The FBI was tapping my telephone-o
I never live alone
I never walk alone
My posse’s always ready
And they’re waiting in my zone-o.

October 26, 1997 – Charles Barkley is up inna club with a bottle-a bub and getting his mack on with a tableful of ho’s at Phineas Phoggs, a disco in Orlando. It’s round about closing time and holms is feeling NICE.

Then some punk throws a cup of ice on him. Just out of the blue, for no good reason, WHAM… ice.

So Charles defenestrates the motherfucker, which was well within his rights given the circumstances. Throws him through a plate glass window, which, of course, Charles planned to compensate the establishment for three times over. So, no problem, right?

Predictably, the police did not see it that way and arrested his ass.

Outside as the cops were cuffing The Round Mound, he continued to explain himself to Mr. Ice Thrower, who had now been renamed Mr Pavement Sucker. “You don’t respect me?” he said. “Fine, I hope you’re seriously hurt. For all I care you can lay there and die.” Asked later if he regretted his actions, Charles replied, “I regret that we weren’t on a higher floor.”

So there you go, a lesson from history. It’s like an Aesop’s fable really. And the moral is… bloody obvious.

The Carp-enator flirted with one last night, but evidently, to throw a World Series complete-game shutout in the new millennium, you have to be facing the Yankees.

The only two blank jobs since 2000 came at the expense of the Bombers – Randy Johnson for the D-Backs in game two of the 2001 Series (3 hits, 11 k’s) and of course Josh Beckett in game 6 of the 2003 Series (5 hits, 9 k’s), one of the great Series closeouts ever.

Both Beckett and Johnson won the Series MVP awards, although RJ shared it with mound-mate Curt Schilling. Which brings me to a painful side note – prior to Johnson, Schilling was the author of the last CGS in a World Series, but it wasn’t as a D-Back. 1993, motherfucking game five. Bow your heads in silence…

October 25, 1990 , Evander Holyfield doesn’t get the big payday, but does get the belts, knocking out a listless Buster Douglas to take the unified title that eight months beforehand Douglas had taken from Mike Tyson.

After the big Tyson upset, Buster treated himself to many a peanut buster parfait and precious little training. He came into the Holyfield fight bloated and soft, weighing close to 250 pounds. Evander, who for the past year had been anticipating a stratospheric superfight with Tyson for the heavyweight crown, was instead faced with just the shell of the man who had knocked Iron Mike on his ass. It was easy work for the Real Deal, a third-round KO.

From there, the trajectories of the two careers parted mightily. Buster retired to a life of fried food and indolence, blowing up to 300 pounds and nearly dying in a diabetic coma before getting himself together and attempting a comeback. Evander meanwhile became arguably the most dominant heavyweight of the decade, giving us a slew of epic performances , the Foreman fight, the Bowe trilogy, both Tyson fights, and then his two bouts with Lennox Lewis, after which, if the world were a perfect place, his career would have ended.

I watched the Floyd/Gatti and then the Baldomir/Gatti fights back-to-back on HBO last night and I must say it was an eye-opener. Neither fight was exactly as I remembered it, and the hard evidence has dampened my enthusiasm for Floyd/Baldomir quite a bit.

1. Floyd/Gatti , Jesus. It’s a horse-whipping. It’s a man fighting the heavy bag. It’s a man fighting a retarded puppy. I remembered Gatti being utterly humiliated, and in fact, it’s worse than that. The fact that after such a beating Arturo ever ventured back into the ring really says something about the man. But I’m not sure what.

2. Baldomir/Gatti , This was nowhere near the whupping I remembered it being. At the time I think was surprised that Baldomir won the fight so convincingly, and in my mind that translated into utter dominance. It was actually a very competitive fight right until the last, with none other than Manny Steward saying early in the ninth, “Arturo can still win this fight.” Gatti took a lot of punishment, but then so did Tata. If Arturo had boxed a little more, he could have won and saved himself a lot of pain. It was probably a curse for him that the fight was in A.C.

I wish someone would show the Zab fights back-to-back, because I think Baldomir was actually more impressive over Zab than Floyd was. But still, I doubt it would change my mind at this point. Gatti was the FASTER fighter in his bout with Baldomir. Think about that. I doubt Carlos will lay a clean punch on Floyd all night. Meanwhile, he will eat countless combinations. The only thing Tata has going for him is that head of his, which seems to made of solid granite. Then again, a couple hundred of Floyd’s one-two-uppercut’s could probably knock out a Rodin. I say TKO in the 8th, and not much to enjoy before that unless you’re a sadist.

The world’s first and oldest football club, Sheffield F.C., was formed on this day 149 years ago, October 24, 1857. It was the brainchild of two keen cricket lovers, William Prest and Nathaniel Crestwick (no, I did not randomly take those names from a Dickens novel). They were just looking to keep fit during the winter and thought a football club would turn the trick nicely.

The first order of business for the fledgling club was to elect a secretary and captain. It was decided that Creswick would occupy both of these offices, which must have cheesed ole Will Prest not a little bit. Headquarters were established in a potting shed. I imagine their meetings to have been like the 19th century British edition of Fat Albert.

The club was responsible for drawing up the distinctive Sheffield Rules, which do not penalize offsides or excessive pushing and award a free kick to any player who catches the ball, which sounds to us like a bloody good bit of rough actually.

Still going strong today, Sheffield F.C. plays in the Northern Counties East League, just a notch in the football hierarchy below the much-esteemed Northern Premier League. Or, to put it another way, they play in a glorified t-shirt league for grown men and their mommies drive them to games on Saturday afternoons.

But look, it’s a sodding old club innit and yeah cheers.

Having taken a hard line on steroids (MUCH more of a hard line in track and field than in baseball, but whatever) I know that this makes me a hypocrite, but I just don’t give that much of a shit about pitchers doctoring balls on the mound. I know it’s cheating, and cheating is cheating, but when I think of pitchers doctoring the ball, I immediately think of Gaylord Perry in the old Padres uniform, and I just start laughing. Combine that with the fact that suddenly, in one of the most remarkable career salvations I’ve literally EVER seen, Kenny Rogers seems like the coolest motherfucker on earth, and his little pine-tar-on-the-hand (or as he calls it ‘dirt”) incident last night just makes me dig him more. He’s a cheater, he’s a greaser… he’s a gambler.

With that in mind, here’s the No Mas list of baseball’s all-time greatest Ball Doctors, in descending order:

10. Nels Potter , On July 20, 1944, pitching for the Browns against the Yankees, he became the first pitcher ever to earn himself a suspension from baseball for throwing the spitter. The umpire warned him about wetting his fingers. He did it anyway. Damn the torpedos. He got tossed and hit with a ten-game suspension.

9. Lew Burdette , Never admitted, but was widely known to have thrown one of the greatest spitters of all time. He would say to anyone who brought it up, ‘no, I never throw a spitter, but since you brought it up let me show you how to throw one.”

8. Brian Moehler , Caught with sandpaper taped to his thumb while pitching for the Devil Rays in 1999. Claimed it was dirt. What shall now be known as The Kenny Rogers Defense.

7. Kevin Gross , August 10, 1987, a day before the teenage Large’s 17th birthday, and Large and Large’s mom are at the Vet for a Phils-Cubs showdown. Kevin Gross on the mound for the Fightins. Around the fourth inning, the ump walks out to the mound and says something to Gross, and Gross responds by throwing his hands out as if to say, ‘who, me?” When he does that, he also throws something onto the infield grass. It’s so obvious that even up in the 300 level, my mom and I are saying, ‘what did he just throw on the grass?” It was a move worthy of some cranked-out hick on Cops trying to ditch his meth stash. In this case, the stash was sandpaper, and K. Gross rode the pines for a ten-day stint.

6. Don Sutton , Suspended ten games in 1978 for ball-defacement. A known sandpaper artist. Once left a note in his glove for umpires , ‘you’re getting warm but it’s not here.”

5. Rick Honeycutt , This is a good one. He taped a thumbtack to his finger to cut the ball while pitching for the Mariners against the Royals in 1980. Willie Wilson saw the tack from second base and alerted umpires. Meanwhile, Honeycutt, who later claimed he didn’t even know what to do with the tack in the first place, had managed to use it primarily to accidentally cut open his forehead while wiping away sweat. Gaylord Perry, he weren’t. He got a ten-game vacation and a fine.

4. Preacher Roe , Everybody knew that wily Brooklyn Bum Preacher Roe threw a wicked spitball, and after he retired, he came clean about it in a 1955 SI article titled, ‘The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.”

3. Whitey Ford , Whitey was known to cut the ball with his wedding ring, which seems like a perfectly good use for an otherwise useless piece of jewelry. He also loved to doctor the ball with mud, and a substance he called gunk, which was equal parts resin, turpentine and baby oil, and which Yogi Berra once legendarily mistook for deodorant.

2. Joe Niekro , Second only to The (Gay)Lord as the game’s most notorious ball doctor. When he was caught with an emery board AND a piece of sandpaper on the mound in a 1987 game, he claimed that as a knuckleballer he needed the emery board to keep his nails filed, and that he used the sandpaper for small blisters. He was awarded a ten-game bench sentence to better pursue his manacurial vigilance.

1. Gaylord Perry , The Thrilla, the Killa, the King of Them All. Perry is proof that no one really cares about ball-doctoring, because he never even pretended that he didn’t throw a spitter, and holms is in the Hall anyway. He was known as Gaylord the Greaser, he approached Vaseline about an endorsement deal, and he titled his autobiography ‘Me and the Spitter.” Over the years he was searched countless times on the mound but never nailed for ball-doctoring until his 20th season, 1982, when he was ejected while on the mound for the Mariners. He was one of the truly great characters of the game, the first pitcher ever to win the Cy Young award in both leagues, and one funny, and funny-looking, son-of-a-bitch. Look at him, the freakin James Bond of slippery baseballs. God bless the Gaylord, a true No Mas Hall-of-Famer.

Yo check it, this ain’t no disco. Members of the motley crew below were all born today, and the first one to name them all wins No Mas merch. And look, obviously with the help of the internet, this is a doable task. But yo, without it? How many do you get? Right here I’m willing to wager that off the top of his head, I-berg only gets one. Myself I would get five, but that is because I am from Philly and I have covered both women’s soccer and golf extensively (yes, yes, that’s a clue). And hey, Drew, wait until late in the day to clean up, say around 6:30 or so. Let’s see if we can get some other superstar up in here. Leave your entries as a comment. And may the most zardly sports zard prevail.

Fans booed Mike Tyson and Corey Sanders in their glorified sparring session on Friday night in Youngstown, Ohio. It was the first installment of “The Mike Tyson World Tour,” the latest scheme for The Baddest Spendthrift on the Planet to try and make some money to give to the IRS.

Of course, I didn’t witness the affair, but the descriptions and the photos make it look as embrassing as one would imagine – the former champ sucking wind, Sanders fatter than James Toney, both of them wearing t-shirts to cover their flab. It can’t have been a pretty sight, and yet I wonder… did anyone think it was going to be? Did anyone think it was going to be anything other than exactly what it is?

Back in the golden era of boxing, fans would fork over dough just to see their heroes in the flesh, to see them hit the heavy bag or skip rope or, in the days of Dempsey and Johnson and Jeffries, just to see them say some stupid shit in a vaudeville theater. This Tyson tour reminds me of that in a way. For whatever reason you care to name, Tyson is the last heavyweight who entirely captivated the imagination of the audience. Despite the fact that he is now pathetic and fat and just a living tragedy with a tattoo on his face, people still want to see him in a pair of boxing gloves.

That’s fine, almost reassuring. For me, it hearkens back to another age, when a great boxer held a power over the public that stretched far beyond the limits of his prowess in the ring. But look, if you go to see the Tyson Tour, remember – you’re paying to see vaudeville and not sport, so don’t boo when that’s what you get. You don’t boo at Burger King when they hand you fast food, do you?

Four of the NBA’s 50 greatest players made their professional debuts on October 22nd in history. Starting with the most recent – Robert Parish with the Warriors in 1976, Lenny Wilkens with the St. Louis Hawks in 1960 (I looked long and hard for a picture of Lenny in a Hawks jersey – if you have one, please send it along), Elgin Baylor with the Lakers in 1958, and Sam Jones with the Celtics in 1957. Give that squad a power forward and oh shit you’d have a starting five.