January 31 - Birthday of Champions

No Mas TV Guide: 1/31

Knicks v. Bulls, 11/21/86
ESPN Classic, 5 p.m.
The early editions of the Jordan Bulls and the Ewing Knicks lock horns in Chicago in a game from 1986. Bill Cartwright's still a Knick, and Charles Oakley is still a Bull. And so is Philadelphia streetball legend, Eugene Banks.

UFC Fight Night Spike, 9 p.m.
Replay of last Thursday's card that featured two major upsets and a very strong early candidate for knockout of the year. The featured matches were Rashad Evans v. Sean Salmon and Spencer Fisher v. Hermes Franca. If you missed it, don't miss it again.

TIVO ALERT FOR TOMORROW MORNING
One Day in September
IFC, 8 a.m.
This Munich Massacre documentary is stylized within an inch of its life and wrought with a soundtrack straight off a high school gothdork's MySpace page. Nevertheless, there's meat on this bone.

Slap Shot
HBOc, 9:35 a.m.
Charlestown Chiefs, Reggie Dunlop, the Hanson bros, yeah cheers. Seen it a million times? No dice, Tonto. Watch it again.

Tank Johnson says gun arrest 'opened my eyes'

Dah, to what Tank? How many guns you had?

Tank Johnson says gun arrest 'opened my eyes' (ESPN.com)

Super Bowl of the Day - Riggins run left, Riggins run right

Super Bowl XVII was on this day 23 years ago, also referred to more commonly as The John Riggins Bowl. Ole Riggo ran roughshod over the Dolphins no-name no-defense defense and earned himself the MVP award (which he evidently gave to Sandra Day O'Connor after he shagged her), as the Skins beat the Fish 27-17.

I would just like to point out here that the Redskins were 3-point dogs in this game (just in case you were feeling nervous about betting on Lindsay Hohan in that Tyson fight - underdogs do come through sometimes on the big stage). Other than that, I have nothing to say about it. It was a Super Bowl that I remember being marginally more interesting than most, which is to say still not very interesting.

What I would like to comment on, however, is the entertainment. The game was played at the Rose Bowl, and an all-district band from L.A. was the musical act of the pre-game show (and no, that all-district band was not Van Halen). The halftime extravaganza was something called "KaleidoSUPERscope" that featured a local drill team. And get this, the national anthem was sung by Leslie Easterbrook. If you're wondering who that is, well, that's her lovely mugshot over there on the right. She, uh, was Lt. Callahan in the Police Academy movies. And that's about it.

I mean, all's I'm saying is... those were different times. A district marching band and a Hollywood q-lister to sing the national anthem? Where have you gone, 1983?

In conclusion, The A-Team debuted after this Super Bowl, which is about the most big-time thing it had going for it. I pity the fool who changes that channel, yeah yeah yeah...

Just forget about Oscar/Floyd entirely...

Because this shit right here is some serious shit. Word is that Iron Mike Tyson has checked himself into the Wonderland Center, the same rehab facility where Lindsay I'm such an incredible Ho-Han is currently trying to get over whatever horrible thing is now wrong with her life. There is clearly only one reason for this coincidence - they plan to fight.

Here at No Mas, we are not in the business of making book, but we are nevertheless prepared to take action on this thing. To start we've got Ho-han paying 240 on the c-note. You may think those are great odds given the fact that she's facing the former heavyweight champion of the world and erstwhile Baddest Man on the Planet, not to mention that Tyson weighs about 260 while she weighs about 85 pounds wet, and make that 70 less the implants. But we've got a funny feeling about this one. We hear the Ho-inator has wanted a piece of Tyson for years, and vice versa. We hear she's the nastiest bitch on two heels and that even though she's in rehab she's still smoking a ton of crack, which would have to be in her favor. We also hear that after the bout (ten 3-minute rounds, bare-fisted, no hair-pulling or nipple twisting or crack smoking) they're going to get married, which is definitely the Joe D/Marilyn nightmare that all of us reality-television-watching Ipod-listening millennial mutants so richly deserve.

No Mas TV Guide: 1/30

MUST-SEE NO MAS TV

Lennox Lewis Trifecta
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Three, count 'em, THREE Lennox fights back-to-back-to-back on Classic tonight. These are rarely shown on Classic, and never shown anywhere else, so if you want to see them, tonight's your chance. The first fight is Lennox's bout with Tommy Morrison, aka Tommy Gunn, from 1995. It was Lewis's second bout since losing the title to Oliver McCall, and also his second bout since stealing McCall's trainer, Manny Steward. The second fight is Lennox against Shannon Briggs from 1998, and the third is his 1993 bout with Frank Bruno. All's I will tell you here if you haven't seen these fights is that all three have a lot of action and all three end in stoppages.

BEST OF THE REST

Evander Holyfield SportsCentury
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m.
This is one of the full-hour jammies, and has a lot of good footage, definitely worth a look

Happy Gilmore
AMC, 8 & 10 p.m.
Adam Sandler as a hockey goon turned golfer. Adam Sandler and Bob Barker in a bare-fisted fight to the death. A guest appearance appearance by Apollo Creed. Enough said.

ECW Wrestling
Sci-Fi Channel, 10 p.m.
The rematch nobody wants to see: ECW World Heavyweight Champion Bobby Lashley vs. Test.

Warrior Nation
MSNBC, 10 & 11 p.m.
The fourth and final installment in this mini-docu series looking at the growing world of MMA. Featured in this episode is the build-up to the most anticipated match in UFC history: Liddell vs. Ortiz II.

John Cena on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
CBS, 12:30 a.m.
Personally, I can't get over feeling that John Cena belongs in a gay porn movie. But hey, what do I know? Here's hoping he rips that Scottish wanker a new one either way. I can't stand that ponce.

NFL's Greatest Games: Super Bowl XXXII
ESPN2, 1 a.m.
Forget who was in this one? Well, give a click then love, and we'll set you straight. Or I'll give you a clue. It just may be... the single... greatest... moment... in the HISTORY... of... ah forget it. Broncos/Packers.

One down, 87 to go

On this day 36 years ago, the UCLA men's basketball team beat UC-Santa Barbara 74-61 at Pauley Pavilion. It was a notable win for the Bruins because for the first time in almost a year, they were coming off a loss, their nationally televised defeat to Notre Dame, where they were trampled by Austin Carr's 48-point extravanganza.

But in retrospect, this win over Santa Barbara was also notable because it would prove to be the first of many more to come, 87 more to be precise. The Bruins would not lose again until Digger Phelps and the Irish rolled into town on January 19, 1974 and again played the spoiler, ending the longest winning streak in college basketball history at 88 games.

Most people associate that streak with Bill Walton, and yet the 1970-71 team that started the streak had no big red Deadhead at center. This was the team that presided during the two years between the Walton and Alcindor eras. Forward Sidney Wicks (pictured right) was its star - the other four starters were Steve Patterson at center, Curtis Rowe at forward, and Henry Bibby and Terry Schofield at guards. This was the nucleus of a team that won two national championships, in 1970 and 1971.

Of course, come the '71-'72 campaign, there was a new group of sheriffs in town, a more familiar gang in UCLA history - Walton, Nater, Wilkes. Whereas the team before was exemplary in both skill and discipline, this team was frightening in its abundance of size and talent. Their closest game in their undefeated '71-'72 season was a six-point win over Oregon - their next closest was a fourteen-point win over Cal. In general, if they beat you by 20, you'd had yourself a good night out there.

No Mas TV Guide

MUST-SEE NO MAS TV
Any Which Way You Can
AMC, 3:30 p.m. (all times EST)
Look, Every Which Way But Loose may be the greatest movie ever made. We all know that. But given this fact, I've always been surprised how under the radar the sequel is. In Any Which Way You Can, two-fisted streetfighter Philo Beddoe finally bags Lynn Halsey-Taylor, continues his ongoing feud with the Black Widdas motorcycle gang, and ends up being forced by the mafia to come out of retirement to fight the ultimate bare-knuckles brawl against a martial-arts expert. If you just read that last sentence and still don't want to see this movie, it might be time to admit that you are dead.

BEST OF THE REST
The Color of Money
ESPN Classic, 4:30 p.m.
I honestly think this movie is better than The Hustler, if only because Eddie Felson was so much older then, and he's younger than that now.

Buster Douglas v. Mike Tyson, 1990
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m, 12 a.m.
Shakespearean tragedy in a boxing ring in Tokyo.

Youngblood
Spike, 9 p.m.
Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze are hockey players. They get in lots of fights. Swayze is the tough one, Lowe is the Streisand (naturally). Until the end...

Monday Night Raw
USA, 9 p.m.
On the heels of last night's Royal Rumble pay-per-view, will "the Samoan Bulldozer" Umaga seek revenge on WWE Champ John Cena for choking him out? Also, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon is planning on calling out Donald Trump - does he have the balls to see it through?

Super Bowl of the Day - The Worst... Super Bowl... EVER

Twelve years ago today, the San Francisco 49ers were slated to meet the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX, and for some reason they went ahead and played the game anyway. What ensued was an orgy of strangeness and bad feelings that started off with Kathie Lee Gifford singing the national anthem and then got worse.

First of all, there was the fact that the Chargers were in it. Led by Bobby Ross, no less. I can't even remember who their quarterback was. Wait a second, it's coming back to me... ah who cares. How can you remember the Chargers quarterback when the Niners quarterback had such a record-setting evening? Let's recap shall we:

• 49ers QB Steve Young set a Super Bowl record by throwing for nineteen touchdowns on 7,010 yards passing.
• Wide receiver Jerry Rice set Super Bowl records by catching twelve of those touchdowns and also managing to bang every one of the Chargers cheerleaders while the game was still in progress.
• Ricky Watters also scored six touchdowns, including three during halftime.

It's a little known fact that the game got so boring for the Niners that in the fourth quarter, no member of the team actually played in the game. They sent their wives and sons on to the field disguised in their uniforms. At this point in the game, Steve Young's son threw eight touchdown passes to Jerry Rice's wife.

The score of the game is thought to have ended up at around 278-12, but the final tally was ultimately deemed incalculable using traditional methods and is now represented by a symbol that looks something like what Prince's name used to be. As if all that wasn't bad enough, whereas the Super Bowl usually does pretty well in the ratings, Super Bowl XXIX actually lost its ratings timeslot to both the shows on the other networks - NBC had a Sanford and Son marathon while CBS was showing like, one of the old Super Bowls. A good one.


(ratings were so bad that this Apple ad was the way most people found out that the Niners won the Super Bowl)

K.O.W. - The Banker Cashes Out

As all you No Masians probably know, I had (have, I guess) some serious love for The Boxing Banker, Calvin Brock, mostly because I started following him at the Sydney Olympics, where I was on hand to witness his only bout (which he lost miserably - I sure can pick em).

But that love is not why I have chosen his knockout of Zuri Lawrence for this edition of the No Mas Knockout of the Week. It's because this coming Friday said Zuri, brave soul, is venturing into the ring for the first time since Brock nearly decapitated his ass not quite a year ago.

It was last February on the Sugar Shane/Vargas I undercard. The odd thing is that Zuri was handling himself in there pretty well and probably was ahead on the scorecards. Then again, knockouts be like that, and this right here is a straight-up one-punch goodnight Irene of the highest order. Ref has the paramedics in the ring almost before Zuri hits the canvas. Now maybe you'll understand why I lost all that money on Brock against Klitschko. A left hook like this can make a man a believer.

If you want to rope a dope, eventually you must come off the ropes

This is what I learned watching the Jorge Arce/Julio Ler bout last night on Boxing After Dark. Early in the fight, it seemed that Ler's strategy was a classic rope-a-dope - he went to the ropes for long stretches and let the relentless Arce bomb away at his forearms and gloves. Every now and then he would counter, but that was rare. More often than not, he would take ten or twelve shots and then suddenly scoot off the ropes about ten paces away from Arce, adjust his trunks, and get a baffling look of macho accomplishment on his face that seemed to say, "you see, I did it again."

Of course, trying to pull a rope-a-dope on Arce is a dubious approach to begin with. Little Jorge is not exactly George Foreman - the idea that he would punch himself out by the 30th round, let alone the 12th, is possibly not the soundest notion.

But nevertheless, it's not the worst way to go about fighting him, particularly if you're as overmatched as Ler was - let the cowboy throw his bombs for a good half the fight while you preserve your strength and try to catch him late when he's a little more spent than you are.

It almost seemed to be working. By the middle rounds, Arce's work-rate had definitely dropped, as had the fervor of his blows, but it was hard to decide whether that was weariness or boredom with an opponent who was not fighting so much as, to quote Harold Lederman, "doing a good impersonation of a punching bag." As Max Kellerman pointed out, Ler was landing the cleaner shots in the middle rounds, but they were few and far between and, on a hard head like Jorge's, not making much of an impact.

By the tenth, it was clear that Ler (that's His Speedy Gonzalez-ness himself over there on the right) had no plan to come off the ropes, giving a whole new connotation to the rope-a-dope strategy. Even covering up for all he was worth, he nevertheless walked into one of Arce's hooks in the 11th and did the dance. In the 12th he threw maybe six punches. At that point, he was literally running from Arce in the ring, more so than I have perhaps ever seen in a professional fight.

I can only imagine what Mr. El Mas Macho thought of his opponent's mettle last night. Somehow, though, Arce still made it exciting, just for being so clearly annoyed with the situation and for going to such great lengths, using every style and manner of taunt he could summon, to draw Ler out to something that might approximate a boxing match. It didn't work, but the effort was more entertaining than you would have thought.

Dominance

As we say goodnight to another Australian Open, we find there was an utterly predictable finale on the men's side, and an utterly unpredictable one on the women's side. Yet both were tales of dominance, complete mastery. Roger Federer has this kind of mastery at his fingertips every minute of every day, and Serena Williams surprised us by summoning it after a long period of inactivity.

Federer poses an interesting problem to the sportswriter these days - what is left to say? Maybe only Gretsky has ever been in the rarified atmosphere that the Fed is occupying right now. Tiger Woods has been there, but it's different with golf - even when you're at your most untouchable best, you still lose more than you win. And Jordan... great as he was, someone was always nipping at his heels, making him reach deep.

No one even seems to challenge Moby Fed these days, unless it's Rafael Nadal on clay, and something tells me those halcyon days are about to come to an end. As has been noted ad nauseum, Fed won this Aussie title without dropping a set, a feat that has not been achieved at a Slam in 27 years. I would say right now that the Federer/Sampras debate is about over. Never was Sampras at this level. If Fed retires tomorrow and does not eclipse Pete's 14 Slams, then Sampras must be said to have had the better career, but as for the "who's the better player" argument, Elvis has left the building, and his name is Roger Federer.

What Serena Williams accomplished at this Open is nothing short of astonishing. She hadn't been in a Grand Slam final since 2005. She'd battled injuries, weight and fitness issues, depression, and perhaps most detrimental to her career, a seeming disinterest in playing tennis. She entered this tournament ranked number 81 in the world and on absolutely no one's radar screen as a possible finalist.

One thing that I noticed in her run to the Championship was that despite the fact that she is years away from the days when she dominated the sport, her opponents are still intimidated by her mere presence on the other side of the net. Israeli Shahar Peer, known for her pluck, had Serena on the ropes in the quarterfinal and couldn't close the deal, and there was a clear psychological edge to her ultimate submission. Serena played an ugly match, and easily could have lost, but reached deep and willed the victory. That was her trademark when she was at her best. That is the stuff of champions.

As for her utter pantsing (skirtsing? what is the feminine of pantsing?) of Sharparova on Friday/Saturday, I thought my man Steve Tignor summed it up nicely in his column over at Tennis.com, The Wrap:

From the first swing of virtually every rally, Serena was the stronger player. And that included Sharapova’s serve, which was uncharacteristically short and erratic—a cream puff much of the time. Serena, by contrast, had full confidence in both of her serves from start to finish, and anything that Sharapova left hanging was punished with a clean, laser-like, blatant winner. Even Serena’s stance and swing were more efficient and committed to making a forceful play with each shot. No wonder Sharapova’s father, Yuri, showed up looking like he wished he could prolong a two-day bender for a few more hours.

Serena says that she is now committed to tennis again, to regaining the number-one ranking, to winning more Slams and dominating the sport once again. On that front, she's off to a hell of a good start. Don't be surprised to see Serena and the Fed do a few more Slam-dances before the year is out.

The King

(This dispatch comes to us from us our Parisian correspondent, Massaër Ndiaye, aka Madsear.)

"Collar turned up, back straight, chest stuck out, he glided into the arena as if he owned the fucking place. Any arena, but nowhere more effectively than Old Trafford. This was his stage. He loved it, the crowd loved him" - Roy Keane

It was the kick seen 'round the world.

On this day eleven years ago at Selhurst Park, a Crystal Palace hooligan got the shit kicked out of him by a player from the opposite side who had just been sent off. See, one of the beauties of the premiership is that the seats are so close it allows players to dive in the stands feet first to settle the score if they hear racial slurs shouted at them. In the most unorthodox way possible, Eric Cantona created the biggest piece of entertainment this side of the Atlantic had ever seen. His Kung-Fu kick was retransmitted more times than the JFK assassination.

Eric Le Rouge was born in Marseille and that explains a lot. Like Zinédine Zidane, he was an artist on the pitch but could show his temper if provoked. But off the pitch, Cantona was an artist as well. A painter, a poet and philosopher for some, an all-around weird dude for others. An icon for all.

Eric arrived at 26 in England after quite the eventful career in France. He threw a ball at the referee in his last game and was radiated from the French league in 1992. Two years prior to that he called the French manager Henri Michel a "bag full of shit" (not to put too fine a point on it). Just 25, he decided to retire. Michel Platini called him after 3 months and asked him to try The Big Island. It was a match made in heaven, first at Leeds United where he won a championship his first year and then at Old Trafford where he won four championships in 5 years and won the "double" twice, an unprecedented achievement.

The King was a genius, pure and simple. He transcended the sport. His whole career was about battling injustice. He always stood for his beliefs and stayed proud - some would say regal - on the pitch. After he was sentenced to 2 weeks in jail and 8 months of suspension for his ninja act, his only response was "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea." Exactly.

Having abdicated his football throne at the relatively young age of thirty, he is now enjoying a successful acting career. And as an actor, he's as unpredictable as he was on the pitch. The footballer left the building but the artist remains.

This Week in No Mas

(While reading today's T.W.I.N. notes, we suggest that you listen to the provided audio. It's a little number that we call "Flow Mas", but we think you'll recognize the source. It should set the mood nicely. Production Props to Michael Ramadan Jones.)



1/21
A little Willie Pep, a little Joe Frazier...
Large breaks down the Hatton and Castillo fights from Saturday night. "We think of boxing as such an instinctual, savage occupation, but the way Castillo went about his business last night was positively surgical. He wasn't in great condition mentally or physically, but he knew exactly what he needed to do to win that fight, and he did it as if he were following an algorithm. The sweet science, indeed."

The Prowlin Italian
Must-see No Mas TV - YES is running maybe the greatest episode of The White Shadow ever, the one where Salami starts moonlighting as a club-fighter known as "The Prowlin Italian."

1/22
K.O.W. - The Left Hook from Hell
After all the Ali hoopla of last week, we throw a little love Joe Frazier's way with our Knockout of the Week, Smokin Joe's one-round smackdown on Dave Zyglewicz from 1969. "You get to see the vaunted Frazier left hook in full effect, because in a minute and a half, he lands about 30 of them on Ziggy's body and head..."

Backhand Compliment
Large turns to his pal Steve Tignor from Tennis Magazine for some analysis of A-Rod's backhand and its notable evolution. "...he's taking the ball earlier, farther up in the court, and on the rise (heavy Connors influence) and extending through the hitting zone more (also a Connors specialty). The combination has made it a weapon."

Bam Bam Bigelow 1961-2007
Our wrestling correspondent, The Franchise, says goodbye to one of the all-time greats, Bam Bam Bigelow.

1/23
The earth trembled on its axis...
The anniversary of the day the earth stood still, when the Hulkster broke the Cobra Clutch and vanquished the Iron Sheik once and for all.

1/24
The Swede Down Under
Nineteen years to the day since Mats Wilander beat Pat Cash in an epic five-set Aussie final, the first leg of a three-Slam season for the Swede.

Is Lennox next?
With Vitali Klitschko set to make a comeback in April, Large wonders if his ultimate aim is to mix it up with his brother. "For myself, I know I'd be rooting for Dr. V all the way, but if he wants a piece of his younger bro right now, he better make sure he's in crack condition, because Manny Steward is turning that boy into a veritable one-two machine."

No Mas at the Golden Gloves
The 2007 Golden Gloves opens at the Copacabana, and No Mas is on the scene.

1/25
There is nothing left to do
Large wonders if maybe it isn't time to wonder at just what Reger Federer is up to on this planet. "...after his three-round destruction of Andy Roddick last night, bitch-slapping the insurgent Rod like a Cockney mosquito at an Irish wake, the only explanation left for this man's appearance among us is that he is a space alien."

All right, all right
We start our run to the Super Bowl with our first No Mas Super Bowl of the Day, the Broncos upset of the Packers in SBXXXII.

1/26
Baseball, basketball, tennis, football
The anniversary of the deaths of Abner Doubleday, Al McGuire, Don Budge and Bear Bryant.

Super Bowl of the Day - Sometimes the Bears Eat You
Remember these guys? The '85 Bears? Not enough gets written about them. It's almost like it never happened. "Mostly what you remember about the big game anyway is the week beforehand and all of Jim McMahon's bullshit, the Bourbon Street Pied Piper, mooning the helicopter, dissing the quality of ho to be found in N.O., and of course the personally inscribed headbands - "Rozelle" and my favorite, "Acupuncture."

One is the loneliest number

Here's some excellent analysis from my man Steve Tignor over at Tennis Magazine on how the Federer/Roddick semi hinged on a single game in the first set:

I’ve seen few matches turn so quickly and completely. Federer was tentative to start, hitting a series of shanks in the swirling wind. Roddick, on the other hand, was pressing the action as everyone thought he would and having some success coming forward with his serve-forehand combination. Federer steadied himself, but he seemed content to rally and play defense. Everything changed with Roddick serving at 4-4. Federer hit a sharp backhand pass. Roddick missed a backhand approach. Then, at break point, Roddick played an aggressive point to set up a forehand volley, only to pop the ball up and watch helplessly as Federer jumped on it and passed him. Roddick had played himself into perfect position, then discovered that he didn’t own the shot he needed to win the point—that's gotta hurt. Somehow you could feel that the match was over.

Check out the rest of Steve's column, The Wrap over at the Tennis.com site. He also shows some love to Serena and gives a much appreciated bitchslapping to Dick "I don't never shut the fuck up" Enberg.

Super Bowl of the Day - Sometimes the Bears Eat You

And in 1985, there was a feeding frenzy every Sunday, a season-long orgy of carnage that culminated 21 years ago today at Super Bowl XX, when the Bears dispensed with the mere formality of defeating the overmatched Patriots, 46-10.

There's been so much said about this Bears team over the years that it's hardly worth going into in much detail. Mostly what you remember about the big game anyway is the week beforehand and all of Jim McMahon's bullshit, the Bourbon Street Pied Piper, mooning the helicopter, dissing the quality of ho to be found in N.O., and of course the personally inscribed headbands - "Rozelle" and my favorite, "Acupuncture."

Ditka, Buddy Ryan, Mike Singletary, The Fridge, Sweetness, and yes, The Super Bowl Shuffle (if I never hear that thing again so long as I live...) - good times. For those of you No Masians out there who weren't old enough to have seen this team, let me tell you that it was like no other that I've seen in my lifetime in any sport, not the Jordan Bulls, not the Gretzky Oilers. Watching the '85 Bears gave you a feeling of utter finality. You knew there was just no way in hell they could lose. Because, as we all know, you can't lose if the other team can't score.

They gave us a lot of great memories, and yet one sour one as well, one that I hope haunts Mike Ditka every night before he goes to sleep. The Super Bowl appearance that Walter Payton had been waiting for his entire life, and the Bears score THREE touchdowns on rushes at the goalline, and Walter gets the call on exactly none of them. In the third quarter, with the game already on ice, Ditka lets his circus freak rookie, Fridge Perry, run one in rather than giving Sweetness a much-earned tip of the cap. Say what you will about Ditka, but class was never his thing.

Baseball, basketball, tennis, football...

...each lost a giant on this day in history:

Abner Doubleday 6/26/19 - 1/26/93
Died of heart disease in Mendham, N.J.

Al McGuire 9/7/28 - 1/26/01
Died of leukemia in Milwaukee, WI


Don Budge 6/13/15 - 1/26/00
Died of injuries sustained in an car
accident in Scranton, PA

Paul "Bear" Bryant 9/11/13 - 1/26/83
Died of a heart attack in Tuscaloosa, AL
(a month after coaching his last game)

All right, all right

Contrary to popular belief, and some comments we've received to this effect, we are in fact aware here at No Mas that there is a football game of some import on the horizon. And to show you how much we LOVE the Super Bowl and all the hype that surrounds it (just love it really) starting today we're going to bring you the No Mas Super Bowl of the Day every day right up until the Big Day itself, that holiday of holidays, that game of games.

Let's this get this party started right by kicking it back to January 25, 1998, when Jiggity John Elway finally got the monkey off his back and won hisself a ring. Denver 31, Green Bay 24. This was definitely one of the most dramatic Super Bowls of them all. The Broncos were 11 1/2 point underdogs going in, making this the third biggest upset in Super Bowl history, behind the Jets over the Colts (Jets were 18-point underdogs) and the Pats over the Rams (Pats were 14-point dogs, funny to remember that).

You had Terrell Davis and The Migraine. You had Elway and The Dive. You had Elway and The Redemption. In general, there was some real Peyton Manning-type shit in the air, and there seems to me to be a definite similiarity between Elway and Peyton - two altogether-too-perfect-for-their-own-good type All-American snotbags who have all-world careers and yet get branded as losers. Probably for Peyton the best thing he could do is lose this Super Bowl, because if he wins it no one will ever like him. But if he loses, and keeps at it for another decade, and THEN wins one, maybe he'll get that Elway rebound thing where everyone decides, all right, this chowderhead has been around long enough, we like him now. You have to remember, Elway was universally despised for years before this lovable lose crap started. By the time that third quarter drive started, though, holms had all of America rooting for him. We're a fickle lot, no doubt.

There is nothing left to do...

...with Roger Federer but to put together a special delegation of politicians, statesmen and cultural dignitaries and send them to Fed to ask him, once and for all, exactly who he is and what he wants from us. Because after his three-round destruction of Andy Roddick last night, bitch-slapping the insurgent Rod like a Cockney mosquito at an Irish wake, the only explanation left for this man's appearance among us is that he is a space alien. Whether he means us harm or is on a benign mission, or is merely some cosmic renengade getting his rocks off by embarrassing the stupid Earthlings in the one thing they truly care about as a species - tennis... look, whatever it is he's doing here, we need to find out pronto. If we don't stop pretending about this shit and get serious, before you know it, we're all gonna kneel before Zod. Fed. Whatever.

No Mas at the Golden Gloves

I just got back from the opening night of the 2007 Golden Gloves here in NYC, which was held at the Copacabana in Manhattan. It was an exciting night, some good fights, some not so good fights, a lot of electricity in the air and a lot of boxing lifers on hand to take in the action. I was there with our man No Mas Nick, who shot a lot of footage for us that we should have up here in a few days. We're going to cover the Gloves this year soup to nuts.

To whet your appetite, here are a few shots from tonight's intermission, where Bill Gallo played a little "New York Golden Gloves... this is your life..."

Teddy Atlas and Carl "the Truth" Williams
hug it out


Max Kellerman with his idol, Pernell Whitaker


Gerry Cooney asks Jake LaMotta if he's seen
that movie about him


Mitch Blood Green, doing his "I'm a cross
between DMC and Rick James" thang


From right: Lou Duva, Teddy, Mark Breland,
Lorraine Bracco and Iran Barkley (and no, nothing
says Golden Gloves quite like Lorraine Bracco)

Is Lennox next?

The rumor has been everywhere for months, and word is out today that former heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko has told a few different newspapers that he's coming out of retirement and likely will fight Oleg Maskaev on April 21st.

We haven't seen the good Doctor V. in action since he TKO'ed Danny Williams in December of '04. I wonder what this is about. I can't believe it's because he's feeling like he's just GOT to take Maskaev's belt. He says that he's coming back so he and Wlad can hold belts simultaneously. But yo yo, V-Dog, ain't you been listening to your brother yo? Wlad has made it clear for at least a year now that his whole goal in life is to unify the belts at all costs.

Which raises the obvious question - provided Vitali can get back to form and make quick work of Maskaev, as he certainly would have done in his prime, will he and Wlad eventually fight? If they do, who wins? It's a tough call. On one hand you have the Chris Byrd factor, and on another the Corrie Sanders factor. For myself, I know I'd be rooting for Dr. V all the way, but if he wants a piece of his younger bro right now, he better make sure he's in crack condition, because Manny Steward is turning that boy into a veritable one-two machine. Then again, VKlitsch will always have the edge when it comes to the all-important heart muscle, as evidenced by the action below.

The Swede Down Under

On this day in 1988, Mats Wilander defeated Pat Cash in the Australian Open men's final in an epic five-sets - 6-3, 6-7 (3), 3-6, 6-1, 8-6. It was the first of three Slams Wilander would capture on the year - he also won the French and the U.S. Open.

Prior to Wilander, no one had won three legs of the Grand Slam since Rod Laver won all four in 1969. And since Wilander managed the trifecta in '88, it's only been done twice, both times by the Fed, in 2004 and last year. Odd that Wilander should find himself in such rarified company. He was great, but not Laver/Federer great. Also odd that Sampras never managed a three-fer. Obviously he never won the French, and he won the Australian only twice, in '94 and '97. In both of those years he won Wimbledon but not the U.S. Open.

Laver remains the only man to win the Grand Slam, and he did it twice, in '62 and '69. It's a testament to what an amazing achievement that is that with all the dominant players to follow - Borg, Mac, Lendl, Sampras, Fed - no one else has been able to manage it once, let alone twice.

What time is it?

HAWK TIME!

Yo yo, a red alert to the No Mas community - I was just informed by one of our crack committee of TV Guide-readers out there that Pryor/Arguello II is on Classic tonight at 9 p.m. It's not the first fight, which remains one of the greatest fights of all time and was named Ring Magazine's Fight of the Decade. That first Pryor/Arguello showdown was one of those bouts like the Thrilla or Chavez/Taylor where you saw men actually getting old before your eyes. Neither El Flaco Explosivo nor the Hawk were ever quite the same, and a rematch may never have come about except for the controversy that surrounded the first fight. Videotapes showed Pryor drinking from a special bottle after the 12th round, a bottle which was given to him by his trainer Panama Lewis, who asked for it by name ("no no, give me the one that I mixed," Lewis is clearly heard saying). No one ever knew what, if any, illegal substance was in that bottle, but it was undeniable that Pryor, who was on queer street in the 12th round, came out swinging in the 13th as if he'd been drinking from the fountain of youth. It was enough to force the WBC to order a rematch.

Held in September of 1983, the second fight didn't quite live up to the hype, which was massive. On the other hand, it was no Corrales/Castillo rematch either. In fact, I'd say it was a borderline classic, and it's worth watching just to see these two legends in action again, the unrelenting fury of Pryor, the elegance and resilience of Arguello. If you don't happen to know who ends up winning, I'm not going to tell you what happens. Check it out for yourself, 9 p.m., ESPN Classic.

The earth trembled on its axis...

...on this day in 1984. I'm talking Madison Square Garden, the Iron Sheik, and a certain reality television star. Ring a bell? Don't tell me you don't remember where you were the day the Cobra Clutch was broken at last, and Hulkamania officially began...

Bam Bam Bigelow 1961-2007

Even if you aren’t a fan of professional wrestling, you’ve probably heard of Bam Bam Bigelow, the wrestling giant who died this past Friday. The name might ring a bell because on April 2nd, 1995, Bigelow wrestled NFL legend, Lawrence Taylor, in a not-so-memorable Wrestlemania XI main event.

I remember the build-up to that bout like it was yesterday. LT was watching Bigelow wrestle a couple of months before ‘Mania XI at a WWF event. The announcers touched on the fact that Taylor was sitting ringside but did so in a way that implied he was just a casual fan enjoying some good ol’ wrasslin’ action. At least that is how my innocent little mind remembered it going down. After his match, Bigelow walked right up to Godzilla and pushed him down to the ground. A huge melee ensued and the rest, as they say, is history.

Bigelow retired from wrestling a decade later after a successful run in WWF, ECW, WCW and in Japan. But anytime a casual fan is reminded of his name they say “isn’t he that big guy with the tattoo on his head that wrestled LT?” Yes, yes he is. But let me give you a couple of other reasons to remember him by: Wrestling Observer’s Rookie of the Year in 1986, former WCW and IWGP tag-team champion, former ECW heavyweight champion and the only big man in the history of wrestling to perform cart-wheels in the middle of his matches. Bam Bam could move like no other big man before him. Trust me, I've been watching this stuff for a while.

Rest in peace Bam Bam. Tell Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero, Mr. Perfect, Big Boss Man, Chris Candido, Kerry Von Erich, Davey Boy Smith, Junkyard Dog, Andre the Giant, Big John Studd, Yokozuna and Dino Bravo that I miss them. Sure seems like whoever is promoting matches up there has a pretty damn good roster to work with.

Blades of Glory f'reals

We recently got sent this trailer for the new Will Ferrell movie, Blades of Glory, which will be released at the end of March. You can either watch the trailer or read my detailed summation of the plot below:

Will Ferrell plays a figure skater.

This is quite a leap for Ferrell from his last role in Ricky Bobby, where he played a stock-car driver. It looks like basically any sport that isn't baseball or football is going to be in for the Ferrell treatment in the next twenty years or so. To which I say, "less cowbell."

But enough of that unforgivable wackness. While researching this movie, I came across the real Blades of Glory, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with figure skating. And I quote...

"Blades of Glory is a non-choreographed medieval foot combat group that utilizes various medieval weaponry and fighting styles for entertainment purposes. It is not historically specific to any medieval time period."

For entertainment purposes INDEED, entertaining the public with bloody beheadings and disembowelings and all kinds of torturous medeival shit. They offer a variety of shows, including

• The Duel - A 20 minute, Medieval show with 2 Knights & an MC
  
• Tournament of Champions - A Medieval Tournament with 4, 6, or 8 Knights in combat
• Gladiatorial Spectacle - A Roman Tournament with 4, 6, or 8 Gladiators in combat
  
• The Siege - An indoor Medieval Exhibition using high energy music and an amazing light show
  
• Medieval Kombat - A training school in medieval weaponry

I mean, where do I begin? The Duel? Two Knights and an MC... isn't that a Beastie Boys song? Yo yo that's how they kicked it in the Bronx round about the eighth century. And what about the Gladiatorial Spectacle? Break me off a slice of that. I'm telling you, sign these bitches up for my next birthday.

Backhand Compliment

The Aussie Open is heading into the quarters, with the following matches scheduled to take place today:

Andy Roddick v. Mardy Fish
Roger Federer v. Tommy Robredo
Serena Williams v. Shahar Peer
Nicole Vaidisova v. Lucie Safarova

The winners of these matches will meet in their respective semis, and obviously for ARod, this potentially will bring the white whale back into his sights. I give the Rod a lot of shit because he's just such an all-around ponce, but based on what I've seen of him in this tournament, particularly in the Safin match, I have to say he's looking pretty lethal. Finally, he seems to have a backhand that isn't a liability, and is in fact at times a weapon. I've been noticing him taking the two-hander hard and early, and this from someone who used to rely on a weak slice from the backhand side.

But look, what do I know? For an expert opinion on Rod's backhand situation and how it might help him fare against Moby Fed, I turned to my man Steve Tignor, a writer over at Tennis magazine. Steve is an old friend of mine from college, where he was a four-year All-American tennis player (Large - zero-year All-American). I once challenged Steve to a tennis match for money with the provisions that:

• He got one serve per point, I got as many as I needed
• He had to wear a pair of leather oxfords on the court
• He smoked cigarettes continuously throughout the entire match

When I proposed this to him, he said, "Sure... but I want you to know you still probably won't win a game." This was true, but at the time my feeling was that he didn't need to be so blunt about it. I ultimately pulled out of the match, citing injury.

Here's what Steve had to say about the Rod's backhand:

One thing Roddick has said is that he's hit a ton of backhands in the last year and has grooved it to the point where he no longer "worries about it" (he used to get nervous with it). As far as improving it, he's taking the ball earlier, farther up in the court, and on the rise (heavy Connors influence) and extending through the hitting zone more (also a Connors specialty). The combination has made it a weapon.

It has to help him against Federer. The only guys to beat Federer in the last couple years are Nadal, Gasquet, Nalbandian, Safin, and Murray. What do these guys have in common? They're all very strong from their left sides—Nadal with his forehand, the rest with their backhands. That way they can fend off, at least some of the time, Federer's inside-out forehand.

But the main key for Roddick will still be serving the highest percentage of first serves possible and getting to the net a lot, before Federer has time to take over a point. No matter how good Roddick's backhand is, he'll always be scrambling in baseline rallies against The Fed.

Check out Steve's column, The Wrap, at Tennis.com, ESPN.com, and hopefully now and then right here at No Mas central. I'm putting together an incentive package right now, frontloaded with bitches and money. Expert analysis don't come cheap, let me tell you.

K.O.W. - The Left Hook from Hell

With all the Ali encomiums flying around last week, and then with seeing Smokin Joe in the flesh at the MSG at 50 party, I started feeling like I needed to throw Ole Joe Frazier a little love. So I dug up this clip of his one-round demolition of Dave "Ziggy" Zyglewicz in 1969 for our No Mas Knockout of the Week. You get to see the vaunted Frazier left hook in full effect, because in a minute and a half, he lands about 30 of them on Ziggy's body and head (by my count, he throws the right only four times, although one is a brutal uppercut that sets up the KO). It's a frightening weapon, that left hook, frightening just to look at. Larry Holmes once told me about sparring with Frazier - he said, "Joe was angry in the ring... every time he hit you it was like he tryin to kill you." I watched the Thrilla on Ali's birthday (for about the thousandth time) and I swear - of all the amazing things that happened in that ring, for all the punishment Ali dished out, the most astonishing aspect of that fight is how many of those Frazier left hooks Muhammad absorbed and still stayed on his feet. It was superhuman shit.

Dave Zyglewicz didn't quite fare so well, as you'll see. Check him out after the knockout when the ref hoists him to his feet. Man is like Gumby, dammit.

The Prowlin Italian

Lately YES has been running one of the all-time greatest episodes of The White Shadow, the one where Salami (real name on the show - Mario Pettrino - I'd forgotten that) starts moonlighting at a local meat-market boxing club to make some extra money. It turns out that his dad was a pro fighter for seventeen years and he used to take him to the gym when he was a kid. But Salami is estranged from his dad now, and he's still raw as a fighter, getting his ass kicked every night by older dudes in these backroom bouts.

Coach Reeves gets wind of it (through Goldstein of course, the weasel) and takes him to a real gym, a Latino joint in East L.A. where this Mexican boxing guru is training Carlos Palomino, the former WBC welterweight champ who actually makes a cameo in the show. Salami convinces Reeves to train him for a local tournament (of course Reeves used to box - he's from Queens, everybody from Queens used to box), but then Salami's dad butts in and tells the Coach to piss off. So Salami goes back to the boxing clubs, and threatens to leave town for NYC to start a boxing career there. Meanwhile, Reeves returns to the East L.A. gym to ask the Mexican boxing guru what might be making Salami's dad so bitter. While they stand watching Palomino spar, the guru gives this speech in his thick made-for-TV Mexican accent:

"You know, it takes a certain kind of man to climb into the ring. You're different in here (points to his head), but mostly you're different in here (points to his heart). Dedication, dedication to the most... it takes a special kind of feeling, a real love, to do it for seventeen years. Man that's a lot of agony. And when the time comes and you've got nothing to show... it's like having lived with a mad woman... you gave it your all and you've got nothing but pain. You're bitter, and you're so embarrassed. And you're alone, even when you're not. It takes time to come out of it."

I don't know what the hell any of that means, but it sounds really cool when the dude is saying it, particularly the part about the mad woman. After he finishes, Reeves asks him how much time it usually takes to get over the pain, and the guru pauses and thinks. "A long time," he says, his eyes full of sadness. It's all very mystical.

Another great scene is in the locker room, when Thorpe gives Salami a fake Howard Cosell boxing intro and then everyone tries to come up with a good nickname for him. "You know, all the pugs got good names these days," Reese says. "You got Sugar Ray Leonard, Danny "Little Red" Lopez, Smokin Joe Frazier, and even Larry Holmes... the Easton Assassin!" Sugar Ray, Frazier, Larry, okay... but I don't know how the hell Little Red Lopez's name ever made it onto national TV. Those were different times for real. It's like someone on American Idol mentioning Jorge Arce.

Anyway, the name they come up with for Salami is The Prowlin Italian, which is just too awesome for words. The episode ends with a father/son reconciliation - Salami's getting his ass kicked at the club and his dad shows up in his corner to give him some tips. "Didja fuhget everything I teach ya?" he says. Salami's beaten face breaks into a smile. Roll credits. It's a thing of beauty.

And speaking of two guys knocking the hell out of each other...

Word is out on the wires that Cotto/Margarito is a done deal for June 9th. And get this - the shit is at the Garden. Two huge talents, two boxer/brawlers, Mexico v. Puerto Rico, in New York Fucking City. Are you kidding me? We here at No Mas are, to put it mildly, enthused.

A little Willie Pep, a little Joe Frazier...

Such is how Ricky Hatton characterized his victory over Juan Urango last night in a post-fight interview with Larry Merchant (this after he patted down Larry's head with a handful of spit, saying "your 'air's a bit mussed up there Larry" - king of the pub that lad, no doubt). Hatton was one of two marquee names on the card last night - Jose Luis Castillo preceded him to the ring in a very entertaining bout with Herman Ngoudjo of Cameroon. All eyes were on Castillo and Hatton with an eye towards the two of them mixing it up sometime around June in a superbout of junior welters. As for myself, I was very impressed with both of them, particularly Castillo.

That assessment may seem odd if you watched the fights, because Hatton was clearly the more dominant victor, while Castillo probably fought at 75% of his capacity, if that. Castillo won a close split decision while Hatton won unanimously with all three judges cards reading 119-109.

But Castillo's was a much more dangerous opponent. Ngoudjo looked great last night, gorgeous footwork, a long, kinetic jab, with powerful, fast hands when he got inside. It was clear to me that Castillo had underrrated Ngoudjo - the Mexican warrior looked listless, almost bored, in the first few rounds. In a way, however, that's what impressed me. He wasn't in great shape, he wasn't expecting a tough fight, and yet he found himself in a battle and still didn't lose his cool. His corner was panicking in the middle rounds, but not him. He was serene, joking with photographers, telling his seconds it was under control. This is a true veteran of the wars, Chavez's sparring partner - it takes more than an upstart with a jab to get him ruffled. He saw early on that it was going to be a long fight and he paced himself, concentrating his work on Ngoudjo's body while Ngoudjo landed more crowd-pleasing head shots. By the eighth, it was clear that Ngoudjo was out of steam, at which point Castillo upped his work rate. We think of boxing as such an instinctual, savage occupation, but the way Castillo went about his business last night was positively surgical. He wasn't in great condition mentally or physically, but he knew exactly what he needed to do to win that fight, and he did it as if he were following an algorithm. The sweet science, indeed.

As for Hatton, he did a nice job in there against a very strong, if unspectacular opponent. He put on a boxing exhibition in the early rounds (not exactly Willie Pep-like, but hey, what is really?), traded in the middle rounds (again, not quite Smokin Joe material, very far from it actually), and then did a lot of clutching and grabbing late. He knew he wasn't going to hurt Urango, who looked like a freakin middleweight tank in there with that body of his. So Hatton cruised a little, way ahead on points, protected that big Castillo payday. I don't begrudge him that. You have to pick your battles. It wasn't a tremendous showing, but after his debacle with Collazo at 147, it was more than enough to prove that he is still a powerhouse at 140.

Hatton is already hyping the Castillo fight, and taking a swipe at Oscar/Floyd while he's at it. He's quoted today on BBC Sport as saying, "If you want to watch a chess match then De La Hoya versus Mayweather is the one to see. But if you want to see two guys knock the hell out of each other, then come and watch us."

Two guys knocking the hell out of each other, one of them Jose Luis Castillo? Shit, Ricky, I hope you know what you're getting into, because you've got a lot to live up to on that one. I refer you to exhibit A (check out Dan Goosen - "you gotta fuckin get inside on him now"):

Babe Ruth was the white Josh Gibson

Sixty years ago today, baseball legend Josh Gibson died of a stroke at the age of 35. For four years Gibson had carried with him a brain tumor that he'd refused to have operated upon, fearing that he might emerge a vegetable for the rest of his life. The stroke that killed him was no doubt a result of this tumor, although it also was probably fueled by the drug and alcohol abuse that plagued Gibson's last years, abuse that was in part an attempt to medicate his debilitating headaches.

The tragedy of Josh Gibson's death is compounded by it's timing - just three months before Jackie Robinson began his inaugural season with the Dodgers. With all the controversy surrounding Barry Bonds and his catching Babe Ruth and then pursuing Hank Aaron's career home-run record, it's worth remembering that Gibson is believed to have hit close to 800 home runs in his lifetime. These home runs were never officially tallied, and don't appear in any record books. Nevertheless, baseball's true home run king is most likely a man who never had a single at-bat in the major leagues, a man destined to be remembered in baseball history as the black Babe Ruth. On this day at least, it seems we should try to think of it as the other way around.

This Week in No Mas

1/14
Goodbye Norma Jean
Joe D. and Marilyn's 53rd wedding anniversary. "DiMaggio worshiped her memory, having fresh red roses delivered to her grave three times a week until his death. And in Richard Ben Cramer's book about the Clipper, A Hero's Life, he reports a scene where a drunken Marilyn rued the loss of DiMaggio and his cock, which was evidently enormous. "I miss Joe," she slurred. "He had a big bat and he could really hit home runs."

1/15
The Ides of January
No Mas gives a shout out to Dr. King and a motley group of sportsfolk who share his birthday, including such luminaries as Lord Stanley, B-Hop and Luis Monti.

Saturday Night Fights in Canarsie
Our fistic correspondent, Nick Strini, checks out an amateur boxing night at the Paedegat Athletic Club in Canarsie, hosted by the Starrett City Boxing Club.

1/17
Wednesday the 17th was Muhammad Ali's 65th birthday, and thus we dedicated our site to the Greatest for an all-day No Mas celebration.

• Cassius Clay, Vocal Stylist - Clay and Sam Cooke singing "The Gang's All Here."
• If only, if only... - Ali and Wilt Chamberlain discuss their potential fight with Cosell.
• K.O.W. - The Power of Muhammad - The No Mas Knockout of the Week features Ali's fearsome knockout of Cleveland Williams in 1966.
• Warts and All - A discussion of a London Times article that takes a similar line to Large's Ali Crap piece.
• "You got the butterfly part down" - Ali with Michael Jackson on the Jackson's variety show in 1977.
• It was a chilla, and a thrilla - Ali gets tossed on his ass by wrestler Gorilla Monsoon.
• "There was some shit in my face a minute ago, I know that" - Large riffs on the connection between Ali and Richard Pryor, and Richard Pryor riffs on sparring with Ali.
• Liberace invented rap - Ali, then Cassius, recites a poem while Liberace plays piano on the Jack Paar show.
• "I'm the real Apollo Creed" - Ali bum-rushes Stallone at the '76 Oscars.
• Respect - The Champ pays his respects to his great forebear in the ring and out of it, Jack Johnson.

1/18
Melbourne comes earlier every year
Large wakes up with an Ali hangover and realizes there's a tennis tournament going on in Australia. "I'm just not ready for Grand Slam tennis in January. I'm flicking around channels looking for like the Boar's Head Salami Bowl and the next thing I know I'm watching Mario Ancic sweat his balls off in a hundred percent humidity and it's Wednesday but somehow it's already Thursday."

1/19
No Mas Book Review: The Blind Side
The one and only Big Steve Isenberg, professor, publisher, and sire of C.I., reviews Michael Lewis's latest offering, The Blind Side.

MSG at 50: The Grand Finale
Large and I-Berg go to the screening of the last episode of "The 50 Greatest Moments at MSG" at the Garden theater and proceed to get booed by Ranger fans and learn how much a distant uncle of Wesley Snipes likes his moonshine straight, no chaser.

MSG at 50: The Grand Finale

The last episode of "The 50 Greatest Moments at Madison Square Garden" was screened last night at the Garden's Theater, and I-berg and I were on hand for the festivities. An interesting cross-section of mooks, hustlers, ex-athletes and celebrities also made the scene. Evidently, MSG sent out tickets to the event to long-time season-ticket holders, primarily Ranger season-ticket holders it would seem. The back of the theater was a wall of Messier jerseys. In that The Captain himself was on hand, trust me, the natives were restless.

Afterwards there was a panel that included some chick who got grabbed by the Pope at the Garden when she was six, the Irish cop who told Osama to kiss his ass at the Concert for New York, Adam Graves, Mike Richter and Mess, Clyde and Willis, and of course, the one and only Smokin Joe.

For the most part, Frazier was on his game in the panel. Al Trautwig was moderating and Ole Joe held his own, telling some of his stock stories, like how Ali said to him around the third round of the fight, "don't you know you in the ring with God? I am God!" and Joe said, "well God, you in the wrong place tonight." But then Trautwig mentioned that there was a movie in the making about Frazier's life and asked Joe who he thought should star in the lead. At that point, Joe told a story that I think (I think) was about how he is loosely related to a relative of Wesley Snipes, and this particular person likes a drink or two, and would come by a certain bar in Philly where Joe's dad used to sell bootleg liquor, and would ask Joe for a shot on the house, but Joe would only give him half a shot, and that never went over too well with the guy... he kept going, but that was as much as I could piece together. The upshot, I gathered, was that Joe was nominating Wesley Snipes to play him in the movie, and I have to hand it to him on that one - Snipes isn't a bad choice. Anybody got any better ideas?

No Mas Book Review: The Blind Side

By Steven L. Isenberg


Some No Masians may well have already found their way to Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side whether from having read his Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, his New York Times Magazine pieces on his old baseball coach in Louisiana, or the one that is a slice of this book itself. It was my good luck that your man, Christopher, my son, gave it to me.

The ingredients of The Blind Side are common enough: the drive to win and tactical necessities; coaches of idiosyncracy, imagination, myopia, opinion and ego; professional salaries and star status; high school and college proving grounds; academics and athletes; recruiting and rules; race and poverty as destiny and determiners, and those who would undo that knot; big ambitions and good hearts; and the frame of the South for the picture.

And yet Blind Side’s theme of transformation and its unlikely connections of character and circumstance give renewed vivacity to commonalities.

The pivotal element is the bone-chilling and bone-breaking success of Lawrence Taylor, the specter of his attacks on quarterbacks from their blind side. If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does an NFL coach. Hence, the recasting of the offensive left tackle to become a lynch pin of a winning team.

The physical and skill requirements for this new role changed a position of forgotten names and numbers into one of top draft choices and salaries. Inevitably and urgently, that merger of necessity and opportunity would make its way into college and high school football.

And so the connection to a lonely, abandoned, unschooled African American boy from the Memphis projects, who becomes embraced by a white, evangelical family, and a school whose motto is “Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian,” and eventually the Ole Miss football team.

This tale of nature and nurture, the escape from loneliness, neglect, squalor and silence, is of the creation of a new life for Michael Other, who at sixteen looked to be six feet five inches and 330 pounds, with feet of astonishing agility, and tested at an IQ of 80.

The moving forces are accident, good will, good fortune and purposeful kindness. It is the sports fervor and savvy, generous and directing instincts and unshakable and shrewd resolve of Sean and Leigh Anne Touhy that shape Oher’s awakening and future.

Sean, a high school pal of Lewis, is a fast food entrepreneur with the heartbeat, humor and court sense of an old jock, a scrappy basketballer of drive, who stands with wonder at how his wife takes matters in hand. Leigh Anne, once a cheerleader at Ole Miss, where Sean set an NCAA record for assists (the right metaphor for his role in TBS) becomes for Oher a maternal player-coach who gives new meaning to alma mater.

It is the Touhy family, with their daughter, Collins and son Sean Jr., who provide provisions and visions, willpower and wherewithal, welcome and warmth, to a boy who has only known drift and dislocation. For them, and thus for Oher, where there is a will, there is a way and, interestingly, it is not seemingly ground in the Will and the Way, but worldly paths.

Lewis’s story of Oher is a born again one. Oher had been so cut off from schooling he is without primers of how to think and fundamentals of knowledge. His IQ test is irrelevant. The only test score that appears germane to a boy who could grow up to shield quarterbacks is his high score on protective instincts. What we see and marvel at in Lewis’s retelling is a coming of age transformation where weeks and months stand for years in building for a teenager a new inventory of trust, thought, knowledge and habits.

The plotting quickens our interest as it begins with the mysterious silence and deep reserve of a young man sought out by one of the nation’s top spotters and rankers of high school football talent. Lewis then traces the history of the adoption of Oher, and how his natural, prodigious body and his tutored mind carry him from private school, and are carried by pleas and pressures, schemes and love, astonishingly to college eligibility and the avid press of football coaches.

Lewis does this in an idiom and muscular style common to serious journalism on contemporary matters. Sometimes this means, for me, some turgid patches in the NFL zones (for those with an quenched appetite for the mood and manner of NFL life, see Adam Gopnick’s very good piece in The New Yorker’s January 8 edition which mentions TBS).

I left TBS with a small wish for a novelist’s touch as to know more on the interior life of all I had met. Nonetheless, Lewis’s rightly way leaves the reader to be taken in by the compelling wonder of the story, but not to evade what disconcerts when considering the Touhys’ goodness, mother wit and steely determination, the academic bendings and the place of football in a university, and how the rescue of Oher’s life is a triumph that cannot help but remind the Touhys and us of how many are left behind.

8.5 out of 10

-------------

Steven L. Isenberg is the Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where his well-populated courses include my personal favorite--Literary Journalism: The Violent Worlds of War, Murder, and Boxing. He was formerly the publisher of New York Newsday and the Chief of Staff for Mayor John Lindsay. He is also the author of many of young I-Berg's neurotic complexes and feelings of inadequacy.

Melbourne comes earlier every year

Woke up this morning with a slight Ali hangover and realized that it's time to get back to the real world, and by the real world, I mean the Australian Open.

I'm just not ready for Grand Slam tennis in January. I'm flicking around channels looking for like the Boar's Head Salami Bowl and the next thing I know I'm watching Mario Ancic sweat his balls off in a hundred percent humidity and it's Wednesday but somehow it's already Thursday. They're talking about moving this tournament to later in the year and I endorse that. You hear that Melbourne? Large endorses that! Yeah yeah, it's too hot, but look, the real problem is it's just too early for us couch potatoes over here in the States.

All right. Now that I've got that off my chest, I can tell you that the tournament is finally worth paying attention to tonight, with a muscular third-round matchup between Marat Safin and Andy Roddick. Tough draw for A-Rod, but he's been a good sport about it. "Might as well get right into it," he said. Connors must have told him to say that. On the phone, though. Connors isn't down there. He's like, "look, I'll be your "coach" if you want, but I ain't flying all the way to freakin Australia for shit."

Also tonight - Serena, who's been looking pretty solid so far, plays five-seed Nadia Petrova, by far the best of the third-round women's matches. Number one in the galaxy, Roger Federer plays Russian Mikhail Youzhny, a dangerous and often exciting player who Fed could probably take in a five-setter with his left hand. Finally, the late match in Vodafone (sung, as always, to the tune of "Kodachrome") is The Battle for the Soul of France between eighteen-seed Richard Gasquet and Gael Monfils, a match that promises to be some merde serieuse.

The Champ of Champs

As you're probably aware, Muhammad Ali turns 65 today. To say that we revere the man here at No Mas is to understate the case considerably - in fact, if not for Ali, No Mas most likely wouldn't exist (to find out why, read this interview with His Longwindedness, the I-berg). It started with a t-shirt for us, but it grew into something more, and that something was just as connected to Ali as the shirt - a fascination with the athlete as an influence on and a reflection of the culture at large. That entire notion almost begins and ends with The Greatest. As far as we're concerned, he didn't invent rap, but he did invent almost everything else that we care about, and so today, on his 65th birthday, we dedicate our site to all things Ali. We're going to try and find a few nuggets you haven't seen yet, although that's a tough get with The Champ of Champs. We'll do our best - below you'll find the fruit of our labors. Now rumble young man rumble and away we go...

Respect

We hope you've enjoyed all the odds and ends we brought you today on the official No Mas "It's Ali's 65th Birthday" Smackdown. It's all meant to show our massive respect for the Champ and the excitement, intrigue, provocation and pure fun he brought into our lives. He touched so many different worlds, did so many different things, I feel like I could go on with these posts about him for days and never have to repeat myself.

But I got to wrap it up, and so for our last Ali post, I chose this one from 1978, when Ali himself is paying respects to perhaps the only other athlete of the century who shocked the world so completely and profoundly as he did. And, as Ali points out, Jack Johnson did his business at a time when black men weren't just sitting in the back of the bus - they were getting lynched every weekend. "They'd send him letters," Ali says, "that said nigger you win this fight we'll kill you... and Jack Johnson say well then just kill my black butt cause I'm gonna knock this white man cold."

I love this clip, even though you can already detect the beginning of the end in Ali's voice, the hint of a drawl that was not for dramatic emphasis but early evidence of a mind rapidly slowing. Nevertheless, he riffs so easily, so spontaneously, on his heroic forebear in the ring, and in about a minute and a half gives you a glimpse of that feeling that just about everyone who ever spent time with Ali comments upon with a gleam in their eye - how endlessly entertaining it was just to hang around with the man.

"It was so long ago, people still had log cabins"

"I'm the real Apollo Creed"

As if that was ever in doubt.

Liberace invented rap

Below is some footage of young Cassius with Liberace on the Jack Paar Tonight Show. It was in February of 1964, on the eve of the first Clay/Liston fight. While Liberace plays piano, Clay recites this poem:

This is the legend of Cassius Clay
The most beautiful fighter in the world in the world today
He talks a great deal and brags indeedy
Of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speedy
The fistic world was dull and weary
With a champ like Liston things had to be dreary
Then someone with color, someone with dash
Brought fight fans a-runnin with cash
This brash boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his desitiny
This kid fights great, he’s got speed and endurance
But if you decide to fight him… increase your insurance
This kid’s got a left, this kid’s got a right
And if he hits you once you’re asleep for the night
And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten
You pray that you won’t have to fight me again
For I’m the man this poem is about
The next champ of the world there isn’t a doubt
Here I predict and I know the score
I’ll be champ of the world in sixty-four
If Cassius says a mosquito can pull a plow
Don’t ask how…
Hitch him up!

As Ali poems go, it's a winner, and yet somehow for me Liberace upstages him right at the beginning. He's telling Clay to recite something and he'll play in the background, and then he adds as a perfect throwaway, "For a change, do the one about you."

All right, Liberace... you win this round...

"There was some shit in my face a minute ago, I know that"

When I was about ten, if you had asked me who my top five favorite people in the world were except for my relatives, Richard Pryor and Ali definitely would have been on the list. You toss Steve Carlton up in there, Larry Holmes (ooh that Holmes/Ali fight was hard on Little Large) and probably Harold Carmichael... it's hard to say in retrospect but I think there's a very good chance that would have been my list right there.

Richard Pryor and Ali have always been linked in my mind because of how much I idolized them when I was a kid, but I think there's more to it than that. Without a doubt, the two of them shared an attitude and a unique historical moment. In the racial hothouse of the late 60's and early 70's, a boxer jailed for civil disobediance and a coke-snorting madman of a comedian were two of our culture's most profound, original voices - African-American men who took no shit from nobody, white or black. To call one a comedian and another an athlete I don't think does either of them justice. Pryor on the stage, Ali in the ring and out – it was high-wire performance art. They were manic, virile, hilarious performers, both of them, and each self-destructive in a way that would extol a heavy price – Pryor obviously, with the coke and the booze, but Ali too, in those post-Rumble years with the clowning rope-a-dope, when he took way more punches than he should have, all because he’d learned he could take a punch.

Their diseases late in their lives, their silence - with Richard it was an enormous loss for all of us, and with Ali it still is. But if it was the ferocity of their genius that ultimately consumed them, it still doesn't change the fact of their mammoth impact on the American twentieth century, two fast-talking highly intelligent badasses who spoke truth to power and changed the way we all think about each other forever.

Below is a Richard Pryor routine about boxing that begins with him riffing on a sparring session he had with Ali in a benefit. If you've never seen it before, trust me, shit is off the hook.

It was a chilla, and a thrilla...

... when Ali got tossed
across the ring by this Gorilla.

In the summer of '76, Ali unexpectedly jumped into the ring at a wrestling match in Philly to challenge the 6'5", 350-pound Gorilla Monsoon. He stripped off his shirt, threw a few lazy jabs at the Gorilla, only to have Monsoon pick him up and throw him on his ass, at which point the Champ hightailed it out of the ring.

The incident would later provide Stallone with the inspiration for the Thunderlips battle in Rocky III. Here's what the Gorilla had to say about the incident years afterward:

"Ali was trying to get publicity for an upcoming gimmick fight for a fortune against a Japanese wrestler (Antonio Inoki) and he apparently wanted to use me as a warm-up for publicity. I was in the ring, waiting for my regular match, when Ali jumped through the ropes, kicked off his shoes, tore off his shirt, and began screaming at me. I picked him up and tossed him to the mat with a ‘giant swing.’ But I gave him a break and didn’t use my ‘Manchurian splash.’ "

Monsoon insisted that he knew nothing of the stunt beforehand. "I never saw him (Ali) before and haven’t seen him since," he said.

"You got the butterfly part down"

The Champ on the Jacksons variety show schooling Michael Jackson on how to become a man. Little did he know how much schooling that would actually take. Looking at these two here, I can't help but wonder if anyone ever could have imagined in 1977 what eventually would become of them. Ali's situation I guess even then was predictable. Michael's fate, on the other hand, seems in retrospect only to make sense if space aliens were somehow involved.

Warts and all

There's an interesting article about Ali on the London Times online site today, one that essentially takes the same line as my Ali Crap piece. The writer's main point is that as we have sainted Ali, we also have sanitized his image past the point of recognition to make it more palatable to the white American mainstream, a mainstream that probably still today would reject the historical Ali - he of the friendship with Malcolm X, he of the Nation, he of the Vietnam refusal.

It's interesting to read a piece like this from England, one that feels no (or considerably less) need to participate in the cultural deification of an African-American boxer. I like how this article's ultimate purpose is to demythologize the Champ towards the aim of giving him a more sincere respect. I also appreciate how directly the writer confronts the irony and tragedy of Ali's enforced silence:

"Who knows how Ali, freed from the terrible restrictions of Parkinson’s, would have pronounced upon the great issues that defined his era and have yet to be resolved? Who can tell how a new generation of black Americans would have reacted to his historical legacy had it not been drowned in a torrent of mushy and historically misleading sentimentality?"

The Lord of the Ring suffers as history is rewritten around him (Times online)

K.O.W. - The Power of Muhammad

As part of our Ali birthday celebration, we take you back to November 14, 1966 for the No Mas Knockout of the Week - the night the Champ beat the stuffing out of Cleveland Williams in the Astrodome.

Granted, Williams was a shot fighter in 1966, a once fearsome heavyweight who'd been through a few too many wars, one in particular with the police. Williams hadn't fought a single bout in 1965 due to a gunshot wound that he received from a cop. Prior to that, he'd been known as a punishing puncher who had seriously hurt Sonny Liston in a 1959 fight before the Big Bear came back to stop him.

But even allowing for Williams' diminished capacity, Ali was miraculous in their fight - mobile, powerful, and with the handspeed of a Mexican flyweight on crank. Perhaps no heavyweight who ever lived would have beaten him that night - not Johnson, not Louis, certainly not Marciano or Tyson. He first puts Williams on the canvas with about a minute to go in the second with a straight right hand as he's backing up, a punch that occurs in the exact same part of the ring and looks oddly like the phantom right that felled Liston in their second bout. This punch, however, is no phantom. Williams gets up quickly, but he's far down queer street, and Ali floors him two more times in the round, both with beautiful right hooks, the second of which definitely would have ended the bout if Williams hadn't been saved by the bell. The third round brings another knockdown before the ref mercifully steps in. All in all, it's must-see material for the Ali acolyte. Everything is there - the patented shuffe, the laser jab, the laconic panther circling his prey. He's just a fighting machine, the total package.

Jim Brown calls the bout with Don Dunphy, just a year off his retirement from the NFL. Check out Jim at the end of the fight noting that Ali came into the fight at 212, and that both he and Angelo Dundee think that is the champ's ideal weight. I can only imagine how reassuring Angelo found Jim Brown's concurrence on that count.

If only, if only...

Wilt Chamberlain, never one to underestimate his own abilities at anything, started floating the idea in 1967 that he could whup Ali in the ring. Then he actually started calling him out, and the thing caught momentum in the press, culminating with Cosell having them both on the Wide World of Sports (check that freakshow out below). The initial furor never came to anything, but it all started up again around 1970, and amazingly, the fight was actually made, set for July 26, 1971 at the Astrodome. Wilt pulled out soon after agreeing to the date, saying he wasn't going to make enough money, although of course everyone just thought he was chicken. Click here to read a good East Side Boxing article about the whole mess.

But, so look. What do you say No Masians? Ali vs. Wilt, 1971, Astrodome... what happens? Timber?

Cassius Clay, Vocal Stylist

Above is a clip of Muhammad, then Cassius, singing with Sam Cooke on the BBC. The song they're doing is from an album that Cooke produced for Clay called "I Am the Greatest," and the song is called "The Gang's All Here." The full song is below, and you'll quickly notice when you watch the clip and then listen to the recording that it's a hell of a lot better when Sam Cooke is helping out. But if you've ever watched the first Liston fight, and wondered about the moment at the end when Clay is going nuts while he's being interviewed and then suddenly stops and yells, "let that man in here! that's Sam Cooke! that's the greatest singer in the world!", and then waits while Sam comes up and gives him a hug... well, here you go. Sam was something of a mentor to the young Ali, even went so far as to produce a record for him. They definitely were two handsome young sons of bitches - one can only imagine what kind of damage they did to the ladies when they went out on the town.

Saturday Night Fights in Canarsie

Saturday night, the Starrett City Boxing Club hosted an amateur show at the Paedegat Athletic Club in Canarsie.

Starrett City is known for producing some of the best fighters to come out of New York. The list includes Shannon Briggs, Luis Collazo, Curtis Stevens, Gary Starks and Dimitry Salita. But recently, the club has had problems. It unexpectedly shut its doors for three months during the summer amid rumors of financial problems.


Thankfully, on Saturday things looked again in order. Starrett had five prospects on the card, and as always Starrett City President and New York boxing celebrity Jimmy O’Pharrow(left) was in the house and in good spirits.

80 years old, Jimmy O still goes to the gym every night. He works directly with Golden Gloves Champion Will Rozinsky and undefeated pro Dimitry Salita, but he tells me he’s too old to train the next generation of Starrett fighters. Greg Doyer, and a guy Jimmy calls Panama, trained all the young guys on Saturday’s card.

Talking to Jimmy O, you feel exposed directly to his stream of consciousness. He claims doesn’t he understand anything Panama says and I can’t decide if he’s kidding or not. A minute later he pulls out a picture of himself in the trademark beanie, standing with George W. Bush and Salita at the White House Hanukah Party. He gives me a copy. I’m still not sure, but I think it might be a real picture.

I ask him for Golden Gloves predictions and he gives me only his own fighter, Will Rozinsky, who is expected by anybody who knows anything to take a Golden Gloves title again this year. Jimmy tells me the Gloves is only the beginning for Rozinsky: “Will is going to be a good pro. People just don’t know it yet.”


Rozinsky was there Saturday in a “Will Power” Yankees fitted cap with his very pretty girlfriend. It’s easy to see why Jimmy is so high on him; Rozinsky(left) is the #3 ranked light heavyweight in the country. And he acts right. He made a ring appearance and stayed the rest of the night in the bleachers talking boxing and yelling insight to his Starrett fighters in the ring.

Rozinsky even held the respect of the punk kids who were relentlessly heckling trainer Tony Fortunata of Powerhouse Boxing Club(below right).

Early in the night, after the first of three Powerhouse loses, Fortunata stormed away from his fighter and the ring. The kids in the bleachers didn’t let him forget it. They’d cheer loudly for any Powerhouse opponent and when Fortunata walked past they’d yell, “You’re fired” or “One slice of pepperoni (The Powerhouse trainers shirt made him look a little like a pizza delivery guy).”

It was almost too perfect for the kids when the Powerhouse entry in the 201+ Novice Division was knocked down twice in two rounds. He wore very tight shorts.

The nicest fight of the night was between Doyer-trained Anton Williamson of Starrett City and Whancie Harley of Park Hill Boxing Club in Staten Island.

Promoter Antonio Middyette told me before the fight to watch out for Harley, “Whancie hits very hard.” Watching him warm up, he looked a higher caliber of athlete than the rest of the field.

But in the ring Harley couldn’t make it work. Williamson stayed inside and punched. Harley looked dangerous but frustrated and he was never able to unload. On the judges scorecards, Williamson won a close fight.

Post fight Antonio (pictured left on Saturday with Junior Jones) said to me, “Anton fought a good fight. He cracked Whancie.”

Starrett trainer Greg Doyer wanted more from Williamson. All through the fight you could hear Doyer’s disappointment: “He don’t listen. He don’t listen.”

Rozinsky, sitting in the bleachers, sounding like he’d been there, sympathized with Williamson and laughed at Doyer’s anguish.

It’s a good time of the year for amateur boxing. On a Saturday night of generally uninteresting fights, there was a buzz in the air as everyone anticipates the Golden Gloves. This year is especially exciting because many people believe some of Brooklyn’s young fighters are going to be world-class talents. Danny Jacobs, Saddam Ali, Will Rozinsky, and Andre Willett all have a chance at going to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

If you’re in New York, come see the talent January 24th when the Golden Gloves open at the Copacabana. Also on the schedule, this Friday, January 19th, Brotherhood Boxing Club sponsors a club show at the Williamsburg Community Center, 195 Graham Avenue in Brooklyn.

The Ides of January

Big day of birthdays today, starting with, of course, the Reverend of Reverends. Joining him is quite an eclectic group of sportsmen and women we celebrate today in his august shadow.

Goodbye Norma Jean

On January 14, 1954, Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe in a small civil ceremony at San Francisco's City Hall. Other than the couple and the judge, only three people were in attendance - DiMaggio's friend Reno Barsocchini, and his old manager from the San Francisco Seals, Lefty O'Doul, along with Lefty's wife.

If you know much about either of these two icons, then you probably know the iconic stories of their short-lived marriage. On their honeymoon, they went to Japan, and while there, Marilyn was asked to entertain troops in Korea on a USO tour. She went against Joe's wishes and performed for 60,000 salivating G.I.'s. Upon her return, she told DiMag, "oh Joe, the applause, you've never heard anything like it." His reply - "Yes I have, dear, yes I have."

And such was the crux of the issue - Joe, the retired ballplayer who'd never been much in love with the spotlight in the first place, and Marilyn, more in love with the spotlight than she was with life itself. Nine months after the wedding, the marriage was on the rocks, and when Joe witnessed Marilyn filming the infamous skirt-blowing scene for The Seven-Year Itch, he blew his top. Two weeks later Monroe filed for divorce, citing mental cruelty.

Evidently, they never stopped being in love. DiMaggio worshiped her memory, having fresh red roses delivered to her grave three times a week until his death. And in Richard Ben Cramer's book about the Clipper, A Hero's Life, he reports a scene where a drunken Marilyn rued the loss of DiMaggio and his cock, which was evidently enormous. "I miss Joe," she slurred. "He had a big bat and he could really hit home runs."

There were unsubstantiated rumors that the two were going to remarry around the time of Marilyn's death. DiMaggio loathed Sinatra's Rat Pack crowd and the Kennedy brothers ever afterward, believing it was their sordid influence on her life that killed her. In his brilliant 1966 Esquire piece on Joe D, "The Silent Season of a Hero," Gay Talese recounts the scene at Mickey Mantle's retirement ceremony in September of '65. It was at Yankee Stadium, and DiMaggio was there to introduce his successor in center, the Mighty Mick. While Joe was making the introduction, Bobby Kennedy appeared in the Yankee dugout to the great surprise of all the ballplayers. Later on, Kennedy was introduced and came out onto the field to congratulate Mantle. Talese writes,

"DiMaggio saw him coming down the line, and at the last second he backed away, casually, hardly anybody noticing it, and Kennedy seemed not to notice it either, just swept past shaking more hands."

The Last of the Galactics

(For a European perspective on the Beckham shocker, we bring you this post from No Mas's newest Parisian correspondent, Massaër Ndiaye.)

It’s seems to be the end of the Florentino Perez era over at Santiago Bernabeu. David Beckham, the last of the Galactics along with Ronaldo, will be moving to the United States this summer. And for a reported $250 million jackpot, making him the highest-paid football player ever.

At this very hour on Thursday, the news came down that the Spiceboy had finally made his decision to leave Real Madrid (that was not a surprise) for The Los Angeles Galaxy (that was a huge surprise).

Ever since the season began and Fabio Capello made it clear that the "Galactics" would be replaced by the "Hermetics,” it was clear that the clock was ticking for Becks and Ronaldo. But everyone expected Beckham to make one last go of it either in Italy or in the Premiership before finishing his career in the States. As far as the premiership was concerned, word is that he felt that his relationship with the British tabloids would not allow him to breathe in England, and his wife apparently veto'ed Italy from the get-go. Which left him two choices: go through hell in Madrid or leave the Continent and kiss the English national team goodbye. So he packed up Brand Beckham and took it to La La Land.

David Beckham was never the best player in the world, far from it. He was not even the best player at his position on his own team. He became a pop-culture phenomenon first because of his right foot (the most amazing since Michel Platini), then because of his main squeeze. People hated him because of his looks - the hair, the tattoos - and because of the fact that he wore dresses in magazines and because every woman in Europe wanted to bed him no matter what he did.

No one ever hated him for his game though. He is one of the most unselfish superstars ever to play football. He accepted being the third midfielder in Madrid behind Zidane and Figo without ever complaining. He became the target of a British vendetta after the ‘98 World Cup because he was sent off (and funny how in a similar position, Wayne Rooney is considered a victim). But through it all, he apparently stayed the same humble guy who was just glad to play on the best team in the world. Zidane said that he was the nicest guy he met in football. That says a lot.

Europeans never will give him the credit he deserves because everyone expected him to be Zidane. Sometimes he could carry a team and sometimes he couldn’t, but in the end, he always shouldered the responsibility like a man and you have to respect that.

It seems like the perception across the Atlantic is that they're getting another Pelé, Cruiyff or Beckenbauer who will help the sport develop. This may or may not be the case. They will be getting the most marketable guy in the sport for sure and a solid player to boot, but will he be able to consistently perform at a level that will justify his earnings? Time will tell.
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As I mentioned at the top there, No Mas is proud to welcome a new member to our side, Massaër Ndiaye. Also known to all you No Mas faithful as Madsear, the man comes to us from Paris where he is a law student and general sports fanatic in truly No Masian fashion. He was born in Paris but grew up in Senegal, and he caught our eye when he let slip in a message that back in the 90's (when, by my calculation, he was a much younger chap than I was in the 90's) he would stay up until three in the morning to watch Julio Cesar Chavez fights. This, we thought, was a major league No Mas prospect. And indeed, we have discovered that he got game, serious game. So check him out - we're thrilled to have him on the team.

No Mas and the Week That Was

1/7
The Fighting Fisherman
Yvon Durelle, former light heavyweight champion of Canada and the British Empire died at the age of 77, which of course made us think about his legendary bout with Archie Moore in which he knocked the Mongoose down three times in the first round.

1/8
In the Carlos Mon-Zone
On the anniversary of the death of Carlos Monzon, we bring you the Argentinian in our No Mas Knockout of the Week, a 12th-round Monzonian destruction of Nino Benevenuti for the middleweight championship. "Benevenuti staggers to his feet as the ref is counting him out, and then, as Monzon celebrates in the center of the ring, the vanquished Italian does a Frankenstein-walk toward the ropes where he collapses in the arms of his handlers. Goodnight Irene."

Peter/Toney redux
Our man Unsilent Majority comes to us on loan from Kissing Suzy Kolber to help us out with a little analysis of Sam Peter's unanimous-decision victory over James Toney last Saturday. We also include a little video of the younger, considerably trimmer Lights Out knocking Michael Nunn's lights out.

What time is it? Hawk (and Goose) time!
On the eve of the announcement of the new Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, Large makes his case for Goose Gossage and Andre "Hawk" Dawson.

1/9
Big O 56, Seton Hall 54
On this day 49 years ago, the University of Cincinnati's Oscar Robertson went from star to stratospheric, scoring 56 points at the Garden, two more than the opposing team did in the entire game.

1/10
The die was cast f'real
Yo we're going back (how far back?) way WAY back, to the days when men were men and sheep were nervous and conquering conquerors crossed the Rubicon like it weren't no thang.

The Message
Large examines the Hall of Fame voting results and is shocked by what he finds. "The fact of the matter is that without the steroid controversy, McGwire's career gets him into the Hall, probably on the first ballot. Which means that if he doesn't get in, neither does Bonds, and neither does Sosa, and an entire era of baseball is being essentially erased from the annals of history..."

1/11
Chocolate Thunder at 50
To celebrate the 50th birthday of the President of Interplanetary Funkmanship (earthname - Darryl Dawkins) we reprint a story from the No Mas issue of Frank 151 where the double D tells us, among other things, how he used to have Lola Falana riding shotgun in his invisible spaceship and why Darth Vader is such a little bitch, even in a friendly game of one-on-one. "Maybe the reason that there are so few black superheroes is that there is this one cat who is so bad and so funky and so generally large and in charge and that there's just no need for all the low-rent Daredevils and Green Lanterns that populate the Superman market."

1/12
Don't Get Weary Joe Frazier
First the Big Choc and now Smokin Joe - it's a birthday bonanza on No Mas. We celebrate Joe Frazier's 63 birthday with the song that says it all.

Don't Get Weary Joe Frazier

From Chocolate Thunder to Smokin Joe - I tell you it's Christmas in No Mas Land. Philadelphia's own Joe Frazier turns 63 today. The way this article from last October's New York Times made it sound, ole Joe's fallen on some hard times of late, but look, Joe Frazier knows from hard times. He'll bounce back. Sixty-three years old, battle-scarred veteran of beatings that would have killed mere mortals... and he's probably still the toughest man alive. Ali/Frazier tomorrow, who do you like? I thought so.

Joe, if you're reading, we got a little birthday pick-me-up for you carved out special right here. Remember this one from your boy I-Roy? He say Don't get weary Joe Frazier never never Brother Joe and he meant it from the bottom of his heart. And so do we, yo. Best wishes and many, many more.

Chocolate Thunder at 50

Today is a very special day for us - one of the true friends and patron saints of No Mas, Chocolate Thunder (aka Darryl Dawkins) is celebrating his 50th birthday.

Of course, those are only earth years, which don't mean much at all to a universal force like the Big Choc. But yo, it's a thing nonetheless, and so we thought we'd offer our heartfelt best wishes by rerunning an interview we did with His Highness that was first published in the No Mas issue of Frank 151 (now a collector's edition f'real). And so, as they say, check out your mind, cause there is no impediment to space and time. Happy Birthday Choc, we love you...

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Maybe the reason that there are so few black superheroes is that there is this one cat who is so bad and so funky and so generally large and in charge and that there's just no need for all the low-rent Daredevils and Green Lanterns that populate the Superman market.

This superbrother’s name is Chocolate Thunder, and he hails from the Planet Lovetron. He has most of the traditional super powers that the generic heroes have, but he also has this whole off-the hook funkosity quotient that makes a superhero like Batman, for instance, seem like the borderline pansy that he is. Chocolate Thunder was once the Chairman of Interplanetary Funkmanship, and yes, that is a very heavy trip for mere earthlings to comprehend.

His daytime Clark Kent name is Darryl Dawkins. But unlike Clark Kent, he is anything but mild-mannered. Nor is he shy about using his super-powers for his day-to-day enjoyment purposes. Being 6’11”, and being able to fly and smash stuff and shit, he decided to play in the NBA.

He joined up with the Sixers, and pretty soon just forgot about all that crime-fighting hassle and concentrated on basketball, slayin ho’s, and partying. His greatest joys were dunking, dancing and laying down his mack game, in that order. He named all his dunks like they were his children, names like The Rim-Wrecker and The Spine-Chiller Supreme and The Sexophonic Delight. He laid tons of women and did loads of drugs and just generally carried on like Superman or the Hulk would if they weren’t wound so tight.


Nowadays, he's just chilling, coaching an ABA team, the Newark Express. We caught up with him last week to get all the news from the stratosphere and see what he was up to.

NM: So, Darryl... Mr. Thunder... are you still the Chairman of Interplanetary Funkmanship?

DD: I'm actually president now.

NM: That's quite a promotion.

DD: It's not that big a deal. I've been on the scene for a while out there. It's more about how people have to treat ME, you know what I'm saying? Not what I myself have to DO.

(We ponder that, and find it has great meaning)


NM: Where is Lovetron exactly?

DD: Lovetron is a planet that is one million billion light years away. I go there in my mind to, you know, get away from the day-to-day.

NM: Anyone else we might have heard of who's been to Lovetron?

DD: Oh yeah. World B. Free. Artis Gilmore. And lots of beautiful women. That was my whole thing, taking the ladies out there. That's why, when I go there, I travel in an invisible transporter, so everybody can see all the fine women I travel with. I like to show them off, you know. Back in the day, Lola Folana was often to be seen in my spaceship.

NM: Have you ever been to Krypton?

DD: I've flown over it a couple times. I gotta say, I've never really been able to understand that whole scene. Superman, people from Krypton, they all get destroyed by Kryptonite! I mean, that doesn't make any sense. See, I'm Chocolate Thunder, but I don't get destroyed by chocolate. I like chocolate.

NM: Can anything destroy Chocolate Thunder?

DD: White lightning. In very large quantities.

NM: Do you know Superman?

DD: Oh yeah. All us superheroes know each other. It's very casual. I'm like hey, what's up Supe? And he says, yo Choc. And Devil... you know, Daredevil, I see him around a lot. We don't really hang, but we're cool.

NM: Superman can fly and bend stuff and all... what are the specific superpowers of a Lovetronian?

DD: Well, telling you them all would take a while. But the bending things, that's a key difference right there. Superman bends things. Lovetronians are all about making sure things don't get bent.

(Again, we ponder. The universe is starting to make sense.)

NM: How's Superman on the court?

DD: Solid. You know, he can fly, which is tough. But basketball is not really his thing.

NM: What about Darth Vader? He seems like he's probably got some game.

DD: Oh definitely, Darth is a mother in the paint. He just backs you down and backs you down. He's relentless.

NM: Is Darth really that bad of a guy, or has he just gotten a bad rap?

DD: No no no no NO, Darth is a VERY bad dude. Here's the thing when you're playing ball with Darth... you gotta be careful. Cause he gets worked up, and the next thing you know, you go to block his shot and he just slice your whole hand off, like that.

NM: Finally, Mr. Thunder... on a personal note. Obviously you Lovetronians are very skilled in the art of love. We've been having a little trouble with the ladies lately. You got any seduction tips for mere mortals?

DD: Toes. Earthlings always forget about the toes. Women love to have their toes done. And don't be afraid to use your mouth.

The Message

What happened yesterday with the Hall of Fame voting was nothing short of shocking (and no I'm not referring to the fact that once again, Goose Gossage did not get his props, although that also qualifies as a shock in my book). I did not think there was a chance that Mark McGwire would make it into the Hall on the first ballot. It seemed clear to me that a message would be sent about steroids with this vote and that Big Mac, a certain first-ballot HOF'er given the numbers, would be forced to sit out a year or two as penance for his sins.

But yesterday's voting results have to make you wonder if the message that was actually being sent to McGwire is that he never will be elected into the Hall of Fame. He was named on a paltry 23.5% of the ballots, which does not bode well for his candidacy. I did a quick check and found that since 1980, only two players with first-year numbers as bad as Mac's eventually got elected to the Hall by the writers. In his first year of eligibility, 1982, Cubs' great Billy Williams was named on only 23.4% of the ballots and was elected just five years later with an 85.7% tally. In 1994, Bruce Sutter appeared on the ballot for the first time and received only 23.9% of the votes - he was finally elected last year.

Of those two, I think that only Billy Williams should be considered interesting, because Sutter was caught up in the debate concerning relief pitchers (one that seems to continue to plague one Mr. Gossage). As for Williams - I don't get it. He was a clear-cut Hall-of-Famer. That he started off with such a low percentage of votes seems to me a statistical anomaly. On the '82 ballot were two first-year near-unanimous inductees (Aaron and Frank Robinson) followed by five guys who were voted in soon after (Marichal, Killebrew, Wilhelm, Drysdale and Aparicio). The glut of big names at the top of the list may explain Williams' poor showing.

McGwire's numbers certainly cannot be explained in this way. Of the names after Ripken and Gwynn, likely only Gossage eventually will make it in, maybe Rice and Dawson, but all three of them could go either way. Maybe Big Mac's results will fit more in the Sutter camp - low initial numbers due to an internal debate that will work itself out in time in his favor. But that's a big maybe, and it's ramifications are enormous. The fact of the matter is that without the steroid controversy, McGwire's career gets him into the Hall, probably on the first ballot. Which means that if he doesn't get in, neither does Bonds, and neither does Sosa, and an entire era of baseball is being essentially erased from the annals of history. The mind boggles.

The die was cast f'real

Exactly 2056 years ago today, the ultimate 50-yard-line was breached. With only a single regiment (a single regiment of genuine badasses it must be noted), Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 B.C., and shit was on. As he himself put it, lacta alea est - which translates to "the die is cast" but also can be taken to mean, "yo let's do this."

An ancient boundary between Gaul and Italy, the Rubicon was a crucial symbol in Roman law - no general was permitted to cross it with a standing army for any reason. Thus, Caesar's action immediately ignited a civil war, one that he knew he was going to win hands down. This he did, chasing Pompey's pissass army around for about a year and half before pushing his team into the red zone, Rome, where he was officially appointed dictator. Game over. He celebrated his victory by heading down to Alexandria and knocking up Cleopatra, who was at the time a veritable Pam Anderson for the dictator set.

Big O 56, Seton Hall 54

On this day 49 years ago, the University of Cincinnati's men's basketball team torched Seton Hall at Madison Square Garden, 118-54. Amazingly, the Bearcats superstar sophomore, Oscar Robertson, netted 56 points in the game, outscoring Seton Hall all by himself. At the time, it was the most points ever scored by a single player at the Garden.

The Big O was a college sensation, a ferocious athlete who did it all (check out those splits up there - man could have been a gymnast), and this was the game that broke him onto the national stage. Check out this 1958 Time Magazine article about Robertson and his 56-point explosion.

What time is it? Hawk (and Goose) Time!

The 2007 Baseball Hall of Fame inductees get announced tomorrow, one of the most ballyhooed vote tallies in recent years, due to the fact that two certain first-ballot heir-apparents are up for election, Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken, and because the steroid era has finally reached the Hall with the candidacy of Mark McGwire.

Personally, I don't care too much about Big Mac one way or the other, or Gwynn and Ripken for that matter. Roids or no roids, they were all great players with first-ballot numbers who nevertheless bored the shit out of me their entire careers.

But two players I loved are also on the ballot, fighting to get their props from the Hall, and I'm hoping that one (or maybe both - longshot, but maybe) of them gets the call this year.

My two hopefuls are:

Andre "The Hawk" Dawson - Jayson Stark made the case for the Hawk recently as well as it can be made. so I'll just quote him - "He racked up 2,774 hits, 438 homers and 314 stolen bases. The only other players in history who can match that combination are Willie Mays and Barry Bonds."

Rich "Goose" Gossage - Look this one should be easy, because Bruce Sutter got in the Hall last year, and freaking Bruce Sutter couldn't carry Goose's moustache. I mean, wtf?

Blyleven and Rice are borderline guys in my book. Good arguments can be made for both of them, but they also seem to me to be guys that unfortunately exist to define the line of who is and who isn't a Hall of Famer. Dawson and Gossage, on the other hand, should have crossed that line a long time ago. Here's a hearty No Mas hurrah hoping that tomorrow is their day.

Holy shit

I'm sitting here stunned, and more than a little annoyed, with this Florida/Ohio State debacle I just witnessed, but rather than go into the multitude of unpleasant issues it raises, all of them to do with the dubiousness and sucklisciousness of the BCS and the unfathomable fact that one of the teams on the field tonight very clearly hadn't played a game since before Thanksgiving... rather than get into that load of crap I thought I'd just pose some general questions to the No Mas universe:

• Which victory surprised you more - Vince Young over USC last year or this Florida pantsing of the Buckeyes? Personally I think I was more surprised last year, although this shit tonight was definitely shocking. I can't think of the last time I've seen a team so unprepared to play football in such a big game (oh wait, yeah, the Eagles in the first quarter of that game with the Giants yesterday... mercifully that can be filed under "let us never speak of that again").
  
• Is Troy Smith a pro quarterback? Or let me put it another way... is Troy Smith six feet tall? That's what they list him at, which is already short for an NFL QB, but yo, I think he's 6'0" like Barkley was 6'6". Chris Leak is supposed to be barely six foot, and he definitely had an inch on Troy when they were hugging it out post-game.
  
• What's your most memorable college football bowl upset with the national championship on the line? Penn State over the Miami militia in '87? How about Ohio State in '03? Or perhaps it's Miami over Nebraska in '84? If you're forgetting what happened at the end of that one, then refresh your memory below.

Peter/Toney Redux

Below I've included some words from the one and only Unsilent Majority on the Sam Peter/James Toney throwdown. U.M. is on the team over at Kissing Suzy Kolber, the best NFL blog in town. He watched the fight Saturday night and dashed us off a few words from the office about the affair. I'm muy grateful for his effort just for alerting me to the fact that Billy Blanks was actually in Toney's corner during the fight! Jesus. I had no idea. And I must say, I wholeheartedly agree with our man here about Lights Out the Heavyweight. I was watching the Toney/Michael Nunn fight the other night on YouTube and marveling at James the middleweight. Of course, that was 16 years and several hundred pounds ago for the man. Check it out below, check out Dundee in Nunn's corner, check out how Slim Jim Toney drops Nunn like a bad habit. But first I hand it over to U.M.:

...watching Billy Blanks try to dole out serious coaching in the the corner was hilarious. I was just waiting for Freddie Roach to tell him to shut the fuck up. Honestly I cannot stand Toney as a heavyweight, I can't remember his fights ever providing entertainment. However this one was different, this time Peter just came out clubbing. The knockdown wasn't pretty but watching his jelly roll ass hit the canvas was theraputic. It came off of a fairly ordinary jab that should only have succeeeded in making Toney's nose uglier. Instead Peter was able to catch him flat footed and Toney went down in slow motion (at least it looked like slow motion). The first half of the fight was hugely entertaining because the two guys stepped up and slugged it out. Once the second half of the fight got underway it became fairly one-sided with Peter pounding away...good times all around. Now let's see if Peter can do that against a champion.

K.O.W. - In the Carlos Mon-Zone

One of the great middleweights (if not THE greatest middleweight) of all time, Carlos Monzon died in a car accident on this day in 1995. Fifty-two years old, he was returning from furlough to prison in Argentina, where since 1989 he had been serving a sentence for killing his wife, Alicia Muniz.

Monzon's life was glamorous, violent and ultimately tainted by pure evil. More handsome than any boxer has a right to be (Gael Garcia Bernal should definitely be Will Smith to Monzon's Ali), he was brutal to his opponents and just as brutal to everyone else, known for beating his friends and his wives and the gaggle of impossibly gorgeous girlfriends that followed him wherever he went. It was one of these beatings that caused the death of his second wife, Muniz, and landed Monzon in jail.

But as is so often the case in this savage sport, what was disgraceful out of the ring was pure genius inside it. As a fighter, Monzon was the living embodiment of the killer instinct in action. For this installment of the No Mas Knockout of the Week, we take you back to his crushing 12th-round knockout of Nino Benevenuti in Rome on November 7, 1970. It was the Ring Magazine Fight of the Year, and it earned Monzon the middleweight crown, an honor he would never relinquish, retiring seven years later after 14 successful title defenses.

You definitely want to watch this one. A pinpoint right straight down the pike does the deed, puts the Italian down as if he's been shot. Benevenuti staggers to his feet as the ref is counting him out, and then, as Monzon celebrates in the center of the ring, the vanquished Italian does a Frankenstein-walk toward the ropes where he collapses in the arms of his handlers. Goodnight Irene.

Note to self... Tae-Bo makes you suckier

Yo help me out. Unsilent Majority, Chief, anybody out there. I didn't see Sam Peter whup up on James Toney last night, wasn't, I confess, particularly interested after the fatman slow-dance of the first contest. But from what I read today James got the beating of his life in there, and even landed on the canvas for the first time in his career. An interesting article by James Slater on East Side Boxing suggested that Toney's high-profile Tae-Bo regimen and macrobiotic diet with fitness guru Billy Blanks left him weak on fight night. Wouldn't surprise me. Lights Out is 38 yo, and he's been through the wars. Not to mention, training hard has never been his thing, and... is it just the pictures or did he look as fat as ever last night? I mean, if all the fakeass aerobic kickboxing and seaweed shakes weren't going to help him drop a few pounds, then shee-it. Seems like they might as well have let the old dog have his bones.

But look, like I said, I didn't see it. So somebody step up and break it down for us all and I'll publish it as a post. Thanks in advance for doing my work for me.

The Fighting Fisherman

Yvon Durelle, former light heavyweight champion of Canada and the British Empire, died yesterday at the age of 77. Born in New Brunswick, and known as the Fighting Fisherman, Durelle forever will be remembered for one epic fight with Archie Moore in 1958. The ageless Mongoose was 42 years old and owner of the light heavyweight belt - Durelle was a 4 to 1 underdog going into the contest. It was one of the first fights broadcast to a live national audience in the States, and the nation saw Durelle play cobra to Archie's Mongoose right from the opening bell, knocking the old codger down three times in the first round. Cagey and resilient, Moore held on and got his wits back in the second, and came back to knock out the exhausted Durelle in the 11th round.

This comeback was one of the greatest feats of Archie Moore's career, but the fight also made Durelle a national hero in Canada. Unfortunately for the Fisherman, he wouldn't fare so well in a rematch with Moore a year later - the Mongoose struck quickly, knocking Durelle out in the third.

Below is the first round of the 1958 fight, and then the tenth and eleventh. Note Archie's robe - Diamond Palace Importer's San Diego - pretty damn ghetto. Also note just how far down queer street he is after the first knockdown - he barely beats the count. It's amazing that he survives the round. By the tenth, Durelle is utterly spent and Moore is landing at will. The finish is only a matter of time. I love the way old Arch springs out of his corner for the start of the eleventh. Forty-two years old in the eleventh round of a throwdown brawl and he's leaping to the fray like Robin Hood to the rescue. Dude was an absolute marvel.

The No Mas Week in Review

12/31
It was on in Lyon
We take it back to New Year's Eve, 1990, when Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov finished off the last of their epic World Championship smackdown-rumbles. Chess innit? Shit is fierce.

THIS is Rafael's Fight of the Year?
Large takes issue with ESPN's Dan Rafael and his FOY selection. "Evidently Brother Dan and I have a very different idea of what constitutes a good fight. He seems to think it involves two borderline retards in pillow-sized gloves throwing off-balance haymakers at each other and connecting once every six tries with punches that have no pop on them because their authors aren't punching so much as just standing there flatfooted and waving their arms around."

1/2
From the Bear to Broadway
The 42nd anniversary of the Jets' signing a brash young quarterback out of Alabama.

K.O.W. - Pearl Harbor for The American Boy
The No Mas Knockout of the Week features the runner-up for the 2006 No Mas Fight of the Year, Jose Hernandez's eighth-round KO of Jason Litzau.

There are no words
Large reaches deep to eulogize James Brown. "I've listened to JB countless times myself while hitting the bag or getting my shadowbox on, working up that good sweat, feeling my own feeble funk while I bobbed and weaved and jabbed on the one. Shit is so good, so nice, it's hard to believe James didn't have the boxing gym in mind when he put half that shit together."

1/3
Covering Himself in Glory
A.I. you punk you're up to your old shit in Denver already and yo son we don't miss you at all. And oh yeah, them powder blues make you look soft already. "... I woke up this morning and saw that the lowly Sixers won last night in Denver, and that A.I. got ejected, and that he cried like a bitch to the press before and after the game about everything that crossed his mind. When I read all of that, for the very first time since the trade went down, I thought to myself good riddance.

King Kong and Godzilla
January 3rd - quite an anniversary day in Yankeeland, a day in history that brought the Bronx both Big Stein and The Sultan of Swat.

1/4
Pistol Pete must've been all hungover
On January 4th, 1975, the Jazz managed only 20 points in the first half of a game against the Sonics, a record that stood for almost a quarter of a century until the Clippers got around to seizing yet another benchmark of basketball suckosity.

D Large
What would your boxing nickname be? What song would you walk into the ring to? What would your robe look like? "I also have this fantasy where one of my celebrity friends (I'm like the unified champ at 154, see, so I have a TON of celebrity friends), maybe Raekwon, has put together a rap specially for my entrance called "Larger than Large." And when I get to the ring, I open up my robe and I'm wearing a huge belt that reads "D Large" and yo yo, the D is for Diamonds."

1/5
Black Friday
What better way to end a week than to look at a bunch of pictures of people who died tragically on this day in history and get all sad about it? Kick 2007 off right people and get your dead on with your friends at No Mas.

Black Friday

This is morbid, I know, but during my daily research I was struck by the sporting (and I invoke the word in a loose connotation) deaths that have occurred on this day in history, many of the tragic, before-their-time variety. So here they are, quite a group, including the immortal pictured above. A moment of silence for these fallen heroes:

D Large

Our boy Don Khan left a comment this morning on my James Brown eulogy that posed a question for the ages:

What song would you pick to accompany your entrance to the ring, had you that opportunity?

Oh No Masians don't tell me you haven't thought about this about a zillion times. As I said in my message, this simple question has preoccupied me for years. I've never been able to narrow it down to one, so I just gave him my top five:

1. Fight the Good Fight - Triumph
2. Bad Boy Boogie - AC/DC
3. Mystic Eyes - Them
4. Recognize - ODB
5. War Pigs - Sabbath

I also have this fantasy where one of my celebrity friends (I'm like the unified champ at 154, see, so I have a TON of celebrity friends), maybe Raekwon, has put together a rap specially for my entrance called "Larger than Large." And when I get to the ring, I open up my robe and I'm wearing a huge belt that reads "D Large" and yo yo, the D is for Diamonds.

Larry Holmes told me that he personally invented the whole walking into the ring to a song thing when he went into his title fight with Ken Norton in '78 to "Ain't No Stopping Us Now." I've never exactly researched that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

Certainly Tyson was the king of the ring entrance, "Don't Believe the Hype" of course, and then that crazy didgeridoo type vibrating bass noise that was playing when he came into the ring against Spinks. It wasn't a song, just a very loud terrifying sound, like the only thing you ever hear in hell. As if Spinks wasn't afraid enough already.

The best ring entrance I've ever witnessed personally was Dmitri Salita at the Hammerstein coming into the ring with Matisyahu behind him rapping. There was a live band in the corner playing. It was loud as all getout and all the Hasids in the audience were going absolutely apeshit. When they got to the ring, Matisyahu kept rapping and Dmitri bounced around throwing punches. He was amped, we were all amped. It was ill with a capital ill.

I write this all as a preface to hearing from all my people out there in No Mas land. I want to know what your nickname would be, what song you'd walk into the ring with, what your robe would look like, etc. Best ring entrance ever, best ring entrance you've ever witnessed. Let's air it all out right here. Get in the ring, have no shame.

Pistol Pete must've been all hungover

On this day in 1975, the New Orleans Jazz set a record for scoring futility, managing only 20 points in the first half of their 111-89 loss to the SuperSonics. Like I said, either Pistol Pete was all hungover, or he got to the stadium late and didn't make it into the game until the third quarter. Cause damn, back in his LSU days, Pistol had scored 20 points before the game even started.

This Jazz record for one-half crap-osity stood for nearly 25 years, and yo, you would have thought it would stand for eternity. But no. Thank God for them Clippers. The Clips managed only 19 points in the first half of their game with the Lakers on December 14, 1999, getting ole Pete and the Jazz off the schneid.

King Kong and Godzilla

Today is a mother of a day in Yankee lore, a day in history when two of the giants of the franchise joined the team.

On January 3, 1920, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee completed a deal with the Yanks to send his star pitcher and slugger Babe Ruth to the Bronx in exchange for $125,000 cash and a $300,000 loan. Ruth paid Frazee back by becoming arguably the greatest baseball player who ever lived with the Yankees, leading them to four World Series titles, and, oh yeah, putting a curse on the Red Sox that would last for 86 years. In short, the deal was tremendously one-sided.

On January 3, 1973, another epoch-making deal was finalized, as a group of investors led by Cleveland shipbuilder George Steinbrenner purchased the Yankees from the CBS corporation for ten million dollars. At the time of the sale, Steinbrenner was adamant that neither he nor any of his partners had any interest in managing the day-to-day affairs of the club. "We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned," he said. "We're not going to pretend we're something we aren't. I'll stick to building ships."

Of course, within a year, Big Stein had bought out most of his partners and become the team's principal owner. Evidently shipbuilding was beginning to lose its allure.

Covering Himself in Glory

I caught the tipoff of the Nuggets/Sixers game last night on NBA round-up and my first thought was, "those Nuggets unis are totally ill, but they are just NOT A.I.." My man looked right in Sixers black. Powder blue is not his shade.

Then in about the first minute of the game, Iverson committed about six turnovers, threw up an airball, and generally brought his tried-and-true offensive approach to the Nuggets system, i.e. - "I run around like a maniac trying to get an open shot for about 20 seconds or so, and then, in the most awkward of moments I dish to someone completely out of position to bail me out with a shot at the buzzer." Oh how this approach has ruled our lives in Philly for a decade now, and much as I loved the man, I can't say I'm going to miss it.

So then I woke up this morning and saw that the lowly Sixers won last night in Denver, and that A.I. got ejected, and that he cried like a bitch to the press before and after the game about everything that crossed his mind. When I read all of that, for the very first time since the trade went down, I thought to myself good riddance.

There are no words

A friend of mine recently wrote me an email chastising me for not having written about James Brown's death on No Mas. Strangely, I found out that James was dead because of No Mas, indirectly at least. I woke up that morning and made some coffee, turned on the computer, checked my email. The first message I read was from a different friend, which began - "Sad that in the midst of all this Ali Rap bullshit, the man who actually did invent rap died today."

James was a boxer as a young man, evidently a pretty good one, which is not hard to believe when you've dug the goodfoot once or twice. As far as sports go, his music is most directly connected to the sweet science, through his friendship with Ali and his performance at the Rumble in the Jungle festival in Zaire, through his unforgettable "Living in America" barnburner before the Drago/Creed bout in Rocky IV, and through Sonny Liston, who trained so compulsively to JB's "Night Train" that it became his personal theme song, and would later be the name of a Liston biography.

I've listened to JB countless times myself while hitting the bag or getting my shadowbox on, working up that good sweat, feeling my own feeble funk while I bobbed and weaved and jabbed on the one. Shit is so good, so nice, it's hard to believe James didn't have the boxing gym in mind when he put half that shit together.

Then again, there are few things to do that I have not done to the music of James Brown at least sometime. Drinking smoking dancing fucking cokesnorting eating driving grieving thinking every damn thing worth doing in my life has at some point been enhanced by James Brown doing his thing in the background. One album in particular, "In the Jungle Groove," I've listened to so many times in so many different phases that it's hard to imagine how many actual hours I've spent with that record on. It's been more of a constant for me than just about anything other than sports - friends, thoughts, styles, attitudes. I've turned my back on about a thousand different ideas of what my life should be over the years, and kept coming back to that album through every single one of them.

One moment I'll never forget - it was in my room in college, with four friends. We'd all dropped acid, it was the morning, winter-time, and my room was cold like it always was. The shit was just coming on us all pretty hard, that terrible strychnine-laced paper shit that fucked you up so wrong. Everything was starting to turn into a freakshow in there, and I went to my CD player to put on something mellow to chill everything out a little. Traffic, I think, was what I was trying to cue up.

But I played "In the Jungle Groove" by mistake, and from the very first sound on the record - "Fellas, things done got too far gone!" - a mighty spirit put the room in a stranglehold and the voodoo was high. We were about six songs into the thing before I even knew what hit me. It was like "Get Up Get Into It Get Involved" and I was thinking my goddamn head is about to blow right off of my body up in here and I looked up and saw my friends in the same feverish trance that I was, jaws clenched, faces red, bobbing their heads like they might hurt themselves. The music was vicious and dangerous, but in a way that we seriously, SERIOUSLY dug. For myself, it seemed like a glimpse of true manhood, of power and virility and righteousness and of just how heavy shit can get out there in the big bad world. To paraphrase Dylan, I was frightened by the awful truth of how sweet life could be.

Lester Bangs concluded his epic eulogy for Elvis by pointing out that the truly special thing about the King was that he had moved people across all lines of race and class and ethnicity, that he was something we'd all agreed to agree upon, and thus the tragedy of his death was that we weren't just losing an icon, but that we were losing something that had kept us all together, which in this day and age is the kind of thing that we can ill afford to lose. Right now, that feels more true to me of the Godfather of Soul than it ever was of Elvis, and so I'll steal a line from old Lester and finish up by not only bidding farewell to James Brown, but by bidding farewell, my dear readers, to you.

K.O.W. - Pearl Harbor for The American Boy

For the new year's first No Mas Knockout of the Week, I thought I would take you back to December 16 of last year and a fight that absolutely blew my mind - Jose Hernandez's eighth-round comeback knockout of The American Boy, Jason Litzau. As you probably know, Litzau is an exciting boxer/puncher out of St. Paul who has in the last year or so been slated for big things. As for Hernandez, he's a sometimes fighter, sometimes law-student from Chicago with impeccable form and a Golden Gloves pedigree. Based on the evidence of this fight, he's also as tough as the nails that all the other nails think are tough. As you'll see in the video above, he knocked Litzau down with a beautiful uppercut set-up and then an overhand right in the first round, and then came back with that same overhand right to straight-up knock Litzau out in the eighth.

But what you won't see in the above video is the intervening rounds two through seven, of which Hernandez did not win a single round. Litzau is powerful and fast and relentless, and Hernandez ate a shitload of lightning-quick combinations before he found the button with that overhand right. By the seventh, the HBO boys were calling for a stoppage. It was a hell of a gutsy performance by Jose Hernandez, and it only missed being the No Mas Fight of The Year by right of the fact that Pacquiao/Morales was an equally exciting bout of much greater overall import. As runner-up, however, I thought it deserved to be the first K.O.W. of 2007. Enjoy.

Il Campionissimo

On January 2nd, 1960, Fausto Coppi, arguably the greatest cyclist of the 20th century, died of malaria at the age of 40. He'd caught the disease on a hunting safari in Africa, and upon his return to Italy, he was misdiagnosed. By the time the truth was discovered, he was already at death's door.

Winning the Tour de France twice and the Giro d'Italia five times, Coppi was cycling's biggest star in a golden era for the sport - the post World War II years. He shares the all-time Giro d'Italia mark with the great Belgian Eddy Merckx, with whom Coppi also is often mentioned in a cross-generational sporting argument that rivals the legendary Ali/Marciano debates of the 60's and 70's. All Europeans agree that one or the other of these two cyclists is the greatest ever. No, Lance does not enter into that conversation, not even as a joke.

From the Bear to Broadway

Forty-two years ago today, the first New York megastar of the television age was born when the Jets signed Alabama quarterback Joe Namath to a contract worth a reputed 400 large. Just the day before, Namath had won the MVP of the Orange Bowl in a losing effort, as the Crimson Tide were defeated by Texas, 21-17, a loss that oddly enough did not cost 'Bama the A.P. national championship, despite the fact that Arkansas finished the season undefeated (O BCS where wert thou?).

Namath was an athletic prodigy dating back to his days at Beaver Falls High in PA, where he was a three-sport superstar and upon graduation was offered a contract with the Chicago Cubs. He started under center for three All-American seasons in Tuscaloosa, and Bear Bryant would later call him the greatest athlete he'd ever coached. Nevertheless, Namath showed early signs of the personality that would one day lead to a Suzy Kolber sideline smackdown. He was a noted carouser even as an undergrad, and in his junior season was dropped by the Bear from 'Bama's Sugar Bowl roster for missing curfew.

The reported disciplinary problems did nothing to affect his pro football value, however. He was drafted by the Cardinals in the NFL and the Jets in the AFL. Obviously, Broadway was already calling to 'Bama Joe, and as for the Jets, owner Sonny Werblin admitted that the signing was more than just a pure football decision. "Namath has the presence of a star," Werblin said. "You know how a real star lights up the room when he comes in. Joe has that quality." You know the quality he's talking about - the kind that can stand in the presence of the dear departed Mr. Please Please Please and not suddenly blend into the wallpaper (if anybody can tell me the story of this photo, rest assured that there's some top-drawer No Mas swag in it for you).