To the Manner Born

Forty-nine years ago today, Brazil won its first World Cup Final, defeating the Swedes in Stockholm. It was the completion of one of soccer's greatest coming-out parties, as the 17-year-old Pelé was announced to the world as a football phenomenon. Pelé was coming off a semi-final against France in which he broke a 2-2 tie in the 52nd minute and then proceeded to score two more goals for a natural hat trick that sealed the 5-2 victory and a trip to the final.

5-2 was again the score in the final, and Pelé again scored the last goals for the Brazilians, this time the last two, the first of which was a goal for the ages. Although I'm sure you've seen this goal many times, check it out again below. Equally amazing to me as the feat itself is how effortless he makes it seem, such that the whole transaction almost looks like the most natural thing in the world - of course, faced with an oncoming defender, he would just chest the ball to his feet, lob it over that defender, and then take it on the volley into the corner of the net. I mean, what the hell else was he going to do?

No Mas Weekend TV Guide: 6/29 - 7/1

6/29
Wimbledon
ESPN2, 8 a.m.
Two seeded Spaniards went down yesterday, David Ferrer and Tommy Robredo, while the only other surprise in the men's draw was a five-setter for sixth-seed Nikolay Davydenko against unseeded Aussie Chris Guccione. Only upset yesterday in the women's draw was 13-seed Dinara Safina losing to Akiko Morigami, spoiling what I thought would make a fine women's third-round match between Safina and Venus. The cradle will start to rock now, at least in the men's draw - some third-rounders to get worked up about include Blake/Ferrero, Federer/Safin, Nalbandian/Baghdatis.

Still We Believe - The Boston Red Sox Movie
IFC, 2 p.m.
The 2004 Red Sox movie of collective mourning, ironically titled, given what happened in 2004. Fans, players and front office alike chime in about the miserable 2003 seven-game ALCS Grady Little-designed loss to the Yankees.

Friday Night Smackdown
CW, 8 p.m.
I have no idea what's happening on Smackdown tonight. Look, for a complete sports-obsessed lifelong slacker, I'm a pretty busy guy. Is Vince McMahon still dead? Anybody out there want to interview for Franchise's now-vacant post?

Michael Moorer v. Evander Holyfield
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
What is with all the Holyfield fights on Classic lately? Jesus, give us a break. Anyway, this is an important one, Michael Moorer getting the crazy pep talk from Teddy Atlas in his corner with Teddy sitting on his stool, etc. I wrote about this one this past April in a post called Southpaw Jinx.

60 Minutes on Classic
ESPN Classic, 10 p.m.
Two half-hours of classic 60 Minutes - the first is devoted to Tiger Woods and his effect on golf, and the second profiles Pete Sampras and James Blake.

James Toney v. Adolpho Washington
ESPN Classic, 12 a.m.
If you are a fan of ole Lights Out (and I know you is) then you'll enjoy going back to a much slimmer edition's of JT handing out a beatdown to Adolpho Washington in this cruiserweight bout from 1999.

Ali
TNT, 1:30 a.m.
Hey you really really need to watch Will Smith do a mediocre job of pretending that he's the most charismatic man in the world in a bunch of strung-together scenes of The Greatest that primarily re-create moments that, if you so chose, you could watch actual footage of... well, if that's your bag, then here you are. The Champ meets The Fresh Prince.

6/30
Wimbledon
ESPN2, 8 a.m.
Third-round finishes up.

Wimbledon
NBC, 2 p.m
NBC takes over the coverage. It goes back to the deuce at 3.

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 2 p.m.
The Mike Tyson collected Ringside, by which I mean it's the early and late editions - six total hours of Iron Mike. It features, among others, George Chuvalo's commentary for some reason. I can't remember what exactly Chuvalo has to say on the Tyson legacy. It is my belief that Chuvalo did not fight Tyson, but I could be wrong on that. He fought just about everybody else.



There's Something about Mary
FX, 6 p.m.
Yeah there is. She can golf.

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
This Ringside is all about the great rivalries of boxing lore - you got your Ali/Frazier and your Zale/Graziano and your Holyfield/Bowe and your Robinson/LaMotta. Not sure if Pep/Saddler made the cut on this show. It is, as might imagine, a heavy duty Bert Sugar joint.

7/1
Classic Battle Lines
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
Calling all Sooners and Huskers - it's an early wake-up call on Sunday. This show documents the history of the Oklahoma/Nebraska football rivalry, paying special attention to the 1971 donnybrook, known as The Game of the Century and routinely hailed as the greatest college football game of all time.

Monster in a Box
IFC, 7:10 a.m.
Dah... don't they mean "Dick in a Box"?

Wimbledon
NBC, 12 p.m.
Seems like the first Sunday always ends up getting some tennis anyway due to all the rain, but even if they don't play, presumably NBC will show the first week's highlights.

Lords of Dogtown
Starz, 2:10 p.m.
I never saw this, and having seen Dogtown and Z-Boys, I never thought there was much point. Then again, I like to watch androgynous blonde pubescents on skateboards as much as the next pervert, and there's a very good chance that I will have nothing to do on Sunday at 2:10 p.m. and that I may suddenly decide to subscribe to "Starz" whatever that is.

Brazil v. Chile
Mexic0 v. Ecuador
Univision, 4 p.m.
La Copa America, two matches back to back.

Born to Run
FMC, 10 p.m.
Here's TV Guide on this - "Richard Grieco as an outlaw drag racer whose love of the sport is threatened by the local mob boss." And you know what I say to that - Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend I wanna guard your dreams and visions...

Beauty and the Beast

NO MAS MOVIE REVIEW

La Vie en Rose (La Môme)
Director: Oliver Dahan
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Gerard Depardieu
Produced by Légende



I recently saw this Édith Piaf bio-pic, which is titled La Vie en Rose in English for some strange reason, titled La Môme (The Kid) in French. To call this film La Vie en Rose, with its implicit suggestion of a life viewed through rose-colored glasses, certainly seems like a cruel joke given the true nature of Piaf's life, and especially given the version of it that finds its way onto the screen here. Most notable in No Masylvania for her famous affair with the great Algerian-born middleweight Marcel Cerdan, Piaf lived a life that in its rudiments bears more of a resemblance to that of a longshot club fighter than a preternaturally gifted entertainer, a life that left her as damaged in the end as any oft-pummeled pug who took his one too many far too early in the game. She died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 47, her body a withered, humpbacked shell, ravaged by years of hard drinking, drugs, and despair. Her curious version of la vie en rose.

This is one of those movies in which time is elastic, and the jumps are jarring at the beginning. Not until around the midway point does it find a groove between scenes of the cancer-ridden Piaf right before her death, the dying but resilient Piaf battling to return to the stage in 1961, and the younger, more vibrant edition as she navigates the many tragedies of her life.

Although her childhood was on the whole a tale that would have made Dickens cringe (abandoned by her mother, taken in by her alcoholic, contortionist father and his borderline grifter's existence, ultimately left to sing on the streets for her booze money), the most prominent of these tragedies is her doomed affair with Cerdan (Cerdan and Piaf pictured right), doomed because the fighter would die in a plane crash before their love could ever come to any satisfaction. The scenes between Cerdan, the beauty (played by the ridiculously handsome actor Jean-Pierre Martins) and Piaf, the beast, are the best of the film, although as fleeting as their affair was in life. Cerdan summons Piaf to a date in Manhattan under the pretext that they are both ex-pats who are longing for Paris. After taking a whiff of the pastrami at the rough-and-tumble joint where they meet ("it smells like a wet dog"), she whisks him off to a majestic restaurant and orders him a proper meal. They proceed to flirt in believable fashion, and soon the first bell has rung on their affaire de coeur.

It will be of great interest to the No Mas faithful that the Tony Zale/Marcel Cerdan middleweight title fight (Ring's Fight of the Year in 1948) is shown at length, with Piaf ringside, just as she was in real life. The fight itself is as preposterous as all movie fights, but the scene is perfectly staged to resemble a technicolor version of an old-time fight stadium (the Zale/Cerdan bout was in Jersey City of all places), and if Martins is just a little too dashingly Gallic to pass for the admittedly handsome Cerdan, whoever they got to play Tony Zale is a dead ringer.

Cerdan won the middleweight crown from Zale, and then lost it in his first title defense a year later to Jake LaMotta. Flying back to the States in October of 1949, where he had a rendez-vous planned with Piaf before he was scheduled to begin training for a LaMotta rematch, his plane went down. His death catapulted Piaf onto an even steeper descent of self-destruction than she already had been traveling. According to the film, after the Cerdan tragedy she became even more impossibly demanding and shrewish than she was before, only later to be redeemed by the humbling fact of her imminent death. This seems like the greatest crime of the film, for if, as I have read elsewhere, that along with being intermittently impossible Piaf was also regularly magnanimous and generally charming, she's been done quite an injustice by the La Vie en Rose treatment. The beast is primarily on display here - a beast with good reason in the film's cosmology - but a beast nonetheless. There is a lot of darkness and doubt (to bring the Mekons into this), a hell of a lot of shrieking in abominable pain, and not much magnanimity to speak of.

Still, this is a gripping film, and for more than just a brief re-visitation of a great chapter in middleweight history. Cotillard is breathtaking in the starring role, making one of those rare bio-pic transformations that achieves the alchemy sought in these films. It's also a great movie to look at on the whole, and the music is divine. If you aren't stirred by the "Je ne regrette rien" finale, than you don't have a pulse. I tell you, it's more moving than a toupéed Frank, or even a dangerously obese Elvis, singing "My Way". If you don't believe me, check out the real deal below. On s'en émerveille.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/28

Wimbledon
ESPN2, 8 a.m.
The biggest result of the day so far is Wayne Arthurs upsetting the 11-seed Tommy Robredo. No one of interest has yet fallen from the women's draw. Nadal, Hewitt and Sharapova are all in action later today, and His Henman-ness is playing right now, down two sets to Feliciano Lopez. (p.s. - Federer/Safin third-round - Rog might have to actually break a sweat before the semis.)

NBA Draft Preview
ESPN, 1 p.m. & 7 p.m.
It's on. Hopefully you were at the No Mas Lottery show last night to get yourself all primed and ready.

Enter the Dragon
AMC, 1:30 p.m.
One thing I've noticed about AMC since I've started doing this TV Guide - Enter the Dragon is on pretty much every day. I wonder what that's about.

NBA Draft
ESPN, 8 p.m
Sixers pick 12th. Simmons and Ford have them getting Al Thornton. I can't see it happening myself, but believe me, I'd take it. Although I don't know why I care - the Sixers are in bad, bad shape and Al Thornton ain't gonna do shit about that. Oden maybe, maybe, would have put them on the map. Stupid useless late-season surge. Anyhoo...

Evander Holyfield SportsCentury
ESPN Classic, 9 p.m.
Classic is slowly becoming the "all Evander all the time" network. I haven't seen this SC in a while, so they may have updated it to cover all the roids shit. On the whole it's a good watch, though. Good footage of his spread in Atlanta, which is regal.

TNA Wrestling Impact
Spike, 9 p.m.
Heavyweight champ Kurt Angle defends his title against Christian Cage and Rhino.

Mike Tyson SportsCentury
ESPN Classic, 10 p.m.
In my memory of this show, they pretty much attribute every insane thing that Tyson has done over the years to bipolar disorder and the fact that he has been on the wrong medications the whole time. Interesting theory. Maybe, though, it's just cause he's a batshit crazy ultraviolent motherfucker. Did they ever think of that one? Huh?

Jimmy Kimmel Live
ABC, 12:05 a.m.
Big George Foreman is on with Kimmel. Hoppefully Kimmel won't have him drugged right before he walks on set.

Late Night with Conan O'Brien NBC, 12:35 a.m.
A repeat with best bikin' buddies Jake Gyllenhaal and Lance Armstrong.

Unretire me

Thank God. It looks like Lil Floyd's retirement, which lasted approximately an hour, has ended at last. He's quoted today as saying that he will "come back" to the sport of boxing to shut up Ricky Hatton, something that, if I'm being honest, I don't think is going to be a very tall order for Floyd.

Frankly, I'm disappointed. I thought that Oscar's refusal of a Floyd rematch was going to lead to a superbout between Floyd and Sugar Shane, and I think that's a much better fight than Floyd/Hatton. People are raving about Hatton's defeat of Castillo this past Saturday, and yes, he did look more inspired than he had in his two prior fights, but still, I wasn't that impressed. Castillo is very near to finished, and he was counted after a body blow. Just a note here - was Hatton's "perfect shot" to the ribs any more devastating than the "chopped liver" Bernard served up to Oscar a few years ago? Not at all, mate. And yet somehow, Hatton's punch was reported as being so "perfect" that naturally Castillo couldn't continue, while Oscar was roundly doubted for his mettle. It's all in the telling, lads, all in the telling.

Hatton is not particularly fast, or a particularly hard puncher. I know he has the rep of a killer, and he's unquestionably tenacious, but look - do you think Floyd is going to fear the shots of a 140-pound Hatton more than those of a 154-pound Oscar? I doubt it. And the weight won't be an issue, either. Floyd bulked up to 150 to fight Oscar, but even if the fight gets made at 140 (and that's doubtful), he'll make it no problem. The kid is a physical specimen, and he lives to train. And if the fight gets made at a catchweight, or at 147? Sheesh. Hatton is a small 147 at best - we saw that when he nearly lost to Brooklyn hardass Luis Collazo in his American debut last year.

So what he have here is the best fighter of his era, coming off an impressive victory in the most important fight of his career against a much bigger, more skilled and dangerous fighter, facing a smaller, slower, under-skilled opponent. Hatton better hope dearly that Floyd has a big letdown. But let's face it, folks - that won't happen. My early prognosis is very bad for Hatton. I think Floyd will hav only slightly less trouble hitting him than he did Gatti. I say TKO in, oh... the 7th to the 9th. Maybe even earlier.

Mayweather demands a Hatton summit (Guardian Online)

No Mas TV Guide - 6/27

Wimbledon
ESPN2, 8 a.m.
No major outs yet, but something tells me that will change today. Right now I'm watching Moby Fed in cruise control against this interesting young Argentinian, Juan Martin Del Potro. The Rod already had himself a three-set morning today, and Serena won in straight sets as well, although she struggled a little in typically unfocused fashion. Still to play, Lord Henman, who once again has raised the hopes of John Bull with his five-set (13-11 in the 5th) victory over Carlos Moya, and who undoubtedly will dash those hopes, possibly today when he plays Feliciano Lopez.

Evander Holyfield v. Ray Mercer
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Holyfield's raging heart turned into a serious heart condition, one that kept the Real Deal out of the ring for 13 months in the mid-90's. This was his first fight back, after claiming that his heart was healed by God. A good chance to look at a younger, badder Ray Mercer, one who potentially could have represented the sweet science a little better against the MMA barbarians than the older edition did against Kimbo Slice.

Brazil v. Mexico
Univision, 8:30 p.m.
La Copa America action on Univision. Gotta keep Zarko happy.

Late Show with Dave Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann with Dave. In other words, Snarkfest '07.

Mike Tyson v. Michael Spinks
ESPN Classic, 12 a.m.
Don't blink.

Legends
TVG, 12:30 a.m.
A profile of hall-of-fame horse trainer Ron McAnally, who trained, among many others, the great John Henry.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/26

Wimbledon
ESPN2, 8 a.m.
Among the big names in action today - Nadal, Sharapova and her Venus-ness. Couple of interesting matches to watch out for - a golden-oldies showdown between Tim Henman and Carlos Moya, and what should be a veritable laser-show of a match between James Blake and Igor Andreev.

Hector Camacho v. Tony Baltazar
ESPN Classic, 9 p.m.
Mostly when they show the Macho Man on Classic, they've got these awful late 90's fights when he's all bloated and stupid-looking in his short shorts, so it's nice to see them break out some footage of him in his prime. This isn't the greatest fight you'll ever see, but you do get to enjoy Camacho at his best pretty much throwing a shutout in true Macho-licious "I will hit you many many times and conversely you will NEVER hit me" style.

K.O.W. - The Good Doctor

Now that Manny Steward has turned Wladimir Klitschko into a much more skilled and savvy boxer, which has meant less obsessive clinching in the ring, I've found my animus towards Wlad waning quite a bit. That said, I must confess that I welcome the return of his older brother to the fray to spice up what remains a pretty boring heavyweight picture. Vitali always was a more entertaining, wide open fighter than Wlad, and he always to me had a little more charisma and heart in his approach to the sport on the whole. In a bout that I presume will be an HBO broadcast, The Good Doctor Iron Fist is scheduled to fight on September 22nd in Germany against Big Time Jameel McCline. It will be Vitali's first trip to the squared circle since he completely retardificated Danny Williams in December of 2004. Williams, The Brixton Bomber, had some street cred at the time due to his knockout of Mike Tyson just six months before the Klitschko bout, but in the video below you'll see what transpired when he met up with Dr. V. The Iron Fist did fly.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/25

Wimbledon
ESPN2, 7 a.m.
The deuce has first-round action from Wimbledon until 5 p.m. Some potentially interesting first-round matches - Blake/Andreev, Ginepri/Gonzalez, Moya/Henman (that 'Enman, never gives up that lad) and Berdych/Massu in the men's draw, and in the women's... nothing. Probably won't be a good match in the women's draw until the third round, when Venus could face Safina.

Champion
TCM, 3:15 p.m.
A classic of that era of Hollywood movies where boxing was the big-screen's default symbol of tawdry corruption and greed. Kirk Douglas was nominated for an Oscar for his turn as Midge Kelly, an unscrupulous pug trying to fight his way to the top. The tagline for the movie - "This is the only sport in the world where two guys get paid for doing something they'd be arrested for if they got drunk and did it for nothing." Hear hear.

Evander Holyfield v. Bert Cooper
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
By 1991, most people thought that Smokin' Bert Cooper, once the charge of Joe Frazier, was a completely shot fighter, but a manly showing in this fight with Evander briefly resuscitated his career. This is really some ultraviolent shit right here. Whatever you do, don't miss the third round.

Monday Night Raw
USA, 8 p.m.
Vince McMahon's memorial service. I guess he's dead. John Cena, Batista, Edge, and Bobby Lashley stop by to pay their respects. Ah McMahon, we hardly knew ye.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Tony Parker tells Dave how it feels to be so robustly, passionately awesome.

Livin Extra Large

For those who read his prodigious output every day here on No Mas, it should not come as a huge surprise that our wordsmith-in-chief Large was tapped to write MSG's new "Mecca of Boxing", a celebration of the greatest fights in the world's most famous arena.

But what if I told you that the man had also composed three original songs for the show and appears in several montage sequences: singing, strumming a guitar and, at one point, shadowboxing to his own deep groove? Well, you might have your doubts. But that's probably just because you didn't know that Large a.k.a Dave Larzelere has yet another stage name: Dave Lear. And basically, whatever he feels like calling himelf, he is a seriously talented sumbitch.

The show premeires tomorrow night at nine on MSG. Check the preview here with Large all up in there. In the next week we are gonna be offering a free download of "Ali/Frazier", one of the songs that appears in the show.

In the meantime, congratulations to Large and to our man Stephen Palgon, who produced the show.

Bronk Knew Wrestling

On June 23, 1939, 67 years ago today, Bronko Nagurski won the NWA World Wrestling Title by defeating the young, future wrestling legend Lou Thesz in a championship match in Houston. Bronk would proceed to lose, regain and then lose the NWA title again over the course of the next two years.

Of course, Nagurski is best known for having played football. He was the John Riggins of his day (and there's a line that would make many an old-timer squawk - "Compared to Bronk John Riggins was a freaking 98-pound woman!"), a bruising fullback renowned for busting through the line and punishing all who dared to step in his path. He also was a fearsome force on defense, a precursor to Butkus and Singletary as the prototypically ferocious Bears' linebacker. And like Butkus, Sam Huff, Jack Lambert, L.T. to name a few, in his day the name Bronko Nagurski was accepted nationwide as a two-word synonym for rugged badassitude on the gridiron.

In 1938, the Bears refused Bronk a raise, and he went all Jim Brown on them, brusquely retiring and making the jump full-time to professional wrestling, an endeavor he'd pursued on the side for years. Wrestling was a fractured enterprise at the time, but the money was good, and Nagurski was as much of a powerhouse in the ring as he was on the football field, not much interested in fancy moves, but very interested in that which had always interested him - a no-nonsense brand of ass-whupping. He was a star attraction as a wrestler until 1960, when he retired to run a gas station in his hometown of International Falls, Minnesota. Thereafter, he never had many kind words for the sport, and in interviews he rarely talked about his long wrestling career, preferring to dwell on his football greatness.

No Mas Weekend TV Guide: 6/22 - 6/24

MUST-SEE NO MAS TV
Ricky Hatton v. Jose Luis Castillo
HBO, 10 p.m.
Could be the fight of the summer, could be the fight of the year. Certainly, something of interest should transpire, because neither one of these guys is given to taken a backwards step in a fight, and defense is not a big part of credo. Large is a little stumped on who to back in this one. My instincts tell me Castillo - the guy is just indestructible and much more ring-savvy than Hatton. But it's kind of like watching Curt Schilling on the mound. You're loath to bet against the guy, but then eventually his arm HAS to fall off, right? Eventually all those shots have to show an effect on Castillo, and if this is the night, Hatton will finish him in eight or less. But I just can't tell if this is the night or not. If it isn't, Hatton's straight-ahead approach seems tailor-made for him to take a horrific beating from Castillo. One nice thing about this fight - it's hard to imagine a lackluster affair either way.

The Greatest Game Ever Played
Encore, 5:45 p.m.
Did any No Masians out there ever see this thing? It seemed like a seething cauldron of schmaltz, Bagger Vanceian-type shite - then again, it is a pretty good story, and when I was still with Classic Now, we had Bill Paxton (director) on the show and he definitely knew his shit.

Friday Night Smackdown
CW, 8 p.m.
The big Vengeance preview show.

Dwight Braxton v. Leonard Langley
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Classic must have some Dwight Qawi retrospective coming soon if they're suddenly clearing his meaningless early bouts. This was The Camden Buzzsaw's (then Dwight Braxton) tenth pro fight - he was still a year and a half away from taking the light heavyweight title away from Matthew Saad Muhammad in one of the great Philly/Jersey boxing showdowns of all time.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
ESPN2, 8 p.m.
Big night ahead in the outdoors - both the men's and women's 100m finals and 5000m finals.

Julio Cesar Garcia v. Troy Browning
ESPN2, 9 p.m.
Strange one headlines Friday Night Fights - the 20-year-old Mexican, Baby Face Garcia, versus a 39-year-old journeyman out of Philly, Troy Browning. Only thing is, the journeyman is undefeated. Hard to figure how that happens. Last I saw of Garcia, he was putting a beatdown on everybody's favorite hardass step-up-in-competition bout (not to mention JCC's Waterloo), Grover Wiley.

60 Minutes on Classic
ESPN Classic, 10 p.m.
Classic gets us primed for Wimbledon with a full hour of tennis segments from 60 Minutes past, including pieces on the young Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker and Agassi.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Sir Charles on with Dave in a repeat.

TNA Wrestling Impact
Spike, 12:35 a.m.
Rhino and Eric Young v. Robert Roode and James Storm; Chris Harris v. Raven; Kurt Angle's "Victory Road" opponent is announced.

Bloodfist VII: Manhunt
Spike, 2 a.m.
Corrupt cops frame an ex-Special Forces man for murder. I can only imagine how that turns out. Somebody's fist is going to get awfully bloody.

6/23
Sonny Liston's Greatest Fights
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
I've seen this before but I can't remember what bouts are included. I'm pretty sure Mike DeJohn and Eddie Machen are on the roster.

Ultimate Fighter
Spike, 9 a.m.
Starting at 9 on Saturday morning, Spike is going to run the whole season of Ultimate Fighter in succession to get everyone ready for the big Saturday night finale.

High Noon
AMC, 11:45 a.m.
It might be time that we all finally sat down and watched the actual move behind a million sports/gunfight/showdown metaphors.

Legendary Nights: Hagler/Leonard
HBO, 11 a.m.
I watched the Hagler/Antuofermo fight the other night and felt a retrospective pang for the plight of Marvelous Marvin. The decision in that fight was unconscionable, and knowing that immediately afterwards Sugar Ray won his first world title and fulfilled all of the Golden Boy predictions... man Marvin's heart must have burned with envy and rage. And that it all came down to this bizarre affair eight years later - shit is like a 19th century revenge epic.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
NBC, 2 p.m.
Finals today include the men's and women's 400m, the men's decathlon and the women's heptathlon.

The Triple Crown of Polo
ESPN2, 1 p.m.
Dah... what? What the fuck is this? Do we have a t-shirt about this yet? I'll have to speak to I-berg. We probably do.

Urban Cowboy
WE, 3 p.m.
Tony Manero moves from Brooklyn to Nowhere, Texas, marries Debra Winger, and gets obsessed with riding mechanical bulls in bars. All's I have to say to that is... "Sissy! Git me a beer!"

Eight Men Out
ION, 7 p.m.
Look, champ. I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. "Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say "Sit down, maybe you'll learn something." Well, I learned something alright. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands. Tell me, champ, all those years of puggin', how much money did you make?

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Joe Louis is the featured subject. And you know what that means - "Pour some Bert Sugar on ME!"

Ultimate Fighter Finale
Spike, 9 p.m.
B.J. Penn and Jens Pulver meet at last in the Octagon.

British Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 1 a.m.
An hour recap of that most No Masian British Open, John Daly's storming of the fescue at St. Andrews in 1995.

6/24
Bend It Like Beckham
IFC, 11:10 a.m.
Don't laugh. I liked this movie. It warmed the cockles of my cockles, and was my first opportunity to get horny for Keira Knightley. If you haven't seen it, I'll clue you into something lest the suspense be too much for you - in the end, they let the girl follow her dreams.

U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships
NBC, 1 p.m.
Men's and women's 200 and 800 finals featured.

Gold Cup Final: Mexico v. U.S.
Univision, 3 p.m.
Ah the Copa Oro, with a dandy of a final - a repeat of the Alamo. Canadians meanwhile are still scratching their 'eads about that offside call today.

Vengeance: Night of Champions
PPV, 8 p.m.
Every WWE title is on the line. And Ric Flair is on the card. Big night.

Jack Dempsey
ESPN Classic, 12:30 a.m.
A half-hour on the career of the Manassa Mauler.

Divine Intervention

6/22/86

The Octagon Versus the Squared Circle

Maybe you saw the debate yesterday on ESPN.com about MMA versus boxing (MMA or boxing?). It's certainly a hot-topic issue these days, and before Franchise defected to Cuba we were thinking about staging a similar debate.

It would have been sort of stupid though if we had, stupid for a similar reason that the ESPN debate was stupid - clearly both of those dudes are into MMA AND boxing, so what are they arguing about really? (Chise actually would have had me on that one - he's much more of a boxing fan than I am into the MMA scene.) How interested are you in a debate as to which is better - basketball or baseball? It's not quite the same thing, I know, but it's in the ballpark, and it's kind of a waste of time. They're both good.

I infinitely prefer boxing, as you know, but that's just my preference. I watch UFC pretty regularly, and I enjoy it. I'm glad it's doing so well, and ultimately I think it's success will help rather than hurt boxing. There's enough bloodlust to go around. I admit that I don't feel like I'm watching elite athletes when I'm watching UFC. Tough sons-of-bitches, yes, but I don't really watch this shit to watch tough sons-of-bitches. I still think of boxing at its best as a display of athleticism of the highest order, which is to say that you give me a choice between Gatti/Ward I and Oscar/Floyd, I'll take Oscar/Floyd in a second. Watching two mamalucs try to behead each other is fun, no doubt, but the whole experience of a fight is about much more than that for me.

Clearly the UFC dudes are good athletes, and god forbid I should ever have to fight any of them. But I think even the most diehard UFC fans would admit that as boxers they couldn't compete at the highest level, and as wrestlers they couldn't compete at the highest level. What MMA boils down to is some simulacrum of a streetfight, and yet it doesn't go all the way, and that makes it less interesting to me, makes it seem like just a fusion of two sports in which the competitors really aren't that good at either one of them. For UFC to really impress me it truly would have to be no-holds-barred. A legitimate streetfight with two dudes legitimately trying to kill each other. Obviously that's not going to happen. Or maybe it will. With the way reality television is going these days, you do have to wonder how far away we are from sanctioned murder as popular entertainment.

But I digress. I still maintain that much of a debate on this score is meaningless. Franchise could come on here and rebut all the points I made above and I probably would not have much to say about it, because, as I said, I like UFC. I really doubt you're going to find many fans of either sport who don't enjoy the other at least somewhat, unless they're being really stubborn about it.

The main issue to me is the perception of the respective sports' momentum with fans - boxing as the flabby, old, corrupt instituition, and UFC as the exciting, new, fan-friendly phenomenon. This divide is basically a question of the amount of money involved, and the amount of money the athletes themselves expect to make. UFC is a relatively new attraction, and although the sport has its big names for sure, to this point the real star of the sport is the sport itself, the octagon, the fact of its existence. Over time, this will change. The uniqueness of the events themselves will wear off, and then, like every other sport, it will become a star-driven economy. Gone will be the days when people will watch any two mooks go at it in the octagon, and gone will be the days of the cards packed with great fights and great fighters, because it just won't be financially feasible. You can't have Bernard/Winky, Cotto/Judah and Oscar/Floyd on the same card - there's too much money involved, you have to pay each fighter too much. I guarantee that UFC eventually will face the same problem, and fans then will have the same complaints as boxing fans. But until then, I think the competition UFC gives to boxing is only good news for fight fans of all kinds, and the inevitable boxing/UFC showdown that someday will transpire is certainly going to be an enjoyable evening for all of us.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/21

Zab Judah v. Micky Ward
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m. & 12 a.m.
Now that it seems like His Zab-ness is an ESPN fighter for life (his next bout already has been announced for September 7th's Friday Night Fights) the Worldwide Leader is showering him with love in the repeats. This one features a 21-year-old Zab against Irish battleaxe Micky Ward. Good action, not great.

Alexis Arguello v. Ray Mancini
VS., 9 p.m.
Arguello/Mancini - pretty much the Alamo here in No Mas-land. It's certainly one of the defining fights of my life, two of my heroes as a young boxing fan in a war to the finish. We featured this one as a Knockout of the Week in December.

Last Call with Carson Daly
NBC, 1:35 a.m.
Stanley Cup-winning headhunter Chris Pronger is on with Carson. Which makes me wonder, is he like in a band or something?

Pocket Hercules

Most of us remember Freddie Patek as the diminutive (5'4") shortstop of the great Kansas City teams of the late 70's, the little guy with the squeaky voice who ultimately lost his job in the middle of the Royals' infield to the toothpick-chewing U.L. Washington.

One thing that none of us remember Patek for, however, is power-hitting. And yet, 27 years ago today, Lil Fred went big. Over the course of his 14-year career, Patek hit 41 total home runs, but on June 20, 1980 he hit three in one game. He was with the Angels at the time, and California blew out the Red Sox at Fenway, 20-3. Patek, batting eighth, went 4-7, with three dingers and a double and seven RBI's. At the time he was only the second shortstop in history, after Ernie Banks, to hit three long balls in a single game. Today he remains undoubtedly the most unlikely player ever to achieve that feat.

Angels/Red Sox boxscore - 6/20/80 (Baseball Almanac)

No Mas TV Guide - 6/20

Michael Nunn v. John Scully
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Ole Second-to-Nunn has been largely forgotten by history, and yet round about 1990 he was a legitimate PFP candidate. Until he met up with a much younger, much skinner James Toney that is (for a little bit of that action, click here). By the time of this Scully fight, Nunn was pretty much shot (I guess Classic wants to prove that Scully, their D-list boxing announcer, actually was a boxer once), but he was a great fighter who doesn't get his due and he's not on TV too much anymore, so here you go.

Peter Manfredo Jr. v. David Banks
ESPN2, 10 p.m.
Wednesday Night Fights - what a load. Let me just say here that I have had it with the Contender chumps. People want to dig that show, fine, but don't keep trotting the dudes out afterward against real fighters and wasting our time. These cats CAN'T FIGHT. I mean, yo, did you see Manfredo/Calzaghe? Jesus. That looked like what I imagine would happen if Winky fought me.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Dave has Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti in a repeat from right after the race.

You Can't Go Home Again

Sixty-one years ago tonight, televised sports made a leap forward in its inevitable march into every living room in America with RCA's broadcast of the very first televised heavyweight fight, the Joe Louis/Billy Conn rematch at Yankee Stadium. It's estimated that about 150,000 people saw the fight that night on just under 5,000 sets across the country. A year and a half later, over a million people would see the first Louis/Walcott fight on TV.

Unfortunately, the first big television fight night was a dud and a half. Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid, was a hard-nosed light heavyweight champ who nearly had upset Louis in 1941 at the Polo Grounds. In that bout, leading on two scorecards and tied on another, most experts felt that hubris got the better of Conn and led him to brawl with Louis in the late rounds, a mistake that caught up to him in the 13th when the Bomber put him down for the count. Despite the loss, his heroic effort and damn-the-torpedoes attitude made him a boxing folk hero, and that first Louis/Conn fight still tops many a boxing pundit's list of the greatest fights of all time.

The sequel, held five years later almost to the day, was an utter disappointment. Since their first bout in '41, the fighters had fought sparingly, not out of choice, but because they both served in the war. The break was not kind to either of them, and particularly not to Conn, who was nowhere near the float-like-a-butterfly-punch-like-a-gorilla force he had been five years prior. Nowhere near his own best, Louis nevertheless was pitching a near-shutout rounds-wise when he knocked Conn out in the eighth. Today the bout is almost universally forgotten, and it lives on in boxing lore not for being the first televised heavyweight fight but for Louis's legendary quip in an interview beforehand when asked about Conn's famous elusiveness in the ring. "He can run," the champ said, "but he can't hide." It's a line that's been so often repeated you'd think the source was Shakespeare.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/19

Syracuse v. Virgina Tech 1998
ESPN Classic, 2 p.m.
Some DMac heroics for the Orangemen in his senior year, winning the game on the last play from scrimmage with a 13-yard touchdown pass.

The Electric Horseman
Sundance, 1:30 p.m.
Oh this movie is so freakin 70's. Robert Redford stars as a former rodeo star who is now slutting himself out to Wild West shows. Jane Fonda is the city-slicker reporter who falls in love with him. It's a little Crocodile Dundee, a little Urban Cowboy, a little Horse Whisperer. And the title - it really should have been a porn movie.

SportsCenter Flashback
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m
On the 21st anniversary of the death of Len Bias, Classic shows an hour of the SportsCenter coverage from the weeks after the tragedy.

Jose Luis Ramirez v. Pernell Whitaker
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Exhibit A in the "Pernell wuz robbed" story of Whitaker's life. The bout was held in France, which was probably the problem. French judges are known for their blindness.

K.O.W. - The One You Don't See

Haven't had a Knockout of the Week in a while, so I wanted to get us back in the game with a dandy. This here is from Friday Night Fights in 2002, a huge upset in which Juan Valenzuela stopped Julio Diaz in the first round. Diaz was a legitimate lightweight contender at the time with only one loss on his record, a tight split-decision loss to Angel Manfredy in an IBF title-shot eliminator two bouts prior. Valenzuela (nickname, Pollo - bad nickname) was just another one of those hordes of young badass Mexicans out there in the world waiting for their shot to beat the shit out of someone on TV. Ill-advisedly, Diaz got a little sloppy with this kid, and paid the price dearly with a left-hook out of nowhere that completely sleep-ified his ass. As Diaz did the unconscious bobblehead, Valenzuela laid another overhand right on him just to emphasize the visit from Mr. Sandman, and the ref got in there quick, thank Christ, cause this one had Benny Paret written all over it.

Thank Ew

Twenty-two years ago today, the 1985 NBA draft was held, the first seven picks of which had been decided by the league's first draft lottery held a month prior. It was a unique situation, because the jackpot was so dearly prized - a seven-foot center out of Georgetown almost universally acknowledged to be the type of player that comes along once in a generation.

As we all know, the Knicks won the top pick and the right to Ewing, and a lot of words have been wasted ever since suggesting that the whole thing was rigged (note the infamously folded corner of the Knicks' envelope in the video below). If it was, it was rigged by someone who hated New York. Who else would saddle the city with such high hopes, with such near-certainty of future glory, when a first-year player was already in the league who would personally guarantee that those Olympian hopes would never be realized?


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Mark your calendars for the No Mas Lottery show in Manhattan on Wednesday, June 27th, 7:30 p.m. at 31 West 19th Street. Portraits of all the 105 original "lottery picks" (1985 - 1995) will be given away to members of the audience in a one-time-only lottery and art draft. RSVP: [email protected]

The rules of the show are below (click on the image to read it):

No Mas TV Guide - 6/18

Roberto Duran v. Pipino Cuevas
Roberto Duran v. Davey Moore
VS., 5 p.m.
Two crucial fights for the rehabilitation of Duran's image after the No Mas embarrassment. In successive bouts in 1983, he brutalized the revered Mexican Cuevas and then won his third world title in his third weight class in a war with Davey Moore at the Garden.

Monday Night Raw
USA, 9 p.m.
What is the WWE going to do in the aftermath of McMahon's demise? Well, there's only one way to find out...

And with the second pick of the draft, the Celtics select...

Today is the 21st anniversary of the 1986 NBA draft, one that is shrouded in retrospective tragedy because of the fate of the second overall pick, Len Bias. A genuine force of nature at Maryland, Bias was thought to be the future superstar who would ensure the continuation of the Celtic dynasty long past the retirement of Larry Legend. Of course, Bias never made it to the court in the green and white - 48 hours after he was drafted, he was dead from a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by a massive amount of cocaine.

Although Bias was the draftee who suffered most dramatically at the hands of the white stuff, two other lottery selections of the '86 draft also went on to become infamous travelers on the white lines highway. 6'11" Chris Washburn, drafted third by Golden State after only one full season at N.C. State, remains today one of the biggest busts in the history of the draft. Less than five months after signing a big multi-year contract with the Warriors, Washburn checked himself into drug rehab. His career spanned a total of 72 largely useless games over the course of two seasons.

Michigan's Roy Tarpley, another 6'11" can't-miss low-post stud, was taken seventh in the draft by the Mavericks. He lasted a little longer than Washburn, and had a promising rookie season, but blow took him down hard. He was kicked out of the league in 1991 for violating the drug policy. In 1994 he got another chance, rejoined the Mavericks, and then got the final boot after testing positive for alcohol.

On the whole, the '86 draft was a bizarre affair, for the drug casualties of course, but also for the fact that not a single bona fide superstar emerged from the first round. Probably, that would have been Bias. But in his absence, the best player taken in the first round turned out to be the first overall pick, Brad Daugherty, who was definitely an elite center in his eight seasons in Cleveland, but never exactly the franchise-defining star the Cavs thought he would be.

Arguably, the best player taken in the entire draft turned out to be a raw, unheralded 6'8" forward out of basketball powerhouse Southeastern Oklahoma State University. A skinny, strange-looking weirdo truly worthy of being called "The Worm", it was absolutely impossible to imagine at the time that Madonna, cross-dressing, countless dye jobs and five fingers worth of NBA rings awaited him.
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On Wednesday, June 27th, No Mas is presenting The Lottery here in Manhattan on the eve of the 2007 NBA Draft. Portraits of all the 105 original "lottery picks" (1985 - 1995) will be given away to members of the audience in a one-time-only lottery and art draft. Mark the date, people, because you have to be in it to win it. RSVP: [email protected]

Going Back to Cali

On this day in 1975 the Milwaukee Bucks traded away, well, the only reason they ever won one championship, and their only chance of ever winning another one, sending Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walt Wesley to the Lakers for Elmore Smith, Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters and Dave Meyers.

Before the Gretzky trade, this was probably the biggest and most ballyhooed trade in sports history. The Tom Seaver and O.J. Simpson deals were equally enormous media-wise in the 70's, but both came at the end of those stars' careers and had little or no impact on their respective sports. The Kareem trade completely changed the balance of power in the NBA, and brought the Lakers their third all-universe center to lead them back to greatness.

The Bucks have been excoriated in the press over this trade almost since the moment it happened, and it's a wound for Milwaukee sports fans that never will completely heal. But the franchise has taken a bad rap on this count, because the fact of the matter is that they really didn't have much choice but to deal Kareem. The big bad Muslim from Brooklyn basically demanded it. He hated living in Milwaukee, and after six seasons in the Brew City (which included three MVP awards and an NBA title) he'd had enough.

"Live in Milwaukee? No, I guess you could say I exist in Milwaukee," Abdul-Jabbar said in a magazine interview. "I am a soldier hired for service and I will perform that service well. Basketball has given me a good life, but this town has nothing to do with my roots. There's no common ground."

Kareem wanted either to go back home and play for the Knicks, or go back to the city where he'd attended college, L.A. That was his list of teams right there. The Bucks were held up at gunpoint on this one, and so, like many a team after them that has found themselves in this situation, they did the best they could.

At the time, it didn't seem like they made out too badly. Elmore Smith was an a-lister at the time, a seven-foot center good for a nightly double-double, Brian Winters was a first-round draft pick from the previous season who had star potential, and Dave Meyers and Junior Bridgeman were the second and eighth picks respectively in the '75 draft. Of course, it didn't pan out as Milwaukee might have hoped. Smith's production dramatically declined after a season in Milwaukee, Bridgeman and Winters became serviceable but not standout players, and Meyers never cut it in the pros. The Bucks remained a playoff team for years after the trade, but haven't made it back to the NBA Finals since.

Meanwhile, Kareem won his fourth MVP award in the '75-'76 season for the Lakers. He would add his fifth the season after that, and then his sixth in '79-'80, when he teamed with a young superguard out of Michigan State to bring the NBA title back to L.A. and embark on a decade of dominance and dynasty.

No Mas Weekend TV Guide: 6/15 - 6/17

6/15
Lucian Bute v. Sakio Bika
ESPN2, 10 p.m.
Another Friday Night Fights from Montreal - boxing must be big up there (Franchise... where are you?). The featured bout has undefeated 168 Lucian "Le Tombeur" Bute, a Romanian who fights out of Montreal, making a big step up in competition against the brawling Scorpion from Cameroon, Sakio Bika, who gave Joe Calzaghe some trouble in a very dirty bout last October.

60 Minutes on Classic
ESPN Classic, 10:30 p.m.
This half-hour includes profiles of Magic Johnson and Dikembe Mutombo.

6/16
America's Cup, 1851-2007
ESPN Classic, 11 a.m.
You know, we don't do enough yachting here at No Mas (our lack of a yacht has a role in this). With the America's Cup currently raging in Spain (and we do mean raging), here's a starter course for anyone who wants to get into the game, an hour-long doc on the history of the sport's most famous event narrated by noted yachting enthusiast, Walter Cronkite.

U.S. Open - Third Round
NBC, 1 p.m.
Mickelson - cut. Goosen, Garcia, Love, Harrington... amscray. Beemer, Monty... get lost. Goddamn shit got ugly out there in the second round (although how about that Paul Casey routine? unreal...). Angel Cabrera - I'd like to see him hang in. Seems doubtful though. My picks - Goose and Perez - oh man I am not on a hot streak right now.

Evander Holyfield v. Michael Dokes
ESPN, 1 p.m.
Rarely referred to when we talk about the Real Deal's great career, his tenth-round TKO of Dynamite Dokes capped off a hell of a fight, largely because Evander in 1989 wasn't quite filled out as a heavyweight yet. As for Michael Dokes, well, he wouldn't have another meaningful fight until he fought Riddick Bowe in '93, when Big Daddy stopped him in the first.

UFC 72 Countdown
Spike, 2 p.m.
Get yourself primed with this preview show.

UFC 72 PPV, 3 p.m.
A full card from Belfast including Hector Ramirez v. Forrest Griffin and headliner Rich Franklin v. Yushin Okami.

The Best of the Lady Kickboxer
Telemundo, 4 p.m.
I have no idea what this show is about but it looks very promising. Is "The Lady Kickboxer" some recurrent character on Telemundo? Like a detective or something? See this is what's wrong with America. We get "The Closer" and like a million chicks who talk to God and meanwhile Mexico has "The Lady Kickboxer."

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Oh shit, Ringside gets all No Mas. This episode is called "Boxing and Hollywood" and promises to run through the greatest boxing movies ever made. I'm sure they will be reviewing many of the Academy Award-winners we mentioned in this post from our Tribeca Film Festival coverage.

Paulie Malignaggi v. Lovemore N'Dou
HBO, 9:30 p.m.
More Paulie on Boxing After Dark, going up against N'Dou, the IBF champ at 140 and a 35-year-old Aussie battleaxe who has been through the wars. This should be a competitive bout - in 2004, N'Dou gave Cotto a better fight than Paulie did last year. It's a stretch, I know, but it's something. On the undercard, Brownsville bruiser Curtis Stevens makes his HBO debut against Athens bronze-medalist Andre Dirrell. (Note - had a good laugh a few days ago when I heard Chris Russo interrupt Mike and the Dog's wall-to-wall Sopranos coverage to read an HBO promo - he had to pronounce "Malignaggi," a name he'd clearly never seen before - it didn't go well.)

TNA Wrestling Impact
Spike, 11 p.m
Christian Cage battles a mystery opponent in his King of the Mountain qualifier for Slammiversary.

6/17
Classic Battle Lines
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
The battle lines are drawn for Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, which ended with this dude hitting a walkoff home run. I can't remember who it was - it was cool though.

Ryder Cup Highlights
Golf Channel, 8 a.m.
If you feel like getting all amped at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, well, here you go, and hour-long recap of the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline, which featured The Putt, the Most Awful Golfwear Ever Worn at a Major Event, the Boopsie Wives, and the Worst Fist Pump in History (David Duval).

Drumline
TBS, 10:30 a.m.
Finally, a movie that had the courage to tackle the high-octane, high-stakes, high-risk world of big-time college marching bands. This thing blew the lid of the whole marching band hustle, and nothing has been the same since.

U.S. Open - Final Round
NBC, 1 p.m.
The smacketh will be layeth downeth. I have no idea who will hang in and win this thing, but I am willing to be that the winning score is at least 4-over par.

Legendary Nights
HBO, 2 p.m.
The Hagler/Leonard edition, a classic. Every time I watch a Legendary Nights I find myself thinking "I wish they made one of these for every fight." You telling me you wouldn't watch a Legendary Nights about, say, Calzaghe/Lacy?

The Great White Hope
FMC, 4 p.m.
A film from 1970 of the famous play by Howard Sackler starring James Earl Jones as controversial heavyweight champion Jack Jefferson, a thinly-veiled version of Jack Johnson. A great movie, highly recommended No Mas viewing material. (Ali saw this play and then went backstage to tell Jones, "That's my story... you take out the issue of white women and replace it with religion and that's my story right there" - to which we reply, "oh come on Muhammad, you know you loved yourself some white women.")

America's Cup: A Sailor's Story
CBS, 5 p.m.
Yachting, everywhere yachting.

Slammiversary 2007 PPV, 8 p.m.
King of the Mountain match? TNA X Title Match? Christian Cage, Kurt Angle, Sting and... Frank Wycheck? Is this the same dude from the Music City Miracle? The tight end? He's a wrestler now? When did that happen? Hmm. Franchise could explain this all to us but I don't know where he is.

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 12 a.m.
The Lennox Lewis edition.

Shaq Two

As we sit and ponder today the Spurs' fourth NBA Championship (and by ponder, I mean, blankly wonder if the whole series actually happened or if it was just something we saw on YouTube), let me take you back six years to another NBA Finals that didn't last too long. On June 15, 2001, the Lakers closed out my upstart Sixers in five with a 108-96 fifth-game victory in Philly. Shaq went for 29 and 13, and Kobe added 26, 12 and 6. Even Rick Jheri Curl dumped in 20. The I scored 37 in the losing effort, shooting his typically marksman-like 14 of 32 from the field, and Eric Snow had 12 assists, but otherwise my boys just didn't have the firepower to deal with that Laker dynasty. It was the second of three straight championships for L.A., and in those three trips to the Finals, they lost three total games. In the 2001 playoffs, they went 15-1, losing only that first shocking overtime game to Philly at the Staples Center. Shaq won his second consecutive Finals MVP award, joining Hakeem Olajuwon and M.J. as the only players to win that honor two years in a row.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/14

U.S. Open - First Round
ESPN, 10 a.m.
Olazabal is leading through six, and Tiger is even through five after opening bogey/birdie. Golf swami says... oh this is a tough one on Golf Swami. I'll play it safe and say Goosen. Oakmont's going to be ugly this year - everybody says so - and the Goose just stays cool as a cucumber in those types of scenes. For a wild card I'll go with Pat Perez.

British Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 1 p.m.
You get tired of watching live golf today, you can go back to the '97 -'99 British Opens on the Golf Channel. In the '97 British, Justin Leonard came from five strokes back on Sunday to win with a final-round 65. In the '98 tournament, Mark O'Meara added the Claret Jug to the green jacket he'd won himself earlier in the year. And in '99? A certain Frenchman completely lost his mind.

All the Right Moves
HBO2, 2:30 p.m.
Salvucci, he didn't quit. None of us quit. I don't know. We beat those guys asses up and down that field tonight! We got nothing to be ashamed of, right? Isn't that right? Maybe the scoreboard doesn't say it, but we won that game. We held them. It was just a fluke. That's all. It's just a fluke.

U.S. Open - First Round
NBC, 3 p.m.
NBC takes over the first-round coverage at three.

NBA Finals - Game Four
ABC, 9 p.m.
Game set and match presumably. Worst finals ever?

Hasim Rahman v. Taurus Sykes
VS., 9 p.m.
If you've been wondering what became of the Rock after he couldn't make it out of the 12th with Maskaev, well here's your chance to catch up with the ex-champ. A live bout on Versus. How the mighty have fallen.

Last Call with Carson Daly
NBC, 1:35 a.m.
Keyshawn joins Carson.

Put him in the books

With his no-no against the Brewers yesterday, Justin Verlander etched himself into the majestic annals of Detroit baseball history, adding his name to the list of four Tigers who have thrown five no-hitters for the team before him. That list is below, but before I move on, let me point out that Verlander's no-no is the first ever at Comerica Park, and only the fourth interleague no-hitter in history, after Larsen's 1956 World Series perfect game against the Dodgers, Coney's perfect game against the Expos in '99, and the Astros six-pitcher collective no-no against the Yanks in 2003.


July 4, 1912
George Mullin
Tigers 7, Browns 0

Mullin, a.k.a. Wabash George, was a stalwart of the Tigers during their near-miss decade of the nineteen-oughts in which they made it to three straight Fall Classics (1907-09) only to lose them all, the first two to the Cubs and the third to the Pirates. His no hitter on the fourth of July in 1912 also fell on his 32nd birthday, and Mullin, a career .263 hitter who was often used as a pinch-hitter with the Tigers, contributed three hits and two RBI's to his victory.

May 15, 1952
Virgil Trucks
Tigers 1, Senators 0

August 25, 1952
Virgil Trucks
Tigers 1, Yankees 0

Along with Allie Reynolds, Nolan Ryan and Johnny Vander Meer, Virgil "Fire" Trucks is one of four pitchers to throw two no-no's in a single season. In the first on May 15, 1952, the Tigers' Vic Wertz broke a ninth-inning 0-0 tie with a walkoff home run off the Senators' Bob Porterfield to snare the victory and the no-hitter for Trucks. His second no-no of 1952 was a close-call due to a play the Tiges' shortstop Johnny Pesky made on Phil Rizzuto in the third that initially ruled an error, changed to a hit, and then changed back to an error. Amazingly, Trucks' second no-nit victory of 1952 raised his record to 5-15, and he would not win another game all season, finishing off the year 5-19.

July 20, 1958
Jim Bunning
Tigers 3, Red Sox 0

Though he'll always be a Phil to us Illadelphians (and just as he is on his Hall of Fame plaque), Jim Bunning was actually in Detroit longer than he was in Philly, coming up with the Tigers and spending nine years with the team. His first of two career no-no's (he threw a perfect game with the Phils in 1964) came in the first game of a double-header on July 20, 1958, and included 12 strikeouts against only two walks and a hit batsman.

April 7, 1984
Jack Morris
Tigers 4, White Sox 0

It's fitting that the great Jack Morris kicked off the Tigers' miraculous season of 1984 with a no-no, at that point matching the earliest date ever for a blank-job (Hideo Nomo's April 4th no-hitter in 2001 broke that mark). Morris didn't make things easy for himself, notching six walks on the afternoon against eight strikeouts. It was the first of 19 wins for Morris on the season as the Tigers marched to their first World Series title in 26 years.

Today is your birthday...

A solid lot of June 13 birthdays to celebrate, including those of some bona fide legends - The Flying Finn, The Galloping Ghost, and one of two men's tennis players to ever win the Grand Slam. Add to that a three-time Pro Bowler, a famous footballer and a famous footballer turned pundit, a European basketball pioneer, a hockey player better known for his hockey-playing brother, the current world-record-holder in both the men's 5,000 and 10,000 meters, the member of the Breakfast Club who ends up with the wrestler, the most distinguished occupant of the center square (not to mention the voice of Templeton the Rat), and the Nobel Prize-winning poet who wrote the lines that I often think of when I'm transfixed by great athletes in action - "Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

No Mas TV Guide - 6/13

U.S. Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 2 p.m.
This one goes back ten years to Ernie Els second Open victory at Congressional in '97, besting Monty by a stroke.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m.
Classic runs half-hour recaps, back to back, of what may be the two greatest games in NBA history - Game 6 of the '74 finals, which the Bucks pulled out over the Celtics in double OT behind a heroic effort from Kareem, and Game 5 of the '76 Finals, the generally acknowledged greatest of the great, as the Celtics outlasted the Suns in triple OT.

The Endless Summer II
IFC, 3:15 p.m.
Twenty-eight years after the original, Bruce Brown made a sequel to his seminal 1966 surfing documentary. This one stars Pat O'Connell and Wingnut Weaver.

U.S. Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 4 p.m.
A recap of the '99 Open, one of the most memorable of all time, as Payne Stewart knocked down a 15-footer on the 72nd hole to edge Phil Mickelson by a stroke - Phil who was then still carrying the Best Player Never to Win a Major cross. Mickelson also had been walking the course all weekend with a beeper, because his wife was about to have their first child, and he'd vowed that no matter what happened he would leave the course as soon as she went into labor. As for Stewart, this was his last victory before dying in a bizarre plane crash in the fall of '99.

Verno Phillips v. Julian Jackson
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
The tragedy of boxing writ large. The once mighty Hawk, Julian Jackson, unfortunately still fighting at the age of 38, gets pummeled in this 1998 bout with Verno Phillips.

Gold Cup: Mexico v. Panama
Univision, 10 p.m.
Here you go, Zark. La Copa Ora in all its glory.

This Day in Baseball History

A lot of important importance went down on this day in baseball history. Let's go to the videotape:

June 12, 1880
Facing the Cleveland Blues at the Worcester Agricultural Fairgrounds, John Lee Richmond of the Worcester Ruby Legs pitched the first perfect game ever recorded in professional baseball. That's ole John Lee over there on the right. Kind of looks to me like he should have been the baseball player in the Village People.

June 12, 1922
Babe Ruth's unlikely nemesis, Hub Pruett of the St. Louis Browns, strikes out the Babe three times in a row. Pruett, whose lifetime career record was 29-48, had Ruth's number, striking out the Bambino ten of the first 13 times that he faced him, and 15 of a career 30 at-bats.

June 12, 1939
The National Baseball Hall of Fame was dedicated by Stephen C. Clark, grandson of the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Originally the Hall was primarily a gambit to bring tourists to Cooperstown by capitalizing on the claim (probably apocryphal) that Abner Doubleday had invented the game of baseball in the town. The idea of the Hall had been around for some time, and the Baseball Writers of America actually had voted on and inducted the legendary first class in 1936, a class composed of five immortals - Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner. Added to that list for the formal opening of the Hall in 1939 were eight more players - Grover Cleveland Alexander, Lou Gehrig, Eddie Collins, Willie Keeler, Nap Lajoie, George Sisler, Tris Speaker and Cy Young.

June 12, 1981
Major League Baseball players go on strike, one that eventually will last 49 days and force the cancellation of 713 games. This resulted in the bizarre split season playoff format that kept the two best overall teams in the N.L., the Reds and the Cardinals, from making the postseason. Little Large was living in England that year, and so this whole business has never entirely made sense to me.

June 12, 1997
One of baseball's grand traditions is thrown out the window, as interleague play begins. Typically with an idea so short-sighted and devoid of the overall majesty of the game, the first interleague matchup was as inauspicious as could be imagined - the Rangers hosting the Giants at the Ballpark in Arlington. I have always been against interleague play, but now the cat's out of the bag and you'll never get it back in again. It was a big promotional thing for about three years - no one gives a shit about it anymore because all the teams play each other all the time. Meanwhile, you can never recapture that feeling that you used to have in the All-Star Game and the World Series, when the very idea that Ron Guidry was going to pitch to Steve Garvey, or Steve Carlton to George Brett, was so unimaginable as to throw you into an ecstasy of anticipation.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/12

NBA Finals Films
ESPN2, 2 p.m.
A half-hour recap of the '82 Finals, which featured an as yet Moses-less Sixers squad against the mighty Lakers. It was the last days of Chocolate Thunder down in the Illadelph, despite the fact that the superbrother had himself one hell of a series. But we needed Moses to get to the promised land.

U.S. Open Preview
ESPN, 3 p.m.
Sportscenter at Oakmont. I'm kind of pumped for the Open this year. Oakmont is truly one of the royal settings for the whole scene, and the word is that the bogeys will flow like wine. No prediction from Large yet. Swami comes out in the Thursday TV Guide.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 5:30 p.m.
Finally Classic gives us a game that is worthy of this "NBA's Greatest Games" crap instead of being just another one of those "NBA Games That Had Michael Jordan In Them." This one, though, is straight off the Parnassus of great games - 1970 Finals, game seven. Willis Reed. Clyde. For rizzle dizzle.


Strictly Ballroom
IFC, 7:20 p.m.
Yeah, I saw this shit. Baz Luhrmann, word. You wanna make something of it?

The Waterboy
Starz, 7:30 p.m.
My Mama says that alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush.

Slap Shot
AMC, 8 p.m.
Reggie: She underlines the fuck scenes for ya? Jesus, if she underlines the fuck scenes for ya, she must worship the ground you walk on.
Ned: They teach you how to underline in college.
Reggie: Not the fuck scenes, they don't.

NBA Finals: Game 3
ABC, 9 p.m.
Oh the ratings for this thing are in the freakin TOILET. King James my ass. Although, LeBron is not really the problem. It's the Spurs. God they are the most boring great team in the history of the league. Bring on the golf already for chrissake.

Johnny Miller: Open and Honest
The Golf Channel, 9 p.m.
The title of this show makes me want to jump out the window and hopefully land right on top of Johnny Miller. That said, as you may or may not know by now, holms did shoot a 63 in the final round of the '73 Open at Oakmont yadda yadda yadda.

Evander Holyfield v. George Foreman
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
The bout that announced to the world that Big George's comeback was no joke, and the bout that taught us something we would subsequently learn time and again - there's no give-up in that dog named Holyfield.

0-3

Here's my No Mas trifecta box - Hard Spun, Judah and Federer. Underdogs all. Take it to the bank...

Oh man my weekend prognostications were an utter embarrassment, a straight-up oh-fer. I give myself a pass on the Belmont, because honestly, I don't know shit about the ponies. I got some expert advice to go with Hard Spun, and trust me, said expert is now officially dead to No Mas. So that's that.

As for Zab, well, he put up one hell of a fight, showed more guts than I ever would have expected of him. Large was in the house, with Large's Lady, and let me tell you something - shit was insane in there. The P.R. madness, the constant alternating chants of "CO-TTO" and "JU-DAH", the electricity shooting through the crowd every time Cotto even threw a combination, let alone landed effectively - it all created a perfect fight night atmosphere, the way I wish it felt in the arena every time I went to the fights.

Even though Zab had some success early, in my eyes it looked bad for him almost from the first bell. I was primarily baffled by his footwork. Zab's always been a very mobile fighter, and yet his movement against Cotto was almost entirely limited to moving straight backwards with a slightly crouched shuffle-step that seemed to put him right in the range of the bruising Boricuan. He'd back up until he found himself on the ropes and then scoot out to the center of the ring and start over. Surely, with a straight-ahead bull like Cotto, you want to keep him circling left, away from those thunderous left hooks to the body. But Zab seemed frozen in the ring at times, and I must say, it looked to me that fear was a factor in that.

It's not hard to understand his fear - Cotto is a freakin Terminator. He takes a lickin and keeps on flickin. My girl had a very good line about him - we were talking about how much we would like to see him fight Floyd and she said, "yeah, Cotto is perfect for Floyd - he doesn't take no for an answer."

Indeed he doesn't. And Zab provided him with a lot of "no"'s in the form of loaded-up straight lefts and bolo shots from the hip that sliced up Cotto's face and turned his lower lip into a thick hunk of sashimi. As far as single, devastating punches, Zab landed the better of them, the shots that wobbled Cotto or backed him up. But the accumulation of punishment that Cotto visited on Zab was frightening, and whatever you think of the Brownsville Boy (he certainly didn't cover himself in glory early on with the histrionics about the borderline low blows), in the end he gave a hell of a good account of himself merely by hanging in there. By the 11th it was clear that he wasn't going to win the fight (he was down six points on all three scorecards) and yet he seemed determined to finish it, despite the fact that he was getting killed in there. That's the kind of heart he hasn't shown much of in recent years, and it may have been enough to get him another significant bout in the near future. As for Cotto, what can you say? Mega-stardom, here he comes. He's handsome, he's Puerto Rican, he's charming yet modest, and he's a killer in the ring, a true action fighter who... does not take no for an answer. Bring on Margarito, and more importantly, bring on Floyd. You hear that Floyd? Put your money where your mouth is and fight this monster. Because as far as fighting you goes, this guy is everything that Oscar wishes he could be.

Onto Roland Garros. Federer? I was betting with my heart, admittedly. Talk about a Terminator - on the terre battue Nadal is the ultimate Terminator. It is amazing though isn't it? - watching Fed struggle with his psychological demons, watching him tighten up in big moments and spray his groundstrokes all over the place, watching him lose pivotal games and then completely lose his composure. For the other eleven months of the year, this is what Fed's opponents are doing while he coolly stalks the baseline with that half-smirk on his face of complete mastery and self-satisfaction. On clay, against Rafa, the tables are turned, and though I readily confess that I wanted to see him win and go on to finish off the Slam, I equally enjoyed watching him lose. Nadal right now is the true Frazier to Fed's Ali, the irresistible force to his immovable object, the upstart opponent that he must conquer if he is going to solidify his legacy as the sport's king of kings. This is what it's all about in sports, this is what we wait for, and right now, every time the two of them step on the court together, it's instant history. So Rafa - bear down at Queens and get your grass game sharp as a razor, because we want a repeat final at Wimbledon.

The Right Complexion to Make the Connection

Today is the silver anniversary of one of the biggest fights in heavyweight history - on this night in 1982 Larry Holmes met Gerry Cooney at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Neither fighter has been treated particularly fairly by history (which in Holmes' case I think is one of the great injustices that boxing historians have to answer for) and so this fight has faded considerably in our collective memory. But that does not change the fact of the bout's momentousness at the time - it was a fight as anticipated and hyped as Jeffries/Johnson and Louis/Schmeling before it.

I choose those fights as reference points for an obvious reason - as with Holmes/Cooney, the race card was also the trump card in the massive interest generated among the public for both of those epochal bouts. Probably not since Johnson/Jeffries was a fight so divided down racial lines as was in Holmes/Cooney, a division fostered by the fight's promoter, Don King, a man who has shown himself time and again over the years willing to stop at nothing to build the hype of a Don King production.

At the time, Cooney seemed to be the true Rocky, the great white hope, the giant slab of Irish-American bricks-and-mortar who would reinvigorate a general public that had never taken to the Easton Assassin as the heavyweight heir to Muhammad Ali. As Cooney decimated one opponent after another, fading former heavyweight a-listers like Ron Lyle, Jimmy Young and Ken Norton, the press started to see the future of boxing in the reappearance of a rare breed thought to have gone extinct with the retirement of Marciano - a legitimate white contender to the heavyweight throne.

Before you knew it, Cooney was on the cover of Time Magazine with his cinematic doppleganger, Rocky, (read the story here), a symbol of the fact that despite Holmes was the recognized champ who had defeated all comers, the lion's share of the hype for the fight was leaning in Gentleman Gerry's direction. Then, as he was wont whenever the spotlight was upon him, Larry both told the truth and said the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time and turned public opinion unanimously against him, pointing out that Cooney wasn't really deserving of a title shot but merely had "the right complexion to make the connection." Before you knew it, the Holmes camp was fielding death threats daily, which led to retributive death threats against Cooney. Snipers lined the roofs around Caesar's Palace the night of the bout and armed guards wandered through the pre-fight crowds. The whole affair had the atmosphere of a very ugly riot in the making.

Perhaps no fighter other than Marvin Hagler harbors the kind of retrospective bitterness that Larry Holmes does towards the press and the boxing public, and like Marvin, he has good reason for it. Among the litany of his complaints, certainly what transpired during the introductions 25 years ago sits in the top three reasons for that bitterness. Unbelievably, years of boxing tradition were spurned that night in the ultimate insult to the champion, as he was introduced first in the ring and then the challenger in order to milk the maximum amount of crowd noise for the crowd favorite, Cooney. It was an unimaginable breach of decorum, particularly given the race-baiting that surrounded the fight.

Nevertheless, Larry kept his cool, fought his fight, and systematically took the overmatched Irishman apart. He dropped him in the second, fended off rallies from Cooney in the middle rounds, and starting to embarrass the slow, spent but valiant Great White Hope starting around the ninth round. It was over by the 11th, and a bloodbath in the 12th - Cooney's trainer, Victor Valle, finally took mercy on Cooney in the 13th and stopped it. Gerry gamely took a world of punishment that night in a fight that he simply wasn't ready for, and he was never the same afterward. Larry, on the other hand, just kept on taking care of business, defending his title eight more times until running into the Spinks Jinx in 1985.

(As a post-script I'd just like to point out that over the years Larry and Gerry have become very close friends, and Larry is a big supporter of Gerry's FIST Foundation, which provides jobs and financial help to retired boxers.)

No Mas TV Guide - 6/11

U.S. Open Golf Highlights
Golf Channel, 6 p.m.
The countdown to the Open is officially on, and this show should get you primed by taking you back to last year's affair at Winged Foot, which will forever be remembered for Phil Mickleson's Jean Van de Velde routine on the 72nd hole, which allowed Geoff Ogilvy to sneak off with the tournament.

Edison Miranda v. Howard Eastman
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Now that La Pantera has been forced to go back to the drawing board after that brutal destruction at the hands of Kelly Pavlik, we can go back to some of his old bouts and look for the clues that he wasn't all they were making him out to be. Those clues were manifest in every one of his fights, including this TKO of Howard Eastman from last year.

WWE Raw Special
USA, 8 p.m.
The WWE draft, whatever the hell that is. Look, I can't help you, and Franchise is AWOL. I can't lie to you - the wrestling situation here on No Mas is in dire straits at the moment.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 9 p.m.
Bulls/Jazz, game 5, 1997. Jordan, flu, etc.

Clavin Brock v. Jameel McCline
ESPN Classic, 12 a.m.
It seems like this is going to serve as the high point for the Boxing Banker's career, after Wlad sleepified his ass last fall. But look, this is a great fight, primarily for the eighth round, which in any other year which did not include the first Corrales/Castillo fight would have been a sure-shot for Round of the Year. Worth watching too for a look at the gigundous Big Time McCline, who it seems will be Vitali Klitschko's first fight back from retirement.

Deep Tennis with Steve Tignor

Steve, with all the excitement surrounding the big Rafa/Fed showdown tomorrow, we've been thinking about the specificity of greatness on clay and all the legends of the game who never managed to win at Roland Garros (Mac, Connors, Sampras). So our question is - who do you think is the greatest clay-court player of all time?

This is one of those sports parlor games that’s really not much fun. It’s a quick one, too, because there is, and never has been, any argument possible. Bjorn Borg is the greatest men’s clay-courter of all time.

First, you’ve got the stats. The guy played the French Open eight times and won it six times. Not surprisingly, that’s the highest winning percentage of any player at any Slam. And those two losses were to the same guy, Adriano Panatta (one was in Borg’s rookie year, when he was a teenager). That’s efficiency.

Borg didn’t just win the French Open, either, he made it look sick. Here’s how he won the 1978 tournament:

1st round: d. Deblicker 6-1, 6-1, 6-1
2nd round: d. Fagel 6-0, 6-1, 6-0
3rd round: d. Bertolucci 6-0, 6-2, 6-2
4th round: d. Tanner 6-2, 6-4, 7-6
quarterfinals: d. Ramirez 6-3, 6-3, 6-0
semifinals: d. Barazutti 6-0, 6-1, 6-0
final: d. Vilas 6-1, 6-1, 6-3

I don’t know the records, but I’m willing to bet that’s the least number of games ever given up by a Grand Slam winner. Notice who he beat in the final. Guillermo Vilas had won the tournament the year before (Borg didn’t play) and had set a clay-court winning-streak record that same year (the one Nadal broke in 2006). But during that streak he had never played Borg, and it looks like the Swede wanted to show the world what would have happened if he had. The two came out and played an incredibly long first point before Vilas dumped a forehand in the net. One of the writers watching the match said he could see from Vilas’s body language that it was over right there. Willie knew there was no way he could win.

Borg was the best on clay because he was fast—those long legs were his signature, helped by the short shorts of the day—and he never missed. He roamed way behind the baseline, but still managed to control the points with his topspin. Few players at the time hit with that kind of spin, and he used it to back his opponents up without having to hit a risky shot to do it.

If the Borg of 1978 walked on court today with his old wooden Donnay and demanded a showdown with Nadal, could he win? No. One look at an old clip of Borg at Roland Garros will tell you that there’s more power in the clay game now. But it would not be a ridiculous mismatch—that’s how much better Borg was than everyone else at the time.

There is, or was, a YouTube post of Borg’s final point at Roland Garros, when he beat Ivan Lendl in the 1981 final (of course he went out on top). He walks off casually, like a guy who had already done this five times before. He holds up the trophy and the French crowd gives a cheer unlike any other I’ve heard. It sounds to me like they’re happy he won because Borg winning the French Open means that, no matter what else is going wrong in the world, all is right for this day. What was supposed to happen did happen. You’ve got to be a pretty dominant athlete to make people react like that.
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Steve Tignor is the executive editor of Tennis magazine - for more of his writing, check out his weekly column, The Wrap, on the Tennis website.

Slew II

(Our horse-racing correspondent, Frank Mitchell, whets our appetite for the Belmont today by taking us back to the '77 Belmont for some more reminiscence about the great Seattle Slew.)

Thirty years ago, just three quick decades, a seal-brown, nearly black colt named Seattle Slew became the first and only racehorse to win the Triple Crown while undefeated. Not Secretariat (twice beaten and once disqualified by the stewards for running over an opponent prior to his Triple Crown in 1973) nor Citation (also twice beaten before his triple in 1948) had accomplished the neat trick of winning the intensely competitive series unbeaten.

So when Seattle Slew approached the Belmont Stakes, final leg of the Triple Crown, as an unbeaten champion, it was a special moment in sports, and the press corps was not slow in appreciating its significance. Trainer Billy Turner said, “There would be 150 a day before the Derby, and up here at Belmont, I had press and television people every day from the time of the Wood Memorial [in mid-April] through the Belmont. There’d be a dozen photographers and TV crews. That was the height of the coverage of horse racing, and the reason for that was Secretariat had brought the world alive.”

That coverage made Turner and the Slew Crew – Dr. Jim and Sally Hill, Karen and Mickey Taylor – famous faces across the country. Jim Hill recalled that coming into the Belmont with an unbeaten colt “was a heady time. It was an amazing feeling to be around an animal like that. And also I think I was getting a bit overprotective at the time. I didn’t want anything to go wrong. If Slew had a weak spot, it was his feet. We tried to shoe our horses about a week before the race, and when we shod Slew, the next day he was sore. We called our blacksmith, and he came racing back up from Maryland. We doped out a plan, and within a week, he was fine.”

The excitement of an unbeaten colt, trying to overcome the odds of chance and win the Triple Crown, brought out legions of racing fans. Mickey Taylor said that “Seattle Slew was late arriving for the Belmont to be saddled because they didn’t expect 77,000 people, started parking cars in the way. Billy and the groom had to go one way to get to the backside of the barn, then found they couldn’t get through, and they had to go back and return to where they started to get to the tunnel by another route. Then once in the tunnel, Slew would just take three or four steps and stop, then another three or four steps and stop. Everyone around the horse started to get excited, but the trainer, groom, and my dad were not excited. They knew they couldn’t start the show without Slew.”

The horse did not let his public down. Karen Taylor said that “the paddock was a sight to behold to see how the crowd received him. He really put on a show. Slew was like Muhammed Ali. He would psych up his opponents in the paddock, arch his neck and do his war dance.” In the Belmont, Seattle Slew took control of the pace, racing on the lead and galloped his opposition into defeat. Turner said, “The Belmont was the easiest race of the three.”After the race, Sally Hill said that the owners went to a party at the offices of the Fasig-Tipton sales company, which runs the auction where Seattle Slew was sold as a yearling in Lexington, Ky. John Finney, then director of Fasig-Tipton, “told us that he got so excited when Slew crossed the finish line that he threw his binoculars, which he had for 40 years. He was that excited.

“Winning the Triple Crown was the best feeling in the world, and when we were in the winner’s circle, we couldn’t stop smiling.”

All the racing world smiled with them.
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To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Seattle Slew's Triple Crown, No Mas has released a Seattle Slew t-shirt as part of our Pantheon collection. It's a replica of the official shirt of the Slew Crew, which can be seen in the photo in the piece above worn by Slew owner Jim Hill while his son Jamie feeds the horse. That photo comes to us courtesy of the Hill family.

No Mas Weekend TV Guide: 6/8 - 6/10

THE NO MAS WEEKEND TRIFECTA




Belmont Stakes
NBC, 5 p.m.







Miguel Cotto v. Zab Judah
HBO PPV, 9 p.m.






French Open Men's Final
NBC, 9 a.m.




Three great showdowns make this a great No Masian weekend - Preakness-winner Curlin, Hard Spun and the dangerous Rags to Riches in the Belmont, undefeated Miguel Cotto facing his toughest opponent yet at the Garden (on the eve of the Puerto Rican Day Parade no less), Brownsville's Zab Super Judah, and then the tennis smackdown that the world truly awaits, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the men's final of the French Open. Here's my No Mas trifecta box - Hard Spun, Judah and Federer. Underdogs all. Take it to the bank.


BEST OF THE REST
6/8
Auburn v. Alabama, 1982
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m.
The Iron Bowl from 25 years ago, and a game to remember for two reasons - Bo Jackson bruising performance and game-winning touchdown run, and the fact that this was Bear Bryant's last showdown with Auburn - the big Bear would be dead not two months after this game.

Election
Showtime, 5:15 p.m.
A modern classic that in my mind belongs to a class of drama that includes Mozart's operas - which is to say it's the wicked stepsister of Bring It On and all such films in its hilariousness, realistic-osity and overall viciousness. No, it's not a sports movie, but it's one of the best movies I know of on the reptilian beast that is the competitive heart. And, you know, the football/cheerleading culture of the American high school presides in all of its dipshit vicissitudes.

Friday Night Smackdown
CW, 8 p.m.
"One Night Stand" results reveal whether Edge survived his Cage Match. Also - the countdown to the WWE Draft.

The Karate Kid
ABC Family, 8 p.m.
Wax on, wax off, yadda yadda yadda...

Herman Ngoudjo v. Randall Bailey
ESPN2, 8 p.m. (replay at 3 a.m.)
Friday Night Fights travels to Montreal, and they're showcasing a very exciting young fighter who fights out of the Ville Marie by way of Cameroon, Herman Ngoudjo. Ngoudjo gave Jose Luis Castillo all he could handle this past January (read what I had to say about this bout here). Tonight in his adopted hometown he faces Randall Bailey, who's been through the wars - last big fight I remember Bailey having he was getting the beating of his life from Cotto.

Roberto Duran v. Ken Buchanan
ESPN Classic, 9 p.m.
What a lean, ferocious, beautiful monster Duran was as a lightweight. This is a classic fight, the night that Duran won his first world title at the Garden. Very brutal fight, very strange ending.

60 Minutes on Classic
ESPN Classic, 10:30 p.m.
Two segments about sports fall from grace - the first interviews Roger Staubach and Arthur Ashe about the loss of innocence in pro sports, and the second takes us back to Leslie Stahl's interview with Latrell Sprewell after the strangling donnybrook.

Miguel Cotto v. Ricardo Torres
HBO2, 11 p.m.
Had it not been for Castillo/Corrales, this would have been the clearcut Fight of the Year in 2005. I was in the house, and man, let me tell you - it was some shit. Both fighters tasted canvas, both fighters were at one point or another completely out on their feet. Trust me, this is a jaw-dropper.

Zab Judah v. Demarcus Corley
HBO2, 11:30 p.m.
A year and a half after losing his IBF belt at 140 to Kos Tszyu, Zab himself another 140 belt, the WBO, from Demarcus Corley in a split decision. I don't feel like checking this right now, but I think that Corley is the only common opponent between Cotto and Zab. Cotto destroyed Corley in 2005.

Tonight Show with Jay Leno
NBC, 11:35 p.m.
Kenny Smith jumps on the couch with Jay. Myself, I'd about ready to send Kenny fishing.

6/9
French Open Women's Final
NBC, 9 a.m.
Breakfast at Roland Garros - Henin v. Ivonovic. If you want to get some tennis-watching in this morning, you better get up early, because I have a feeling that Henin - winner of three of the last four women's singles titles en Paris - will make quick work of this Serbian upstart.

The Masutatsu Oyama Trilogy
IFC, 10 a.m. & 2:35 p.m.
All three movies back-to-back-to-back in which Sonny Chiba plays his legendary karate mentor, Masutatsu Oyama - Karate Bullfighter, Karate Bearfighter and Karate for Life. I still feel like the third movie would be more awesome if it were called Karate Sharkfighter, but whaddya gonna do?

Juwanna Mann
Comedy Central, 12 p.m.
Look it's Saturday, it's noon, and most likely you're just waking up on a beautiful summer afternoon and facing the fact that you're probably not going to make it outside today because you're too hungover. So why not just take it a notch lower and turn on Juwanna Mann? Seriously. Crack open a beer for breakfast too. Revel in your disgusting-ness.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 12 p.m.
Game 4 of the '87 finals, the last of the epic 80's showdowns between the Celtics and Lakers.

NCAA Track and Field Championships
CBS, 1 p.m.
Always fun watching. Last year the Florida State men and the Auburn women were each first time champions.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 2 p.m.
Game 6 of the '88 finals between the Lakers and Pistons. I may be mistaken, but I think this is the one that the Pistons had won in the last minute when Dennis Rodman inexplicably took a jump shot which got L.A. the ball back at a crucial moment. Remember that? That was back before the Worm was crazy... when he was just stupid.

Diego Corrales Tribute
Showtime, 6 p.m.
Showtime gets us primed for Saturday night's big fights with a trilogy of Chico Corrales fights. Unfortunately, only one of them really shows the fallen champ at his best - his beatdown of Popo Freitas from 2004. The other two bouts, last year's Casamayor loss and the knockout to Castillo in their rematch, were kinf of embarrassing for Chico and signalled the downhill side of his career.

Antonio Tarver v. Elvis Muriqi
Showtime, 10 p.m.
The Magic Man hasn't been in the ring since his humiliation at the hands of Bernard Hopkins last summer, and for his comeback he's chosen a good opponent in Muriqi - a journeyman, a certain victory, but not such a pushover as to be completely ridiculous. Chad Dawson is on the card as well, who figures to be a future opponent for Tarver, provided of course Muriqi doesn't manage to drug him like Hopkins did.

The Basketball Diaries
Sundance, 10 p.m.
Jim Carroll's uber-cool memoir of his basketball, street urchin, prep-school, heroin-addict adolescence in Manhattan. With Leo DiCaprio in the starring role, this is one of those movies that makes you remember that no matter how cool erstwhile teenagers make themselves out to have been in retrospect, they were really just as lame and stupid as the rest of us.

TNA Wrestling Impact
Spike, 11 p.m.
Sting faces Christopher Daniels, Jerry Lynn takes on Robert Roode, and a King of the Mountain qualifying match to boot.

6/10
NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 10 a.m.
Game 6 of the '98 Finals, the clincher for the Bulls second threepeat, won with M.J.'s unforgettable buzzer-beater after he shook off Bryon Russell. You can't tell me that His Airness doesn't wish that this was still his last NBA moment.

Ben Hogan: The Quest for Perfection
CBS, 12:30 p.m.
These treacly, soft-shot CBS golf docs are usually annoying as hell, but this one in my memory is pretty good, mostly because Hogan is an irrepressible subject.

The Prefontaine Classic
NBC, 4 p.m.
One of the best U.S. track and field events on the calendar, and this year's promises to be a winner, with big-name sprinters like Asafa Powell, Shawn Crawford and Jeremy Wariner taking part and the Bowerman Mile sporting a loaded field.

NBA's Greatest Games
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m.
Game of the 2001 finals, in which the Sixers shocked the mighty Lakers. Watching in bed with my girlfriend at the time (who was, I must say, a very good sport about my histrionics) I all too briefly believed that a miracle might happen in that series. It didn't.

NBA Finals, Game 2
ABC, 9 p.m.
Kind of looks like Prince James is going to have to wait another year to take the throne. Unless, that is, he gets all Super MJ. We'll see in this one. I say no way can the Cavs crawl out of a 2-0 hole against the Spurs. They just don't have the firepower.

Slew

Perhaps no other sport lends itself so well to looking backward as horse racing. Although any sport worth its salt has a history, the traditions of horse racing and the importance of past horses and horsemen play a major role in what happens today in racing. Furthermore, as horseplayers, we continually look backward as we evaluate form. It is essentially impossible to assess what a horse might do or be capable of doing without knowing what its past performance has been.

For those of us who feel the pulse of history, however, the Thoroughbred offers peculiar pleasures. In what other context than racing could the smell and sight and sound of horses propel us backward three decades to a time when the exhilaration of the racetrack was the essence of a social afternoon.

In 1977, racing was riding the crest of a wave of popular interest sparked by the great Secretariat, who became the first Triple Crown winner in a quarter-century and raced across sports pages like a beam of light. The sport had not yet begun to feel the pinch as its immense base of fans began to age or as state governments began to operate other forms of gambling as revenue streams.

In those seemingly simpler times 30 years ago, the most important horse in America was Seattle Slew. The 3-year-old had crushed his opposition leading up to the Triple Crown. The nearly black colt overcame adversity to win the Kentucky Derby, then traveled to Maryland and won the Preakness.

He approached the Belmont Stakes as an unbeaten champion. No Triple Crown winner had ever completed the difficult series while unbeaten, but Seattle Slew was a very special horse. He was fast, but he wasn’t a sprinter. He had stamina, but he wasn’t a plodder. So dark that he was actually hard to see in the black and white photographs of the day, Seattle Slew was truly unique, combining the excitement of speed with the control of a professional. And he was owned by a quartet of personable young men and women who became part of the bright, young face of racing a generation or so ago.

A large part of Slew's appeal lied in the fact that this dark horse was a genuine "dark horse." Bought out of a select yearling sale for only $17,500 when a lot of people had that kind of money to spend on a racehorse, Seattle Slew was like hitting the lottery – over and over again.Every time the colt won, the story became more exciting, the tension revved up a little more. And Seattle Slew came through, winning the Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown. He was so good that he made it seem easy.
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Frank Mitchell lives on a farm where he writes and raises horses about 30 minutes from Keeneland Race Course in Kentucky. He's written two books on horse-racing and writes a regular column on Thoroughbred bloodlines for Daily Racing Form that can be found at drf.com.

Two Very No Masian Anniversaries

June 7, 1981
Bjorn Borg defeats Ivan Lendl in the men's singles final of the French Open for his sixth and final victory at Roland Garros (this is the tournament that is the focus of William Klein's great documentary, The French). It was Lendl's first Grand Slam final, and he came out swinging, taking Borg, who was untouchable in his prime on clay, to the full five sets. Of course, the rest of '81 didn't turn out so well for Borg - Mac beat him at Wimbledon, ending his epic run of five straight Wimbledon titles, and then Mac beat him again in the U.S. Open final, two defeats which paved the way for Borg's shocking early retirement in 1983.

June 7, 1982
With the fifth overall pick in the 1982 baseball draft, the Mets select a young fireballer out of Tampa named Dwight Gooden. Doc spent a season in single-A, where he struck out basically every single batter he faced, a feat that led Davey Johnson to bring him up to the Show in '84, where, well, you know. As a side note - the Mets didn't make out too badly in the later rounds of the '82 draft either, nabbing two more pitchers crucial to their championship in '86 - Randy Myers and Roger McDowell.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/7

St. Vincent/St. Mary vs. Oak Hill Academy
ESPN Classic, 1 p.m.
Oh yeah, a little classic high school basketball in the afternoon. In this nugget from 2002, a certain young prep schooler by the name of LeBron goes all bubonic. All day, Classic will be alternating vintage Tim Duncan/Wake Forest games and LeBron high school throwdowns.

Best of Butterbean II
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Classic not leaving us hanging on volume two of this cliffhanger. I appreciate that.

NBA Finals: Game One
ABC, 9 p.m.
Here at No Mas, where we tend to be pretty defiantly retrosexual on the sports front, we realize that we cannot in good conscience ignore this series between the Cavs and the Spurs merely from a historical perspective. An upstart prince who would be king challenging a bland but iron-willed dynasty? It's some straight-up War of the Roses shit, and I have a feeling that no matter what the outcome, people will be talking about this series for years to come.

Marvin Hagler v. Vito Antuofermo
VS., 9 p.m.
I gotta hand it to Versus for clearing this bout - somebody over there knows what's up. This is a crucial fight towards understanding the outsider complex of His Marvelousness, as he was held up at gunpoint in the decision of this middleweight title fight in '79. He softened Vito up for one Alan Minter, however, which led to some measure of redemption for Hagler. Read more of what I have to say on the matter in this post from last September.

Late Show with David Letterman CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Chuck Liddell takes the chair with Dave - this is not a repeat, so tune in to hear his lameass excuses for his recent beheading at the hands (hand) of Rampage Jackson.

Birthday Wednesday

An eclectic group of birthday celebrants today, including a Baseball Hall-of-Famer, two Hockey Hall-of-Famers, a Football Hall-of-Famer and two football legends, one in Dallas and one in Ghana, a wrestling pioneer and a pioneering explorer, an Olympic gold-medalist, a Nobel Prize-winner, and if not the greatest, certainly the coolest tennis player ever to slide into a microscopic pair of Fila shorts.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/6

French Open - Men's Quarterfinals
ESPN2, 12 p.m.
By far the most interesting match today is the Nadal/Moya match, a type of master and student (ah, but now master is student Carlos-san) showdown I more associate with boxing than tennis. In the other quarter, sixth seed Novak Djokovic takes on unseeded Igor Andreev, who ousted Andy Roddick in the first round.

An Officer and a Gentleman
Cinemax, 4:20 p.m.
The best parts of this otherwise sappy crapfest are the karate showdowns between Richard Gere and Louis Gossett. They look really real too. Gossett seems like he could probably fight anyway, but Captain Buddha Gere has definitely got some moves on him too.

Best of Butterbean Volume I
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
I know what you're thinking. Volume One? Sheesh. But hey, what else are you going to do on Wednesday night? Watch hockey?

Barbaro
HBO, 10 p.m
Another treacly, teary-eyed look at the horse that could, and then couldn't. Frankly, the whole story is getting a little old.

Arnold Cream's Last Hurrah

The great Jersey Joe Walcott (née Arnold Cream) made his only successful defense of the heavyweight championship on this day in 1952 when he outpointed Ezzard Charles over fifteen rounds at Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia.

It was the fourth and final fight between Walcott and Charles in one of heavyweight boxing's greatest and most under-appreciated rivalries. Their first bout came in 1949 after the retirement of Joe Louis - Charles won that one by unanimous decision. Their second fight came almost two years later, after Charles had become the universally recognized heavyweight king by beating Louis after the Bomber came out of retirement in 1950. For the second time, Charles convincingly defeated Walcott, putting him on the canvas in the ninth round and winning another UD.

The third time was the charm for ole Jersey Joe, however, as he knocked out Charles in the 7th round of their fight in 1951 to become, at that point, the oldest heavyweight champion in history at the age of 37. The fourth Walcott/Charles bout, 55 years ago today, was the least interesting of the four, a fight perhaps more notable for the ref than the action inside the ring - that night Zach Clayton became the first African-American to referee a heavyweight title fight (Clayton is today probably most famous for reffing the Rumble in the Jungle).

Walcott won the fight by unanimous decision and held on to his hard-won belt, but not for long. Three short months later, ahead on points in the 13th round, he stepped into the brick wall of Rocky Marciano's right hand, and the next era of heavyweight dominance had begun.

No Mas TV Guide - 6/5

French Open Quarterfinals
ESPN2, 12 p.m.
The big smackdown tomorrow is the second match scheduled on Chatrier, when Serena and Justine Henin-Hardenne go at it. Federer plays after that against the Spaniard Tommy Robredo, who likely will get Moby Fed a good sweat before his rubdown. On Lenglen, the big match is the last once scheduled, Davydenko and Canas. If Canas makes it through to the semi, he plays Fed, who he miraculously beat twice in three weeks back in March.

U.S. Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 8 p.m.
Golf Channel getting us all primed for Oakmont by taking us back to the last time the Open was held at the venerable Pennsylvanian course, the 1994 tournament, when Ernie Els outlasted Loren Roberts and perpetual bridesmaid Colin Montgomerie in the 18-hole playoff to win his first major.

Evander Holyfield v. Michael Dokes
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
Rarely referred to when we talk about the Real Deal's great career, his tenth-round TKO of Dynamite Dokes capped off a hell of a fight, largely because Evander in 1989 wasn't quite filled out as a heavyweight yet. As for Michael Dokes, well, he wouldn't have another meaningful fight until he fought Riddick Bowe in '93, when Big Daddy stopped him in the first.

Evander Holyfield v. Bert Cooper
ESPN Classic, 9 p.m.
By 1991, most people thought that Smokin' Bert Cooper, once the charge of Joe Frazier, was a completely shot fighter, but a manly showing in this fight with Evander briefly resuscitated his career. This is really some ultraviolent shit right here. Whatever you do, don't miss the third round.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Olympic gold-medalist swimmer and overall superhottie Amanda Beard is on with Dave. Why, you ask? Because she's going to be on the cover of Playboy. She posed nude for the July issue. I guess Olympic swimming just doesn't pay what it used to.

Remember the Titans
TBS, 1 a.m.
You take a look at her. Cause once you step on that bus you aint got your mama no more. You got your brothers on the team and you got your daddy. You know who your daddy is, doncha? Gary, if you want to play on this football team, you answer me when I ask you who is your daddy? Who's your daddy, Gary? Who's your daddy?

Last Call with Carson Daly
NBC, 1:35 a.m.
Carson is joined by Tommy Morrison. Unreal. The Duke has been making news lately by calling out Chuck Liddell. If you were going to have to fight Liddell, I must say, now seems like it might be a good time to do it.

K.O.W. - The Zab Boogie

Maybe this post is unfair to Zab, because usually when we do a Knockout of the Week based on an upcoming fight, we show one of the fighters knocking somebody out, not getting knocked out. But this one - I just can't resist. With the big Cotto/Judah throwdown coming up this Saturday, the first thing that came to my mind for a K.O.W. this morning was Zab getting pulverized by Kos Tszyu in the second round of their junior welterweight unification bout in 2001

As you may remember, this was a heavily hyped fight, with Judah at the time seeming like a carbon copy of Floyd with perhaps just a little more power. In my recollection, it was even money going in, which was really saying something, because at the time Tszyu, The Thunder from Down Under, seemed indestructible, like the Mongolian Chavez.

The fight ended early, and bizarrely, when Kos caught Zab with a straight right hand at the very end of the second round. Zab tried to showboat a little and leap right to his feet, and once there he discovered that his bell had been rung a little harder than he thought. What ensued was some straight-up Three Stooges shit, one of the great walks down Queer Street you'll ever want to see. It prompted Jay Nady to wave the bout off, an unfortunate early stoppage that caused all manner of controversy and resulted in Zab getting himself suspended for throwing a shitfit (once he stopped, uh, doing the Chicken Dance that is).

Ten-Cent Beer Night

Thirty-three years ago tonight, the Cleveland Indians management enacted either (depending on your point of view) the biggest blunder or the most ingenious scheme in the history of baseball, when they staged their infamous ten-cent beer night at Municipal Stadium for a home game with the Rangers.

I think the picture above pretty much tells the story of how this brilliant idea turned out, but I'll offer a few details anyway. The backdrop of the game already presaged disaster, as the Indians and the Rangers went into the evening with bad blood dating back to a bench-clearing brawl at a game in Texas the previous week.

The ten-cent beer on offer in Cleveland was Stroh's. Oddly, this did not stop the 25,000 fans in attendance from drinking themselves stupid dime by dime, which resulted early on in a lot of senseless nudity, and quickly moved on to a more familiar cinematic vice - unbridled violence and mayhem. The Tribe's first baseman Mike Hargrove was nearly hit by a jug of Thunderbird wine (they weren't even charging people for that shit, they were just giving it away) as debris was constantly being rifled at players on the field.

In the ninth, shit went completely batshit crazy. A fan sprinted onto the field and stole Jeff Burroughs cap and glove, and the Rangers, led by manager and legendary five-star General of Fuck-It-Let's-Fight-Em-All, Billy Martin, marched onto the field with bats in their hands with an eye towards getting jiggy with whoever wanted some. Not surprisingly, EVERYBODY wanted some, and soon the bat-wielding Rangers were surrounded by a frothing circle of drunken Cleveland mooks brandishing every manner of weapon imaginable, including ripped-out stadium seats. At that point, the Indians grabbed bats and stormed into the outfield fray as well. Shit proceeded to get all Warriors out there.

The Indians forfeited the game, which was tied at five apiece in the ninth. The outfield gang-war resulted in no shortage of injuries to players, fans and umpires (Hargrove famously did some serious damage out there). In the end, A.L. president Lee MacPhail summed up the situation in typically incisive fashion when he said, "There is no question that the beer played a part in the riot." Was it Descartes or Homer Simpson who said, "Ah alcohol... the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

Stay out of the lane when Obama's driving

The recent revelation that presidential candidate Barack Obama is a "no autopsy, no foul" kind of playground basketball player is a fascinating piece of information, one that has all sorts of implications for his candidacy and how it is evolving amongst the spin doctors and media machine. And when I bring up spin-doctoring, I don't mean in any way to suggest that I doubt the legitimacy of Obama's basketball pedigree. In fact, it seems almost unspectacularly believable that Obama likes to play some hoops now and then. That said, clearly his campaign is interested in positing this image of their man to the nation - Barack as wily elbow-artist in a pick-up basketball game near you. It makes sense. Presidential candidates have always chosen to define themselves and their social and class affiliations by making public displays of their sporting activities. In a sports-mad nation, there is maybe no easier way to automatically tell people who you are than to show them what games you play when you want to blow off some steam.

It's a delicate balancing act, though, because Americans have a strange relationship to their Presidents and what it is they like to imagine them to be. Americans want their Presidents to be someone who is innately better than them, but someone who doesn't know it, who despite his royal lineage nevertheless resembles the rank and file and their many flaws and peccadilloes. Bush is a textbook example of this phenomenon - the bumbling prince of a dynastic family, the Texan accent and homespun malapropisms, the overall affect of a failure made good, the eternal C student... but at Yale. W is many things, most of them bad, but one thing he never seems in his jocular, nicknaming sort of way is intellectually or culturally arrogant. This is the cardinal sin of a Presidential candidate today, one that felled the past two Democrats in the general election, most notably John Kerry.

Kerry's arrogance, or perceived arrogance, almost could be summed up by his one glaring, most unfortunate sporting association - the wind-surfing photo. At exactly the wrong moment, it crystallized everything that the nation already suspected of him, and disliked - that he was an astronomically wealthy playboy of expensive leisure pursuits. It made W, progeny of one of the office's great sporting Presidents, seem masculine and down-to-earth by comparison. You think of the Bushes, you think of the lean, elder George jogging or throwing horseshoes or smacking tennis balls on the run. For all his pasty, ineffectual blathering, by all accounts George Bush the elder was a hell of an athlete. Hell of a soldier too, evidently, a man's man, but one uniquely unsuited to the office of the Presidency.

Of course, George Sr. was also an avid sailor and in general as WASP-ish as could be, but then voters aren't always intolerant of an aristocratic edge in their Presidents' extra-presidential activities. More often than not what flies with the public seems a matter of timing and, maybe more importantly, contrast. Clinton, for instance, could get away with the perpetual golfing, cigar-in-the-mouth, fatcat shots that punctuated his years in office because of the general understanding of him as a Burger King-gobbling white trash yokel who elevated himself by the sheer force of his will and intellect. Similarly, Nixon's football obsession (and it was, as were so many things with Nixon, an obsession) undercut his public image as the ultimate Beltway insider and operator.

This contrast angle never has been so important to a President as it was in the 20th century's most famous bit of Presidential athletics, the touch football games that are today as synonymous with the Kennedy clan as are alcoholism, adultery and tabloid tragedy. It's a little hard for us to fathom now, in that he has been deified, sainted, dragged through the mud and then sainted again since his death, but in the beginning of the national awareness of JFK, he was a man entirely alien and suspicious to most of the American electorate - secular royalty from a Northeastern bootlegging dynasty, too handsome and possessed of a disarmingly broad accent and Irish Catholic to boot. Those front-yard football games with all the dogs and laughter and hair flopping in the breeze became so iconic precisely because they humanized a man who desperately needed such humanizing. In doing so, they achieved in just a few seconds of footage what every Presidential aspirant since has sought to achieve for themselves in their photo ops - the image of a regular Joe and family man who just happens to want to occupy the highest office in the land.

Getting back to Obama, however, I must reference two more of our notable sporting Presidents, two that I think are most relevant to Obama's case - Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Both of these men were celebrated in their time for an athleticism that was largely symbolic of an overall bad-ass-itude - Lincoln as the bare-chested wrassler who had throttled the great Jack Armstrong, and Roosevelt as the pugnacious sporting alpha-male - boxer, hunter, marksman, Rough Rider, and a wrassler himself to boot (see above right for evidence).

Roosevelt and Lincoln both took office during troubled times and both were called on to confront giant symbols of corruption and greed in conflicts that threatened the very foundations of the nation. It's no mystery that the image of them as strong, swarthy, virile athletes who could stand toe-to-toe with any man was a central component of the mythology that surrounded them. Just like today, theirs were not times where America would tolerate windsurfing or any of its effete equivalents from its leaders.

Which brings me to Obama - the guy who smokes, the guy who had it rough when he was a kid and turned to drugs as an escape, the guy who hard-scrabbled his way out of a troubled youth to become a Harvard Law scholar and now the anointed savior of the Democratic Party. And oh yeah, the guy who isn't afraid to mix it up on the playground pavement and throw a few 'bows when tempers flare. It's almost too perfect, really. It is, dare I say it... a layup.

(P.S. The fact that I never got to Gerald Ford or the Eisenhower tree in this piece pains me. But it just didn't happen. Let me just state here lest anyone out there not happen to know this - Gerald Ford is hands down the greatest athlete ever to occupy the Oval Office. Strange but true.)

No Mas TV Guide - 6/4

2005 NLDS, Game 4
ESPN Classic, 12 p.m. & 5 p.m.
To welcome the Rocket back to the bigs (oh how we missed and prayed for his return... I hope he does it the same way next year) Classic is very cleverly playing a Roger Clemens marathon today, including his 20-strikeout games against the Mariners in 1986 and against the Tigers in 1996. So if you're a big Clemens fan, then Classic is the place for you to be today. Myself, like all reasonable human beings, I loathe his self-aggrandizing ass and therefore could give a shit about watching his old games. But this NLDS game from two years ago is really one of the greatest playoff games I've ever seen despite Clemens involvement. You remember - 18 innings, Chris Burke walkoff. Shit was unreal.

Cinderella Man
Cinemax, 6 p.m.
People never seem to be able to get over it when I tell them that I've never seen this movie. I know someday I'm just going to HAVE to break down and watch it, but come on - Russell Crowe doing a man-of-the-people accent, Renee freakin Zellwegger doing whatever it is she does, and a boatload of historical inaccuracies to boot? I'm putting it off as long as I can.

Gay Sex in the 70's
Sundance, 9 p.m.
My impression is that it was very athletic.

Late Show with David Letterman
CBS, 11:35 p.m.
Dave, a big racing fan as you probably are aware, is joined by the Indy 500 winner, Dario Franchitti.

"Drugged" is the new "lost"

George Foreman says he was drugged before the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 (the fact that it was like 114 degrees probably had nothing to do with his reported lethargy in the ring - as a friend of mine said when he read about this, "man it was so hot that night, all the fucking Africans at the fight were like "man it's hot...")

Now Antonio Tarver says he was so lethargic the day of his loss to Bernard Hopkins that he thinks he might have been drugged (the fact that he had to lose about 40 pounds to make weight surely had nothing to with this... hey Antonio, ever heard of this dude named Roy Jones?).

I see a whole school of historical revisionism emerging here. "I was drugged." The entirety of man's past is being rewritten before our eyes. Hector... drugged. Napoleon at Waterloo? Completely drugged. Goliath... Custer... the entire Royal Navy before the Battle of the Dardanelles... Dewey... Spassky... Bobby Riggs... the Shah... Mary Decker... Communism... Jana Novotna in the 1993 Wimbledon final? Drugged, drugged, drugged, drugged, etc. Even Satan now suspects that there was some foul play in both of his wars with the Lord's Mighty Army. Which is why, at the weigh-in before the upcoming Battle of the Apocalypse, holms will be having some of them demons in his corner sample all his motherfucking food.

La vraie fusée

On this day in 1962, perhaps the greatest tennis player in history (check out what our Deep Tennis correspondent has to say about that) won his first French Championship and the second leg of his first of two career Grand Slams.

Of course, I'm talking about the Rocket, Rod Laver, who 45 years ago today won the men's final at Roland Garros in an epic five-setter against another tennis legend, Aussie compatriot Roy Emerson. Laver already had dispatched Emmo in the Australian final, and would do so again in the U.S. Championships later in the year to polish off the Grand Salami.

Laver would win the French only twice in his career - his next victory at Roland Garros would come in 1969 in the midst of his second Salami. Oddly, after his Slam in '62, Laver would not win another major tennis tournament until he won Wimbledon in 1968.

No Mas Weekend TV Guide: 6/1 -6/3

French Open
ESPN2, 3 p.m.
The heavenly Venus is the first boldface name to make an early exit from Roland Garros, losing today to Jelena Jankovic. See this match on the deuce later on and also some action from two exciting third-round men's matches - Monfils/Nalbandian and Ferrero/Youzhny. Moby Fed plays today as well.

Johns Hopkins v. Duke
ESPN Classic, 4 p.m.
Classic replays the NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championship game. In a replay of the 2005 championship, Hopkins stymied a comeback effort from the Dukies and squeaked out a 12-11 victory.

Game 6
TMC, 7 p.m.
This movie is about a playwright (Michael Keaton) having anxiety attacks about the opening of his new play. Which, you know, doesn't sound that great - but he also a crazed Red Sox fan and the whole thing is set around the '86 World Series. And it's based on a Don Delillo short story. I think it was straight-to-video disaster, but it has potential.

Shaun of the Dead
MTV, 10 p.m. & 12 a.m.
Any movie where flesh-eating zombies are killed with cricket bats is plenty sporting enough for No Mas.

James Kirkland v. Ossie Duran
Timothy Bradley v. Donald Camarena
Showtime, 11 p.m.
A showcase for two young, undefeated up-and-comers - 23-year-old knockout artist, James "The Mandingo Warrior" Kirkland, and Timothy "Desert Storm" Bradley. I've seen Kirkland in action a couple times and I am convinced he is the rilly-dilly.

6/2
Do You Believe in Miracles?
HBO, 5:15 a.m.
HBO runs its 1980 Olympic hockey doc early Saturday morning. If you're still up drinking and coking and snorting and smoking, well, you might want to throw this on, reminisce back to 1980, and wonder where it all went wrong.

A Forgotten Heavyweight: Jerry Quarry
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
I LOVE this show, really vintage material on The Quarryman. Check out what I had to say about this very program here.

French Open
NBC, 1 p.m.
More early-round action - should be the men's fourth-round.

He Got Game
WGN, 4 p.m.
Terrible movie, good soundtrack. The opening scene, an operatic, balletic Spike Lee paean to the beauty of basketball, always looks to me like an SNL-skit.

U.S. Open Highlights
Golf Channel, 5 p.m.
This recap takes us back to the '93 Open at Baltusrol, Lee Janzen's first of two wins at the U.S. Open (both of which, oddly, were two-stroke victories over Payne Stewart).

Air Bud Spikes Back
Animal Planet, 7 p.m.
The Air Bud sequel where Bud plays volleyball (this is either the fourth, or the ninth, or the fourteenth in the series). Evidently, in a pure stroke of genius, Animal Planet has purchased the rights to the whole Air Bud franchise. That should make them millions.

Ringside
ESPN Classic, 8 p.m.
One of the best of the Ringside series. Titled "Little Big Men", it features Duran, Basilio, Willie Pep, Alexis Arguello, and of course His Sugar-Ray-ness (and I do not mean Leonard). Good footage of all of these guys.

China v. U.S.
ESPN2, 8 p.m.
An international soccer friendly between China and the U.S. being played at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. The U.S. is 3-0-1 under new coach Bob Bradley.

Wonderful World of Golf
Golf Channel, 10 p.m.
Jack Nicklaus faces off against Johnny Miller in San Francisco. There was a time, oh, say, 1972 or so, when it seemed like Miller would emerge as Nicklaus's true rival. Kind of like that brief period when it seemed like Duval and not Tiger was going to be the alpha dog of his era.

College Softball World Series - Games 9 and 10
ESPN Classic, 3 a.m.
How many fucking games do they play? What is it - best of 25?

6/3
Classic Battle Lines
ESPN Classic, 7 a.m.
This show sets up the 1981 Wimbledon final between Borg and Mac at Wimbledon, after their epic encounter in the 1980 final. This was the year that Mac really made history with his on-court shenanigans, including the essential "You cannot be serious" and "You're the pits of the world" tantrums. Watch this and then treat yourself to a No Mas special commemorating the event.

French Open
NBC, 1 p.m.
Finishing up the fourth rounds of the men's and women's draws.

Bud Greenspan's Kings of the Ring
ESPN Classic, 1 a.m.
A Bud Greenspan joint that looks at arguably the four greatest heavyweights in history - Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Ali.