Deep thoughts, cheap shots & bon mots ...

Say Hey! Great honor for Willie Mays, his name on the World Series MVP award. Willie is No. 24 in your program, No. 1 on your list of splendid baseball ambassadors.

The NBA season officially tipped off Thursday, when Suns’ rookie and certified superstar Josh Jackson called Stephen Curry “small and unathletic.” If you listen to the league’s trolling yappers, you wonder how Klutzy Curry manages to tie his own shoes. Maybe they’re slip-ons, with fake bows.

I wonder if President Trump, when responding via tweet to Curry’s statement that he would not visit the White House, regretted having already used “Little Rocket Man” on someone else.

Speaking of rockets, Matt Olson will be the Must-See Guy next baseball season. The A’s rookie’s big challenge will be not becoming the baseball version of Linsanity.

Andre Ward slipped away too quietly. I was ringside when he won his Olympic gold medal, and I saw several of his pro fights. I’m no expert, but I know that every fight was Fists of Marshmallow stepping into the ring against a badass promising to expose Ward as a pinkie-lifting tea-sipper. Andre was like the milk bottles on the carnival midway game — not as easy to knock down as they look.

Andre Ward, meet Steph Curry. Steph, Andre. And hey, here comes Joe Montana.

Déjà vu Dept.: Old-timers recall that at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City there was an under-the-table illegal-payoff scandal, with rival companies Adidas and Puma fighting it out in what Sports Illustrated dubbed “The $100,000 Payoff.”

Can’t wait for the new Adidas model, “Exercise Yard.”

What I love about college sports is the purity. That’s why I go to ESPN Classic and watch only games played prior to 1910. The hi-def sucks, but you can’t beat the purity.

I’ll sympathize with the amount of miles a team has to fly in a season as soon as they start flying commercial and sitting in coach, where the meal is a bag of stuff vacuumed off the floor in first class, the coffee is “Prison Reject,” and you always get a middle seat between two sumo wrestlers, in uniform.

“You don’t understand, air travel can be very arduous and taxing,” say several members of the president’s cabinet.

Louisville’s interim school president Greg Postel says, “We’re intending to have a robust men’s basketball season.” That would be a first. No basketball season in history, good or bad, has ever been referred to as “robust.”

Have a robust weekend.