- What’s one of the biggest recruiting pitches schools make to athletes? Come here and you’ll have a campus full of hot girls, nearly all of whom are eager and willing to hook up with you. Even though every single college and university would deny making such a pitch, they would all be lying in making that denial because even if it’s a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, under-the-table type thing, you can be sure it’s going on. Schools may be banned from using sex as an incentive for recruits, but that doesn’t mean they can have plenty of hot girls around when a recruit visits and suggest that the recruit can expect more of the same if they come to the school. Bearing that in mind, I have to ask Notre Dame football player Derrell Hand what the hell he was thinking. Hand, a defensive lineman at one of the most prestigious football schools in America, was suspended indefinitely from the football team, after soliciting sex from an undercover cop posing as a hooker last Thursday. He was released on $250 bond, but his troubles are far from over. My main question is how a football player, one of the most visible people on campus, has to pay for sex. Aren’t football players pretty much guaranteed sex just by showing up at a party on any given Saturday night? It’s a known fact that a lot of girls like to be with athletes, and on college campuses, athletes don’t get any more high profile than football players, especially at Notre Dame. Stand in the middle of a room at any frat party on a Saturday night, do a 360 and you’ll see no less than a dozen girls who would hook up with a football player right then and there. I know it’s summer and the campus is somewhat empty, but there’s no way Hand should be resorting to a hooker to get his freak on. Not a smart move, my man, and now it could cost you your football career and your scholarship.
- It was nice knowing you, two Cuban boxers deported from the Pan Am Games after going missing and running up an exorbitant bill as a luxury resort. Brazilian police arrested the pair and hauled them off to jail. Now they’re back in Cuba, where they are confined to guest houses and awaiting punishment from the Cuban government. Ailing leader Fidel Castro, a man renowned worldwide for his mercy, compassion and leniency, has promised that the two boxers will not be punished severely, so I’m sure things will turn out OK for them. Either that or they’ll spend a couple decades in a dirty, dark prison, disappear and never be heard from again or be otherwise tortured brutally. After all, Cuba doesn’t have a history of dealing kindly with athletes and others who run away and try to escape when visiting a foreign country. Normally those doing the running are looking to defect and leave Cuba for good, but based on the actions of these two tools, I’m not sure what their end game was. If they really wanted to leave Cuba, wouldn’t they have gone straight to the embassy and tried to seek political asylum? Instead, they holed up at a resort, ordered pay-per-view movies out the ying yang, raided the mini bar repeatedly and dug themselves a hole that they’re not going to get out of.
- There is no bigger baby, no more immature whiner on the PGA Tour right now than Rory Sabbatini. Sabbatini, who is a master at shooting his mouth off and then not backing it up, had a run-in with a fan at the Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio on Sunday because the fan had the audacity to call him on something Sabbatini had said several months ago. The fan, Steve Banky, called out to Sabbatini after the golfer made a double-bogey on the ninth hole, asking him if he still thought Tiger Woods was beatable. The comment made reference to a statement Sabbatini had made a few months ago at a tournament in Charlotte when he said that with his new swing and new approach to the game, Tiger was now much more beatable. Woods responded the next day by saying that he has won a ton of majors and tournaments and that Sabbatini has won a total of three tournaments and no majors. When the fan made the comment, though, Sabbatini flipped out and ran down a security guard who then had the fan ejected from the course. No, the fan didn’t threaten Sabbatini, nor did he use a profanity or throw something at him. He merely reminded Rory of a comment he’d made and that was enough to lead to a meltdown. Well, actually Sabbatini was melting down long before the incident, because he was in the midst of turning a one-shot lead over Woods heading into the final round into an eight-shot deficit by day’s end. It’s hard to see why he played so poorly under pressure, given the grace and deft touch he showed in handling Banky. Hey R., if you can't handle one fan and a harmless comment he makes in passing, how are you going to hang tough when you’re paired with Woods, the best player in the world, in the final round of the tournament? Sounds to me like someone was overly sensitive about playing so poorly with the spotlight on him and decided to take it out on an innocent fan.
- It was a great opening weekend for The Bourne Ultimatum, with the action thriller bringing in more than $70 million at the box office. For once, a movie lived up to the ginormous hype and was rewarded for it, a lesson that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End could have learned from. Unlike Pirates, Bourne stayed true to the spirit and character that made the first two movies in the series so great and having a lead actor like Matt Damon, someone who by all appearances seems like a good guy and someone who has character in real life, as your protagonist helps as well. What’s noteworthy about the $70.2 million raked in by this movie is that it nearly equals the total of the opening weekends of the first two Bourne movies combined ($27.1 million for The Bourne Identity in 2002 and The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 with $52.2 million). Runner up in the weekend earnings race was The Simpsons Movie, followed by the universally panned Underdog. Not a good sign for Underdog, because if your movie can only hit third place with meager earnings on its opening weekend and critics are roundly ripping the film, the combination of poor word of mouth, low opening weekend numbers and bad reviews does not bode well for the film’s prospects. It’s shocking, I know, that a live-action film with a talking dog and Patrick Warburton as one of the voiceover artists for the film isn’t doing well. Poor Warburton, ever since he lost his gig as Elaine’s lovable oaf of a boyfriend David Puddy on Seinfeld, things haven’t been going very well.
- Get a blog and spend your time writing snippy, sarcastic putdowns about the president, Justin Manuel Arrieta, because your strategy of trying to scale the wall at the White House to get to W. didn’t go well. Arrieta was not surprisingly nabbed by Secret Service agents at about 10:30 a.m. Sunday when he tried to enter the White House grounds by climbing a fence on the north side of the property. Arrieta, a 22-year-old from Cocoa Beach, Fla., was taken into custody and charged with unlawful entry, although his intentions for trying his climbing antics were not known. Here’s hoping it wasn’t some sort of dare that he and a few drunken buddies made to each other, because if so, that’s the dumbest dare I’ve heard of yet. If it was some sort of political statement, then where was the sign, the banner or the t-shirt with a political message on it? Or maybe Arrieta is just crazy, which actually seems like the most logical explanation here. But let’s face it, millions of Americans would love to get into the White House and smack W. upside the head with a blunt object or ten, but most of us are smart enough not to climb a fence and be captured by waiting Secret Service agents.
- Sunday came and went with no real progress on the Brady Quinn contract front, although two things did happen that make B. Quinn look even worse for continuing to hold out from Cleveland Browns training camp. Two first round picks from Quinn’s area of the draft (Nos. 23 and 25, respectively) signed contracts with their new teams and were in camp today, leaving Quinn, top pick JaMarcus Russell and No. 14 pick Darrelle Revis of the New York Jets as the only unsigned draft picks left. Jon Beason, picked 25th by the Carolina Panthers, and Dwayne Bowe, chosen 23rd by the Kansas City Chiefs, both signed deals Sunday, even as Quinn continues focusing on things that don’t matter (interviews, autograph signings, etc.) and not getting a deal done so he can focus on what does matter (getting into camp so he can start competing for a starting position). Not that Quinn is going to take anyone’s advice and get his ass into camp any time soon, but he really should sign a deal and get in before the Browns’ first home preseason game, because the scene at that game if he hasn’t signed will be ugly – really ugly. I can guarantee there will be no shortage of signs at banners blasting Quinn for his selfishness and greed, blasts that will be well-deserved by the way. Quinn is just fortunate that Russell appears poised for an equally lengthy holdout, because being the last unsigned first-round pick would take the ignominy of this whole mess to another level entirely.
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