Haw-haw: Another year full of Hooties
They say nice guys finish last. So, it makes sense that this guy finished first.
Mahiedine Mekhissi-Benabbad, a 27-year-old French long-distance runner, won the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the European Championships — and celebrated by shoving the event’s silly-looking but completely friendly mascot. Inside the mascot costume was one very surprised 14year-old girl.
Now he’ll never get to ask for those autographs
The NFL removed replacement referee Brian Stropolo from the crew scheduled to officiate the Carolina Panthers’ game against the New Orleans Saints — because it learned that Stropolo was a diehard Saints fan.
In the end, it was his own behind that was exposed
Pranks and hijinks are just part of the fun of playing on a high school sports team — hijinks like surreptitiously pulling down a player’s warmup pants. But that doesn’t work out so well when the depantser is a male coach/ principal and the depantsee is a 15-year-old girl — who wasn’t wearing shorts under her warmup. Oh, and this happened in front of the boys basketball team. Police in Harrison County, Iowa, were investigating.
He stopped short of pulling down his pants — or invading Poland
Guy Pnini was fined and stripped of his role as captain of an Israeli basketball team after he took on-thecourt trash talk to a new level by calling a rival team’s player a Nazi and telling him “your father should die.”
This gator wasn’t bowled over
To fire up his team during practice before the Gator Bowl, Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio decided to play a prank by having an alligator turned loose during a team pep talk. An animal trainer dressed up as a Michigan State player was to run over and wrestle the gator, thus inspiring the rest of the team. But the trainer slipped — and the alligator bit him in the leg.
Quick, follow that sombrero!
A 40-year-old Minnesota Vikings fan was arrested after a brawl involving 20 to 30 people after the Vikings lost to the Packers in Green Bay. It wasn’t hard for witnesses to pinpoint the Vikings fan at the center of the melee. He was wearing a purple sombrero.
I’ll take the ‘under’ on good parenting
Nine Florida men were arrested on charges of illegally betting more than $100,000 on peewee football games in which the players were as young as 5.
Maybe those guys in Florida had money on the game
A girls high school hockey game in Massachusetts ended controversially — when the parent of a player was caught shining a laser pointer into the eyes of a goalie on the opposing team.
Some guy in Florida had bet this would happen
A New Jersey woman filed a lawsuit seeking $150,000 in damages from an 11-year-old catcher whose errant throw struck the woman at a Little League game.
Cool. Cycling just got interesting
The 14th stage of the Tour de France fell flat when 30 riders suffered punctured tires because of tacks thrown onto the road.
Talk about things being punctured
Lance Armstrong finally met his match when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency presented statements from his former teammates attesting to Armstrong’s use of blood doping and other performanceenhancing techniques during his seven Tour de France championships. His corporate sponsors and even his own cancer foundation began distancing themselves from the defrocked cyclist faster than a 10-speed careening down the French Alps.
I guess STUPID was already taken
Denver Broncos running back Knowshon Moreno was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. He was driving a Bentley convertible with the license plate SAUCED.
Hold the mayo and cut the umbilical
A prep school coach and guidance counselor in Erie, Pa., sent an email rant to the entire student body after being disappointed at the lack of support for the school’s basketball team. He wrote that students who chose to sit with their parents at games should “cut the umbilical cord and grow a pair” and referred to students who sat with classmates as “boy lovers.” Sitting with a girlfriend apparently isn’t much better: “If she made or wanted you sit with her, then she is a high maintenance, selfish pig and you should dump her now.” He was equally critical of an opposing team, calling them “a bunch of mayonnaise sandwich eating, sister loving, trailer park dwelling clowns.” After a followup apologetic email, the coach was suspended for two weeks without pay.
Hi, Mom. They sent money!
Louisiana football prospect Landon Collins, rated the No. 1 safety coming out of high school, announced live on ESPN that he had chosen to play college football at rival Alabama. That was good news for Bama fans but bad news to his own mother. Seated next to him, she shook her head in bewilderment and then pronounced on TV that her allegiance remains with LSU, saying, “LSU Tigers, number one. Go Tigers.”
Question No. 4: What immediately comes to mind when you hear the word ‘fullback’?
The coach for the German soccer club Hannover tried a new method for learning how to motivate his players: He gave them a 128-question survey about their sexual habits and desires. Among the survey’s agree/disagree statements were “I am what you could call sexually unrestrained,” “I want any sex I can get” or “I have a lot of erotic fantasies.” Said the coach: “Each player needs different conditions to perform at his best over a long period.” Um, are we still talking about soccer?
This breakfast cost him some bacon
NHL player Dustin Penner of the Los Angeles Kings was scratched from a game with a back injury suffered while eating pancakes.
They took a knee all right — a knee to the head
Two teen-age fans celebrated a victory by their high school basketball team by “Tebowing” — the act of kneeling in prayer as Tim Tebow does. Fans of the opposing team apparently didn’t care for that — so they punched and kicked the two fans as they left the gym.
Losing the game: Priceless
A Green Bay Packers fan living in New York took five buddies (all of them Giants fans) to the Giants-Packers playoff game at Lambeau Field, along with two waitresses, a driver and an executive chef in a 70-foot RV. Cost for the trip and the six 50yard-line seats: $250,000. The Packers lost the game, meaning the guy who paid for the trip had to listen to his buddies all the way back to Manhattan.
I said, ‘Roll Tide,’ not ‘Rub up against me Tide.’
A drunken LSU fan picked the wrong place to pass out — in a Krystal burger joint in New Orleans and surrounded by celebrating Alabama fans after the national championship football game. A YouTube video captured multiple Crimson Tide fans mocking the fan and leaving trash on his unconscious body. One Bama fan even rubbed his exposed genitals on the passed-out guy. Among the TV stations airing portions of the video on its newscast was WKRG in Mobile, Ala. A day later, the station acknowledged that one of the abusive Bama fans in the video was the son of the station’s sports director.
There’s a joke here about a handball, but we’re not going to make it
AC Milan star Kevin-Prince Boateng missed several weeks of the Italian soccer season with a thigh injury. His girlfriend, swimsuit model Melissa Satta, said she knew the cause of the injury: “The reason why he is always injured is because we have sex 7-10 times a week.”
Fighting Hookers never stood a chance
“Cougars” won a student vote for the new mascot for a Utah high school, but the school board rejected it, saying the slang term “cougar” was offensive to some women.
Sorry you can’t make it, what with the cancer and all. Now, how good are these seats?
Television writer Jason Elia paid $8,000 for tickets to the Super Bowl for him and his girlfriend, whom he hoped would be his fiancee by the day of the big game. Instead, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, and she decided that was too much for her and broke up with him. And she asked if she could still have the Super Bowl tickets.
Something wicket this way comes
When a 15-year-old fan ran onto the field during a cricket match in Bangladesh, an umpire picked up a bat and hit the teen in the head. He died the next day.
Imagine if the home team had lost
Fans in Egypt stormed the field when the home team won Born to lose ... my job Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino was injured in a motorcycle wreck — while riding with his mistress who was half his age and whom he had recently hired and given a $20,000 gift. When Petrino conveniently left out many of those details in his explanation to his bosses, he was fired.
Maybe he was trying to dodge a salmon
Wrecks are common at the Daytona 500, but usually the collisions only involve the race cars. This year’s race was already under caution as officials worked to dry the rain-slickened track. That’s when the No. 42 car driven by Juan Pablo Montoya suddenly veered out of control and smack into a truck equipped with a jet dryer — and filled with 200 gallons of jet fuel, causing quite an explosion and delaying the race further.
I’ll take ‘Maiming’ for $800, Alex
An NFL investigation found that New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams handed out bonuses to players who injured players on the opposing team. Knocking out an opponent earned Saints a soccer match, but the celebration quickly turned ugly, with opposing fans beating one another. A stampede and rioting ensued, and more than 70 people were killed.
His slice has always been out of control
When a faster-playing group tried to play through the group in front of them on a Fort Worth golf course, a fight ensued — and one man was stabbed with a golf club shaft, losing a massive amount of blood from a punctured femoral artery.
We thought those awful puns would go on for Linfinity
The out-of-nowhere emergence of Chinese American Jeremy Lin to a starring role with the New York Knicks caught the nation by storm and drove pun-loving headline writers into a state of “Linsanity.” But one headline writer took things in the other direction; when the Knicks’ Linspired winning streak came to an end, one ESPN headline said, “A chink in the armor.” Perhaps that headline writer had just sampled Ben & Jerry’s new vanilla frozen yogurt flavor, “Taste the Lin-Sanity,” which included fortune cookie bits until the company realized that was Lin-sensitive and opted for waffle cone pieces instead.
You could say he fin-ished the job
How best to honor a loved one who has passed away? Just throw a Chinook salmon onto the ice during a Vancouver Canucks game. That’s what Roger Paquette did after his 30year-old son had died in an ATV accident. You see, the son was planning to throw a Chinook onto the ice at the very same game but didn’t live to do it; so, his father carried out the frozen seafood act in his honor.