Yes, this is Ochocinco’s latest brainstorm. He admits he hasn’t thought it all the way through yet, but he plans to add it to his odd résumé of career achievements, along with riding a bull and trying out for a professional soccer team. He is so over the moon about being a Patriot — hey, in the game of NFLopoly he got a Get Away From Bengals Jail Free card — and Coach Bill Belichick has not yet ground every last bit of his personality into microscopic dust. Of course, training camp just started. He has a lot of new players. Give him time.
Leave it to Ochocinco to spice up the dregs of N.F.L. camp, or you can spend your football brain cells figuring out how the approval of a stadium plan in Los Angeles — let Sam Farmer of The Los Angeles Times tell you about Farmers Field, no relation — may shift the league’s geography. It won’t shift much if the Chargers move a bit north, but Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times paints the unhappy possibility of the Raiders weaseling their way into the picture.
A little football thinking can’t hurt, especially when most baseball thinking involves only three teams. As Tom Verducci writes on SI.com, the majors have become the Phillies, the Yankees and the Red Sox, and everyone else. The Phillies are on pace for an eye-popping season, led by Cliff Lee, who took his latest turn as superhero Tuesday night, not only pitching lights-out but hitting a home run for good measure.
In the “everyone else” news, Toronto is evidently the sign-stealing capital of baseball, according to ESPN the Magazine. They aren’t stealing enough, however, to lift them out of fourth place in the American League East.
If you haven’t had enough of the Tiger Woods versus his former caddie drama, you may be the only one, but rest assured you’ll get plenty more if you tune in to the P.G.A. Championship starting Thursday. This is because the alternative story lines are hard to sell in sound bites: we’ve had 12 different champions in the last 12 majors, and let’s just say that not many of them are household names and the Nos. 1 and 2 golfers in the current world rankings (Luke Donald and Lee Westwood of England) haven’t sniffed a major between them. Sure, Adam Scott is a potentially attractive budding star, in a marketing kind of way, as Robert Lusetich writes on Foxsports.com, but right now everyone only knows him as Steve Williams’s golfer.
The vortex of golf success these days is the agent Chubby Chandler, and Steve Hummer of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains that the Chubby Slam is the talk of the tournament. Well, that’s what people are talking about when they’re not whining about the Atlanta Athletic Club’s monstrously long par-3.
The reigning sentiment in college football these days might be to tee off and hit balls at the retreat that leaders of the N.C.A.A. are staging to try to find a way out of the cesspool they have been wading in. Initial word is they are discussing letting conferences decide the scholarship terms their teams can offer, which sounds like an excellent blueprint for the rich getting an awful lot richer. According to Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com, the N.C.A.A. chief, Mark Emmert, is serious about big things coming out of this retreat and not the usual tinkering around the margins. Too bad they didn’t invite Ralph Nader, who is leading a charge to toss the whole system into a Dumpster, just for the fireworks.
For real fireworks, though, it is necessary to expand to international sports. Soccer, as usual, contributes its share, with the Colombian national team coach being pressured to quit after he punched a woman outside a bar after she was disparaging his coaching abilities. In track and field, there is still some controversy about the double-amputee Oscar Pistorius running in the world championships, but The Philadelphia Daily News’s John Smallwood writes that the complaint about Pistorius’s having a competitive advantage is bunk. He writes this from unfortunate personal experience.
Further bad news: he is a terrible candidate to have Ochocinco go live with him. Or perhaps that is a blessing.
nytimes