a "bitch" by then-Patriots owner Victor Kiam. 
In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the status of Bears coach Lovie Smith and Colts coach Tony Dungy as the first black coaches to lead a team to the brink of an NFL title was frequently discussed. So now that we have another story at the intersection of race and sports, 
