OK, Oprah, are you listening?  I'd like to interest you in buying the Chicago Cubs, who will be sold later this year. That, at least, is what recent news accounts indicate. For reasons I can't quite comprehend, Sam Zell, the Chicago billionaire who bought the Tribune Company media empire and its holdings, which include the Cubs, has said he will put the team up for sale. 

A couple of deep-pocketed NBA tycoons, Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks, and Jerry Colangelo, the chairman of the Phoenix Suns, are rumored to be among the possible bidders, along with several local businessmen. But they're not the well-known representatives of the city that you are, Oprah, plus isn't it time a woman took the reins of a major-league baseball team to see what she can do as the principal owner?

Let's face it, the Cubs' on-field fortunes surely wouldn't suffer, not when you consider how frustrated the team has been, lo, these many decades. Last season the Cubs were the worst team in the National League, and even this season a liberal investment in free agents is no guarantee of improvement.

Sure, the price of the team could be more than you'd want to pay. After all, even as the richest female entertainer and the world's only black billionaire, with personal wealth of $1.5 billion, you might not want to fork over $600 million, the franchise's estimated value.

But maybe you could lure other celebrities into an ownership group consisting mostly, if not entirely, of African-Americans. Michael Jordan's name leaps to mind, because of his years with the Chicago Bulls, and also because he once tried his hand at professional baseball, playing with a White Sox farm team briefly. And any number of other black athletes (past and present) might jump at the opportunity to be part of something that you'd put your name to. The list of candidates could include Venus and Serena Williams, Magic Johnson, and LeBron James, who recently bought a stake in the bicycle maker Cannondale Corp and has tapped multibillionaire Warren Buffett for investment advice. And let's not forget Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub himself, the Hall of Fame shortstop who said last year he wanted to buy the team.

Why put together a black ownership group?  Because it represents one of the last frontiers in American sport, one that Jackie Robinson himself saw as important in achieving the full integration of baseball.

Last month, Major League Baseball celebrated the 60th anniversary of Robinson's historic entry into the majors. In doing so, it was able to point to progress in some areas. For example, black and minority managers are no longer rare, (there are nine presently). Teams are required to  consider a diverse talent pool in filling executive positions, minority- and women-owned businesses increasingly are awarded "supplier" contracts, and in February the Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy was opened in Compton, Calif. Located in an area that is 55 percent Hispanic and 40 percent African-American, it is viewed as a template for other academies like it that presumably would attract more minority youngsters (especially blacks) to play the game. (The percentage of black Americans in the majors has fallen from 20 percent in 1972, when Robinson died, to about 8 percent today.)

Despite Robinson's landmark status in the civil rights movement, the game has lost its allure for many black athletes. There are even reports that some historically black colleges like Florida A&M and Miles College are looking to white players to fill their rosters, the black talent pool is so limited. 

Be that as it may, Oprah, there is still something more troubling in my mind, namely the paucity of black fans at many major league games. It probably is better in Chicago, but when I attended a Red Sox game recently in Boston, I'd guess that African-Americans made up only 2 or 3 percent of the crowd. And the really sad part was I don't remember seeing any black youngsters.

It needn't be this way. After all, baseball used to have a grip on the black community, with pre-integration Negro League games often serving as major attractions. And even after Robinson broke the color line, many black fans kept up their interest by attending major-league games. Over time, however, black fans dropped away. I don't have the statistics to back this up, but I trust that my eyes aren't deceiving me, at least not in the majority of major-league markets.

Some people might argue that the White Sox, who have a black general manager and are more associated with the inner city than the Cubs, would be a more logical team to have black ownership. That may be, but I'd argue that the Cubs, in storied Wrigley Field, are more of a national institution. So, Oprah, it requires someone of your stature to assume control of such an American icon and give it fresh life, socially as well as athletically.

Having a woman in charge would be exciting, especially one as visibly successful as you, and with obvious cross-racial appeal.  You wouldn't be the only black female to be a sports team owner. Sheila Johnson, who co-foundeded the Black Entertainment Television with her ex-husband, is a co-owner of three Washington teams - the NBA's Wizards, the NHL's Capitals, and the WNBA's Washington Mystics. But to find a black woman owner in baseball you probably have to go back to Effa Manley, co-owner and business manager of the Newark Eagles from 1936 to 1948. Manley was a real mover and shaker in the Negro Leagues, so much so that she was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., last year.

According to the hall's website, Manley made the Eagles "a social force off the field and a baseball force on it."  That's just what your presence could provide baseball today, Oprah. And, here, let me say that baseball has already shown some signs of opening its doors to women. Jane Forbes Clark is the Baseball Hall of Fame's chairman of the board, and Phyllis Merhige and Katy Feeney, are vice-presidents in Major League Baseball's executive offices.

But Oprah, you could take things to a new level, bring more women and blacks into the daily operation of the Cubs, and by extension into baseball generally. And something tells me that if you put your mind to it, you'd find ways to bring far greater numbers of black fans to the games, and especially minority youngsters, even if it meant distributing 10 percent of all tickets to Boys and Girls Clubs and other youth organizations that well serve city kids.

Of course, you also could be cutting edge in other ways, too. One, I'd suggest, is to ban Cubs players from spitting on the field or in the dugout, both home or away, and eliminating spitting by visiting players as well at Wrigley Field.

Depending on how things break in the 2008 presidential election, you might even line up Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Cubs fan, to be the first woman president to throw out the a ceremonial Opening Day pitch.

But you better hurry. Martha Stewart, a Yankees fan, might be talked into buying the pinstripers first and leaving her stamp on the national pastime. And who knows what that might lead to?

• Until last Friday night I hadn't seen a Red Sox game in person in about seven years. Some of my impressions of the experience:

- Tickets sure have gotten expensive. The face value of my seat was $80, which is about triple what I remember a similar seat costing the last time I was in Fenway Park.

- Having grown accustomed to watching games on TV, I felt more removed from the action than I would have anticipated in the oldest and perhaps most intimate ballpark in the majors. I had a good, if not great, seat about halfway up in the grandstand and about halfway along the right-field line. There's really no seat in the park, though, where you can enjoy the steady diet of closeups that TV can provide, and there are no announcers to fill in the yawning gaps between pitches with interesting facts, analyses, and anecdotes. I found myself much more aware of the slow pace of the game, and even though a big replay board supplies enlarged footage of selected action, it doesn't begin to compete with TV.

- One advantage of actually "being there," I was reminded, is that you're able to better follow the flight of a flyball. No camerawork ever seems to do justice to this aspect of the game.  Also, the panoramic view a spectator has of the field and environs is something television can't match.

- There's so much information being fed to spectators that it takes awhile to know where to look, for what, and when.  For example, it was interesting to me that the speed of every pitch was posted on a center field digital display that also notes what kind of pitch was thrown (fastball, curve, etc.), a pitcher's total number of deliveries,and percentage of strikes.   

- The Red Sox have done a nice job of expanding the seating capacity of Fenway Park while remaining true to the stadium's existing architecture. That doesn't mean the that there's much more, if any, leg room. My seat had none, with my knees up against the seat in front of me, and my shoulders were squeezed between those on either side of me.

- Bostonians may not have to worry about Fenway being renamed in favor of some deep-pocketed corporate sponsor, but like many ballparks these days, ads are plastered everywhere. In fact, the whole park begins to look like one big NASCAR race car, there is so much commercial messaging. One of the most prominent locations reportedly was sold to a medical devices company that paid seven figures for a multiyear placement in the middle of the Green Monster.

• When I saw that Mark Buehrle of the White Sox had hurled the first no-hitter of the season, I was curious about two things: Was the game in Chicago? And what was the temperature? That's because an unusually cold spring may have handicapped hitters. Buehrle's gem (a near perfect game) was, in fact, pitched in Chicago, with the temperature at US Cellular Field only in the 40s. The Texas Rangers managed to get just one runner to first base, that being former Chicago Cub Sammy Sosa, who proceeded to get picked off right away.

• The National Football League, which is intensely brand loyal to its sponsors, didn't like the fact that Chicago Bears middle linebacker Brian Urlacher wore a cap at a pre-Super Bowl media event that touted a nonsponsor's product, Vitaminwater. Consequently the NFL slapped Urlacher with a fine - 10 times the regular-season rate - for promoting his affiliation with an unofficial company rather than Gatorade, the NFL's official drink. Not surprisingly, Vitaminwater said it would pick up the tab for Urlacher's indiscretion. When he declined the offer, the company said it would make a matching donation to the United Way. 

• Surely, Dick Butkus and the Downtown Athletic Club, based in Orlando, Fla., ought to be able to work out their differences. The former University of Illinois and Chicago Bears star reportedly wants the club to quit using his name for its Butkus Award. He wants the name association to benefit charities of his choosing, not those of the club. Also, he claims in a lawsuit that he only informally agreed to let the award, which is given to the nation's best college linebacker, carry his name, and that nothing specifies how long the the arrangement can continue. It would be a simple enough thing to find a new name for the award, but that hardly seems an ideal solution, since the honor has enjoyed the same identity for 21 years now and Butkus gains nothing from ending the tradition. I'd  think a compromise not only is possible, but mutually beneficial for both parties.  So let common sense prevail, even if it means locking the lawyers out of the room.

• It takes a pretty self-assured person to referee in the National Basketball Association. But it's one thing to stand one's ground in the face of some superstar player's howling protest, and it's quite another to invite a seven-footer to duke it out with you. Figuring that Joey Crawford had crossed the line in offering to fight San Antonio's Tim Duncan, the NBA suspended him indefinitely. Crawford didn't like Duncan's reaction to being called for a technical (he laughed from the bench), so he ejected him. The league fined Duncan $25,000 for his verbal abuse of Crawford, who has more playoff experience than any other active official. Crawford won't be used during the current playoffs, since the NBA figures a referee's job is to bend without breaking. In "light of similar prior acts" by Crawford, the league wants him to sit out until there can be an off season discussion about what's next for the feisty ref.

• If college soccer isn't careful, or maybe more proactive in promoting itself, I predict that lacrosse will enjoy a higher profile on campuses 10 or 20 years from now. The growing popularity of lacrosse could also pose a threat to intercollegiate baseball as the spring sport of choice for spectators. Why? It's a faster-paced game played by both male and female student-athletes, plus lacrosse seems to fit the college calendar better than baseball, its main spring rival, which often seems forced in March and early April.

• Speaking of lacrosse, it will be interesting to see if the University of Albany's emerging success in the sport will tempt the school to hitch its athletic wagon to the men's team. Albany has never been known known as a sports power, but the men's lacrosse program benefits from its location in upstate New York, a regional hotbed for talented players. The Great Danes (11-1) are third-ranked nationally, which is pretty heady stuff, especially for a team that didn't even have a home field until this year, according to The New York Times. If Albany wants to join the sport's elite on a regular basis, it surely needs to be prepared to greatly increase its institutional commitment. Once lacrosse grows as a major sport at schools across the country, the ante to remain near the top will be raised considerably. Just look at what happened when large state universities got going in football. Yale, Harvard, and Penn, once national powers, couldn't or didn't care to keep up and have long since been eclipsed by big-time, scholarship-awarding programs. For the record, Albany awards three full-time lacrosse scholarships and lots of partial grants.

• You've gotta love the friendly, sporting use made of the US-Mexican border recently during a binational goodwill festival that brought together residents of Naco, Ariz., and its namesake in the Mexican state of Sonora. The organizers set up a volleyball court that straddled the dividing line so youngsters could meet, literally, at the net.

• The Tampa Bay Devil Rays didn't go through with a name change, at least not this year, but they've considered one. Focus groups revealed that there's a negative association with "devil." They could drop the word and just use "Rays," or come up with a new nickname. The last time that occurred for a baseball team that didn't change cities was in 1965, when the expansion Houston Colt .45s switched to Astros.

• A tip of the hat to baseball's new and improved caps, which have gone from wool to polyester this season without looking any different. This is good news for traditionalists, who cringe thinking about the double-knit uniforms with elasticized waistbands that ruined the classic look of uniforms in the 1970s. The polyester blend used in the new caps incorporates  – are you ready for this? – superior "vapor management technology." Translation: they wick away perspiration better. They also shrink and fade less. The last time Major League Baseball altered the cap in any significant way was in 1954, when a six-panel design was adopted.

• A number of thoughts crossed my mind after reading that Chicago was selected as the US bid city for the 2016 Olympics:

- It's hard to imagine Chicago being up against a more powerful lineup of candidate cities than the ones the International Olympic Committee must choose from in 2009: Tokyo, Madrid, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Prague, among other possible suitors. Rome and Tokyo have previous experience as Olympic hosts, in 1960 and 1964 respectively. Olympic officials may figure it's high time South America finally gets the Games, so Rio would seem to stand a decent shot.  Madrid and Prague sound intriguing too, although with London hosting the 2012 Olympics, I'm guessing the selectors will avoid any other cities within the European Union until at least 2020.

- If Chicago gets the nod, I wonder if Mayor Richard M. Daley will still be in office when the Games are held nine years from now. By being elected to his sixth term earlier this year, he stands to become the longest-serving mayor in city history. Should he remain in office, he would surpass his father's 21 years at the helm. And with the Olympics on the horizon, the current mayor might want to stick around long enough to make the Games his last political hurrah.

- It had to be a bittersweet moment when Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the US Olympic Committee, announced that Chicago had earned the committee's selection over Los Angeles, the city where he presided over the local organizing committee for the successful 1984 Olympics, the first privately financed Games and only the second to ever make a profit.

- Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the city's Olympic delegation exhibited a lot of class and sportsmanship as the gracious losers. After the news of Chicago's selection was made, Villaraigosa said he would support Chicago's ongoing bid and was quoted as saying, "This is a proud moment for every Chicagoan, but it's also a proud moment for all of us."

- If Chicago's plan to build a 80,000-seat "temporary" Olympic stadium isn't the ultimate symbol of our throwaway society, I don't know what is.

- Concentrating the Games as much as possible along Chicago's lakefront is viewed by the US Olympic Committee as a way to create a "certain magic," maybe something akin to the atmosphere at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, perhaps the greatest world's fair ever held.

• Whether or not you're a Yankees fan, you' got to admire the pitching demeanor of closer Mariano Rivera. When he comes into the game in the late innings, he usually gets the "save," but when he doesn't he maintains his composure. A sure test of that came the other day when he gave up a walkoff, three-run homer with two out in the bottom of the ninth to Oakland's Marco Scutaro. The hit gave Oakland a 5-4 victory, which was bad enough for Rivera, but making matters worse was that Scutaro's batting average at the time was a miserable .050. Still, Rivera strode off the field, seemingly unfazed, no doubt confident that over the long haul, he'll see far more up than down days.

• Congratulations to Jessica Long, the first Paralympic athlete to ever win the Sullivan Award, which the Amateur Athletic Union annually presents to the top US amateur athlete. A double amputee, Long, who was born in Russia - where she was orphaned - but now lives in Baltimore, won nine gold medals at last year's world Paralympic swimming championships for disabled athletes.

• Also, three cheers for American astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams who ran a marathon in space as the Boston Marathon, which she was registered to run, took place Monday. Williams completed 26.2 miles tethered to a treadmill in the international space station in 4 hours, 24 minutes, or about as long as it took to complete three orbits. Because she had to be held down with a harness to avoid floating off, her shoulders took more of a beating than her feet and legs. Delays in getting a shuttle ready to retrieve her from the station mean Williams faces another kind of space marathon this summer, when her extended duty is expected to set a record for the longest space tour by an American astronaut, with roughly eight months aloft.

• I can't imagine anyone's widowed spouse doing a better job of representing a departed athlete than Rachel Robinson, the wife of Jackie Robinson. Her class and dignity in public have long shone through in public life. It was gratifying, therefore, to see Bud Selig present her with the Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award last Sunday, on the 60th anniversary of Jackie's integration of major-league baseball. The award was given for her work in using the Jackie Robinson Foundation to grant scholarships to minority students. Their daughter, Sharon, by the way, is an educational consultant to Major League Baseball.

• To protect against letting nonsponsors associate themselves with the Olympics, a practice known as ambush marketing, the Canadian government has already introduced legislation to trademark certain common words during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Unaffiliated companies that used "gold medals" or even "Vancouver 2010," for example, could be asking for legal trouble.

• Hey, just because it's Little League doesn't mean you can leave the coffers unguarded. The mayor of Adelanto, Calif., and his wife were just charged with embezzling more than $20,000 from the local Little League. And in Tewksbury, Mass., not long ago, the president of the town's youth baseball league was charged with siphoning off $423,000 from the treasury over four years. That sounds like the payroll for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

• In future years, Latino ballplayers surely will see their presence in the Baseball Hall of Fame grow significantly. For now, though, only seven Latinos have made the Cooperstown, N.Y., shrine, beginning with Roberto Clemente in 1973. He was followed in 1977 by Martin Dihigo, a Cuban who played all nine positions at various times in various Latin American countries and in the American Negro leagues. The other honorees, in order of induction, are Juan Marichal of the Dominican Republic, Luis Aparicio of Venezuela, Rod Carew of Panama, Orlando Cepeda of Puerto Rico, and Tony Perez of Cuba. As odd at it sounds, one writer has made a case that Ted Williams was the first Latino member of the hall since, unbeknownst to most fans, he said his heritage was "part Mexican."

• I would have thought every Heisman Trophy winner would automatically be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame upon becoming eligible.  Not so. Louisiana State's Billy Cannon, the 1959 Heisman winner, is still on the outside looking in, not because he wasn't a good enough player, but because he served time in a federal penitentiary for counterfeiting. Whether Cannon will someday join O.J. Simpson and his fellow Heisman winners in the South Bend, Ind., shrine is hard to say, but it's a lock that Doug Flutie and Tim Brown will go in this year. They qualify by being out of the intercollegiate ranks for more than 10 years, retired from pro football, and by being former First Team All-America selections with good citizenship records. The National Football Foundation, which conducts the hall's multi-tiered selection process, will announce May 9 which players will be enshrined.

• Joe Sheehan provides an interesting analysis in The New York Times of why starting pitchers are pulled sooner than they once were. It has to do with the increased power at the bottom of many batting orders, which once was where you found good-fielding, but lighter-hitting batters. Now, with more weight training and more homer-friendly ballparks, even the 7, 8, and 9 hitters (especially in the American League with the designated-hitter rule) are threats. With no "breaks" in the lineup, pitchers have to go all out against virtually every batter, meaning the same amount of effort doesn't carry the starter as deep into games as it used to.

• I always remember Jim Marshall, the retired Minnesota Viking defensive lineman, for one thing: his 66-yard wrong-way run with a recovered fumble in 1964. That led to a safety and a permanent place in many football blooper reels. Fans long ago pardoned him for this miscue. After all, he went on to set an NFL career record by recovering 29 opponent fumbles, a mark that still stands, plus he was a member of the team's famous Purple People Eaters defensive line.  Ironically, a misstep of a quite different kind - a 1990 conviction on cocaine possession - was only recently pardoned, in a St. Paul courtroom.

It was small, easily overlooked news on most sports pages, but when I saw it I became curious to find out more. I was glad I did, because this was not just a run-of-the-mill police blotter account of an athlete's indiscretion, the sort of thing the public has become jaded to. Instead, there was something uplifting about this report, which was fleshed out on the website of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Marshall has been a model citizen in many ways, but according to his attorney, he was led to abuse drugs as he tried to cope with an accumulation of old football injuries. He was arrested in Duluth 17 years ago, pleaded guilty, spent 90 days at home wearing an electronic monitoring device and five more on probation. The shame of it all continued to follow him, and complicated matters when he applied for travel visas. The uplifting aspect of this story was not only Marshall's desire to be free of this "one blemish" on his record and the state's willingness to grant it, but the faithful support and encouragement of Marshall's former coach, Bud Grant.

Grant, a Hall of Famer, essentially served as a character witness at the Board of Pardons hearing. He vouched for Marshall's leadership, integrity, and honesty, adding that he was "the image of the Vikings." Certainly he was as dependable any coach could ever want. He played in 282 straight games, making him the Cal Ripken of football. This record was finally surpassed in 2005 by New York Giants punter Jeff Feagles, but many still consider Marshall, who battled in the trenches, the sport's true ironman.

The board that Marshall petitioned to consisted of the governor, attorney general, and chief justice of the state Supreme Court, a body that includes one of his former defensive line mates, Alan Page. The pardon, however, was not a matter of who Marshall knows or who knows him, said Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who told the Star Tribune, "On the merits, it's the kind of care we would have granted a pardon for anybody, whether they were a Viking or whether they worked in South St. Paul."

• It's always encouraging when the justice system works as it's supposed to, even if slowly and haltingly as it did in the case of the former Duke University lacrosse players. All three of the young men charged of sexually assaulting a stripper at a team party last year were exonerated after a torturous road to this outcome. College athletic departments generally learned a lot in observing this drama, including that you can't let teams use wild off-campus partying as a bonding mechanism. In Duke's case, the situation was made all the more volatile by a racial dimension - the hiring of two black exotic dancers to entertain players on a mostly white team. A recent NCAA student-athlete ethnicity report found a higher percentage of white athletes (91.9 percent) in men's college lacrosse than any other sport, a racial imbalance that universities, and the sport generally, should begin to address.

• During this week's rebuttal press conference at Rutgers University, in which members of the women's basketball team countered the degrading stereotype presented of them by talk show host Don Imus, Coach C. Vivian Stringer made an interesting comment. "These young ladies are valedictorians of their class, future doctors, musical prodigies, and, yes, even Girl Scouts." Exactly, they are students, and sometimes accomplished ones. With this in mind, I suggest that the team start a new tradition at their games, namely, having the pregame player introductions include each player's academic major, even if "undecided." It would be a small reminder that these young women are far from one dimensional.

• The NHL's Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a team that owes its name to a Disney family movie and once was owned by the Walt Disney Company, now is the most fight-prone team in the league. The team racked up 1,457 penalty minutes this season, and logged 71 fights. If this keeps up, parents with tickets may have to leave the kids at home. Maybe the Mighty Ducks are just trying to do their part to keep up the image of the league, whose commissioner, Gary Bettman, who recently told the Canadian Press, "We've never taken active steps or considered eliminating fighting from the game. I've always taken the view that it's a part of the game and it rises and lowers based on what the game dictates."

• After 14 years, Drew Bledsoe has called it quits as an NFL quarterback. He may have fallen short in his quest to win a Super Bowl ring during stops with New England, Buffalo, and Dallas, but he always stood tall in the heat of battle and in the face of criticism, whether from the media, fans, or a demanding coach like Bill Parcells. As well as I remember, Bledsoe was the first player with a Boston or New England team to take out a full-page ad to express his appreciation to the community and fans after his departure. Having once met his parents in their modest Yakima, Wash., home, I can't say I was ever surprised at how well Bledsoe carried himself throughout his playing career. As he walked away, he characteristically took the high road, telling the Associated Press, "I feel so fortunate, so honored, to have played this game that I love for so long, with so many great players, and in front of so many wonderful fans."

• For the first time in the modern era, neither Stanley Cup finalist from last season – the champion Carolina Hurricanes or the Edmonton Oilers - even made it into the NHL playoffs  this year.  That's pretty amazing when you consider how many teams do make the postseason: 16. My sentimental favorite is the Buffalo Sabres. I guess I still feel for Buffalo, which has tried vainly to win a major pro championship, once losing four straight Super Bowls. The Sabres, in case you're wondering, have lost twice in the Stanley Cup finals, in 1975 and 1999.

• Pop quiz: You may have heard about the Logan, Ohio, couple who decided to name their newborn son Tressel Hayes Huffines in honor of two of Ohio State University's most successful football coaches, Woody Hayes and Jim Tressel. But can you name the two men who guided the Buckeyes between the Hayes and Tressel eras? The answer appears at the bottom of this blog.

• Sports Illustrated has called a triple in baseball the most exciting 12 seconds in sports. The problem, the magazine points out, is that there's often not a lot of incentive to try for third since stopping at second puts you in position to score on most singles.

• Bobblehead figurine mania is everywhere these days in sports. It makes me wish I had held onto my Green Bay Packers bobblehead in the 1960s, which surely would be a first-generation collector's item today. I wasn't a Packers fan and the toy-like figure didn't resemble a particular player, so it didn't hold much interest for me. Oh well, at least I kept my baseball cards.

• Quiz answer: Earl Bruce and John Cooper.

• On the surface, moving baseball games from a snow-piled Cleveland to Milwaukee wouldn't seem to make a lot of sense. Major League Baseball took that route, however, after a foot of snow in Cleveland wreaked havoc with early-season games scheduled there, wiping out the Indians' entire series with Seattle and threatening another with the Los Angeles Angels.

Officials decided the best solution would be to find a nearby neutral site with a dome to play the games, thus the choice of Milwaukee's Miller Park, which has a retractable roof. To help lure fans, good seats were sold for $10, which was enough of a bargain to attract 19,000 fans to to Tueday night's series opener. "I know a lot of people from Cleveland [who] live in Chicago came racing up after work," said superfan John Adams. The move was the first made for weather reasons since 2004, when hurricane Ivan forced the Florida Marlins to play the Montreal Expos in Chicago.

• As mentioned in this space recently, the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's integration of baseball will be celebrated Sunday, with every Dodger wearing Jackie's old number, 42. Players on other teams have since announced their plans to follow suit. The one player who can salute Robinson without even trying is relief ace Mariano Rivera of the Yankees. He normally wears 42 even though Major League Baseball retired the number on every club on the 50th anniversary. That's because MLB grandfathered its continued use to anybody already wearing it. Rivera is the sole player still active who reserves that right. Because the number has been retired, though, the Yankees won't have to do it again when Rivera calls it quits. That's a good thing, since the Yankees have already retired more numbers (15) than any other team and face the prospect of having to take more numbers out of circulation in the future. Current stars who would seem to eventually merit consideration for the honor are Derek Jeter (#2), Jorge Posada (#20), Manager Joe Torre (#6), and possibly ex-Yankee Bernie Williams (#51). See if you can name the Yankee greats who wore these retired numbers (the answers are at the end of the blog): 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 (two players), 9, 10, 15, 16, 23, 32, 37, 44, 49.

• Although I'm not a big fan of oversize logos and overwrought designs sometimes used to decorate basketball courts these days, I did admire the tasteful electric-guitar motif used in Cleveland for this year's NCAA women's basketball Final Four. The art, which tied in with the city's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, ran basically the length of the court at Quicken Loans Arena, but because the overlaid design was done discreetly, with a color that blended well with the wood planking, it worked.

• Two-time Daytona 500 winner Michael Waltrip was charged with reckless driving near his North Carolina home, it was reported this week. The news made me realize that it's surprising that you hardly ever read about race-car drivers getting pulled over for lead-footed or reckless maneuvers.

• Maybe her golfing buddies should start calling Elsie McLean "Tiger." She's obviously "got game" and isn't resting on her laurels. Last weekend, playing at Bidwell Park in Chico, Calif., McLean, at age 102, scored her first-ever hole-in-one. She did so using a driver on the par-3, 100-yard fourth hole. On April 24 she's scheduled to appear on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" to explain how she broke the hole-in-one age record of 101, which was set when Harold Stilson aced a hole in 2001.

• The NCAA has compiled an interesting probability table showing what percentage of high school athletes go on to compete in college and professionally. The data shows that ice hockey (among five men's sports and one women's) enjoys the highest continuation rate, with 11 percent of boys who played in high school going on to play in college. Baseball was next with 6.1 percent, followed by football (5.7 percent), soccer (5.5 percent), women's basketball (3.3 percent), and men's basketball (3 percent). Professionally, women's pro basketball was the hardest of all to break in to, with only .02 percent who played basketball in high school landing pro careers.

• Here's guessing that the Detroit Tigers are the only pro sports team ever to be owned consecutively by two pizza tycoons. Tom Monaghan, the owner of the Domino's franchise, sold the club to Mike Ilitch of Little Caesar's fame.

• To throw a baseball from Point A to Point B might seem a simple matter, but in the hands of a rusty-armed politician, it is anything but. Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory proved this point at the Reds' home opener, when his ceremonial first pitch was so wide of the plate that comedians and Internet users tapped its laugh value. Rather than ridicule the errant throw, however, John Geisen, the president of Izzy's deli, decided to capitalize on it, naming a sandwich the Mark Mallory Screwball. It's "any two meats tossed in the general direction of a bun or two pieces of bread." The price: $7.75, when served with pickles and a potato pancake.

• If you think Major League Baseball led the far-westward migration of pro sports by relocating the Dodgers and Giants to California, think again. The National Football League actually beat baseball to the punch by 12 years. What many forget is that the league moved the Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles in 1946.

• Have you ever wondered why a baseball field is called a diamond, when it's clearly not, geometrically speaking. A true diamond incorporates two obtuse angles. More accurately, it should be called a square, but as baseball historian Peter Morris explains in his fascinating book, "A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball," the early fields were too irregular to call the resulting shape a square. Back in the sports pre-Civil War era, "convenient trees, posts, and pumps" defined the flexible layout, as surely such objects still do for sandlot games. Morris's book, by the way, can bog down in arcane, historical detail, but on the whole, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in tracing the origins and evolution of baseball. If nothing else, the depth of research is impressive.   

• When the Rutgers women's basketball team sits down with apologetic talk-show host Don Imus to air out their feelings about his insensitive description of them, let's hope they seize the moment. Not by blasting him, which they've already done to some degree in a press conference, but by inviting him to their games next season. Imus, I'd think, would feel compelled to attend at least some games to show not only genuine repentance, but newfound appreciation of a team that made it to the NCAA Finals this year, and is good enough to return next year.

• Quiz answer - naming Yankee greats who wore these since-retired numbers:

#1 Billy Martin;

#3 Babe Ruth

#4 Lou Gehrig

#5 Joe DiMaggio

#7 Mickey Mantle

#8 Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra

#9 Roger Maris

#10 Phil Rizzuto

#15 Thurman Munson

#16 Whitey Ford

#23 Don Mattingly

#32 Elston Howard

#37 Casey Stengel

#44 Reggie Jackson

#49 Ron Guidry

• On Sunday's Masters golf tournament telecast, CBS didn't seem to have a wealth of information about the surprise winner, Zach Johnson, but I'm guessing he's the first Iowan to ever win a coveted green jacket. His name sounds as middle American as it looks next to those of the three guys who finished two strokes behind him - Retief Goosen, Rory Sabbatini, and Tiger Woods. Johnson played his collegiate golf at non-national power Drake University (that's in Des Moines).

Fittingly, he began his professional career modestly, playing on something called the Prairie Golf Tour and eventually becoming the top player on the minor-league Nationwide Tour. Since moving up to the PGA Tour in 2004, he's blended in with the crowd, but hasn't really disappeared into it. While winning just one other tournament, the 2004 BellSouth Classic, he's been among the top 40 players each year and was  a Ryder Cup team member last year.

The thing that stood out to me about Johnson on Sunday was that he didn't get rattled – not after Woods scored what might have seemed an ominous eagle at 13th, nor when he reached the 16th green, where he had three-putted from three feet away on Friday. Needing a confidence-building putt, he drained an eight-footer for a birdie. Later, when interviewed on national television in the famous Butler Cabin by CBS anchor Jim Nantz, Johnson acknowledged that the win would change his life as a golfer, but he vowed that he would remain the same person as before. In other words, a good ol' Iowa boy.

• True-blue tennis aficionados won't like the idea, but I think it's time that the sport do something radical with its major team competitions, namely incorporate them into the Olympics to give them much greater prominence and sharper focus. As it is, I'm guessing that many average sports fans don't have a clue about how or when these events are conducted. There is nothing wrong with awarding both individual medals and team cups at the Olympics, which truly would become a can't-miss event for the top players if all the tennis world stopped every four years to concentrate on this ultracompetition. In case you missed it, by the way, which seems altogether possible, the United States and Sweden advanced last weekend into one Davis Cup semifinal, with Germany facing Russia in the other, to be held Sept. 21-23.

• Millions of baseball fans know Peter Gammons as an ESPN baseball analyst whose broadcasting and writing on the sport have earned him recognition by the Baseball Hall of Fame. What many outside Boston may not know is that he is also an avid rock guitarist who occasionally jams with Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, who shares the same musical passion. Earlier this week, Gammons played in a concert to benefit Epstein's foundation, amusingly named the Foundation to Be Named Later, and also rolled out a CD, "Never Slow Down, Never Grow Old."

• I'll go out on a limb, though admittedly probably not a very long one, and predict that Gail Goestenkors will do at the University of Texas what she never was quite able to do at Duke, which is coach a women's NCAA championship basketball team. She took two different Duke teams to the brink, in 1999 and 2006, only to see them lose in the finals, and this year saw her top-ranked team upset in the regional semifinals by Rutgers. With the talent pool in the state of Texas and the institutional and fan support at UT, I see a national championship within four years, tops. The Longhorns won their lone women's basketball title in 1986 with a perfect 34-0 record under Jody Conradt, who has retired after becoming only the second women's coach ever to reach 900 victories.

• Billy Donovan's decision to stay at the University of Florida despite losing all five starters from the two-time man's NCAA basketball champions, raises an interesting question: Can a football-oriented school build and maintain a tradition of basketball excellence? Donovan clearly thinks so, otherwise he might have left for Kentucky, where he once was an assistant coach. To a lesser degree, the University of Wisconsin is working on a similar double track, but as fans of the University of Michigan well know, it can be hard to keep both football and basketball programs hitting on all cylinders simultaneously, and football tends to rule the roost.

• I'm beginning to think that Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves may join Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, and John Stockton among the greatest NBA players to never win a championship. Garnett is completing his 12th season and it appears Minnesota will miss the playoffs for a third straight year.

• A growing trend in pro sports is to provide a mixed set of two attractions for the price of one. Mostly these doubleheaders involve a rock concert right after the game, as was the case recently when the Wreckers, a female country-pop duo, performed after the Boston Bruins hosted the Montreal Canadiens.  Bonus concerts are nice, but I'm partial to some of the dual events the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers have put on, including their annual career fair, in which customers who purchase a $35 game ticket are encouraged to bring multiple copies of their resumes to share at an afternoon fair with representatives of numerous local businesses.

• As Major League Soccer fans await this season's ballyhooed import, British star David Beckham, they may not have noticed an interesting outmigration across "the pond." Three teams in the English Premier League are now owned by American businessmen with stateside teams in other sports. Malcom Glazer simultaneously owns Manchester United and the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers; Tom Hicks (MLB's Texas Rangers and the NHL's Dallas Stars) and George Gilllett (the NHL's Montreal Canadiens) jointly own Liverpool; and Randy Lerner of the NFL's Cleveland Browns owns Aston Villa.

• Ironically, Tiger Woods may not be available to play in this year's AT&T National Tournament, which the PGA Tour has turned into Tiger's own event by making him the host and his philanthropy, the Tiger Woods Foundation, the primary beneficiary. His wife, Elin, is expecting the couple's first child right about that time, and Woods says that may prevent him from playing in the event, which will mark the tour's return to Washington, D.C. Part of the proceeds will be used to build a new Tiger Woods Learning Center, similar to the youth education complex that he opened in Anaheim, Calif., last year.

• Roger Clemens has four sons - Koby, Kody, Kory, and Kacy - whose names were inspired by the "K" baseball uses to score strikeouts. A backwards "K" indicates the batter was caught looking, but why this rather odd choice of letters, anyway? The usual explanation is that "S" was already assigned to sacrifices, so the ruleskeepers resourcefully turned to "K" because it was the last letter of "struck."

Today, of course, it seems odd that a sacrifice should take precedence over a strikeout in scorekeeping parlance, but it's important to remember that pitchers originally weren't supposed to try to get batters out. Their job, in the early days, was to make slow, underhanded tosses - to "serve the ball over the plate," Alan Schwarz says in his book "The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics." That all changed, Schwarz explains, in 1860, when 18-year-old Jim Creighton of the Brooklyn Excelsiors began using an imperceptible wrist flick to make the ball harder to hit. This evolved into the batter-pitcher duels that have long been the essence of baseball.

Clemens, clearly, has held the upper hand in many of these mano-a-mano battles. He has the second-most strikeouts in major-league history with 4,604, trailing only fellow Texan Nolan Ryan, who fanned 5,714 batters during his career. For Clemens to hold his No. 2 position, though, he may need to keep playing, since Randy Johnson is only 98 strikeouts behind the Rocket.

• It was nice to see my good buddy Arnold Palmer handling the ceremonial first shot honors at the Masters this year. I jest, of course, about our close friendship, but seeing Arnie again reminds me of the time I was promised a private audience with the golfing great by a public relations rep.

Although the details are fuzzy now, I believe it was 1995 when Palmer, a founder of The Golf Channel, was involved in the cable enterprise's launch, and some of his minions may have been pushing too hard to get him in the media spotlight. One member of the PR machinery  contacted me and asked if I'd like to visit with Palmer and even better yet, to have dinner with him at his house during a trip I had planned to Florida as a sportswriter for the Monitor. This sounded too good be be true, but I went along with the come-on anyhow.

The dinner never came to pass, and the publicist didn't deliver on the promise of a sit-down interview, either. Ultimately, I had to settle for a stand-up, mini interview at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Not only that, I had to wait out Arnie's annual mass interview at the Bay Hill Club in Orlando before a hurried introduction and a few questions. I never held getting such a short shrift against Palmer, who seemed unaware of any promises made to me, but I sometimes wonder what happened to that tricky publicist.

• Kudos to the Atlanta Braves for choosing an exterminator to serve as the team's new public address announcer. Casey Motter's only previous experience was announcing youth baseball and football games in Peachtree City, an Atlanta suburb, where a Braves executive discovered him. Motter, who has four sons, ages 5 to 14, was invited to join about a dozen candidates, with radio and professional voice backgrounds of various kinds, in auditioning for the vacancy. He got the nod with one condition: He couldn't flounder under pressure during a couple of preseason games, which he didn't.

• Three-point shots are the daggers of college basketball. Make them with any regularity and your team's chances of winning are much improved, as they should be. But there are enough long-distance marksmen these days that it's probably time to adopt the NBA three-point line, which is 23 ft. 9 in. straight out from the basket rather than 19 ft. 9 in., which is the college distance. Moving the line out might encourage more mid-range shots, which, in my mind, would be a good thing.

• There's probably no player in the WNBA happier that the league plays in the summer than Lindsey Harding, the Duke All-America guard. Fifteen minutes after the Phoenix Mercury made her the No. 1 overall pick in this week's WNBA draft, Phoenix traded her to the Minnesota Lynx. A Houston native, Harding says she doesn't "do well with the cold at all." Minnesota summers, however, are something she can get used to.

• Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan went on a rant this week after the newest members of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame were announced and there were no players named. I would agree that it seems odd to name several coaches, a referee, and one whole team (the 1966 Texas Western squad that made civil rights as well as basketball history), but not designate a single individual player for enshrinement. I'd go a step further, though, and say the Hall of Fame missed the boat by filling its new class of inductees with all men. Surely, there's a woman in some category - player, coach, contributor - that deserves to be admitted in any given year.

• When it comes to group precision, the Navy's Blue Angels have nothing on the grounds crew at Augusta National Golf Club. A Masters tournament picture in The New York Times this week shows 14 riding lawnmowers rolling down a fairway together, side by side, seemingly just inches apart.

• Have you noticed how Buckeye athletes identify their school as "The Ohio State University," not just as Ohio State? I'm sure there's a tradition here that people at the school want to drive home to the public. I can relate to their efforts, having seen my alma mater frequently called the University of Indiana, which it's not. The proper name is always Indiana University.

• Hats off to the Los Angeles Dodgers for an inspired idea. Every Dodger player will wear Jackie Robinson's old jersey number, 42, on April 15, the 60th anniversary of his historic entry into major-league baseball. On the 50th anniversary, every team retired the number.

• And speaking of retired numbers, you qualify as a trivia overachiever if you know the name of the only Tampa Bay player whose number has been retired by the Devil Rays. See the bottom of this blog for the answer.

• University of Tennessee basketball Coach Pat Summitt strikes me as fiery, tough, and intensely competitive, but fair and a first-class human being. I can see why young athletes would want to play for her, and why she has been able to produce seven NCAA championship teams.

• Long before I knew anything about any of the other historically black colleges, I knew about Grambling, or Grambling State University, to be more formal. That's because NFL fans, even young ones like myself, were aware that Grambling was like a small-college Notre Dame, turning out pro-caliber players during the 1960s, even stars such as Hall of Famers Buck Buchanan and Willie Davis. The man at the helm was estimable coach Eddie Robinson, whose passing this week prompted many lengthy written tributes. I once had the pleasure of sitting around a table with Robinson along with a small group of other college football writers. I'm sorry I didn't keep my notes, but one overarching quality that I will forever associate with Robinson from that opportunity is humility. He was a real, down-home, no-frills guy without an ego to match his 408 career victories, the most ever in the game's upper echelons. Not surprising, when it came time to reflect on what he had achieved, he said,  "The real record I set for over 50 years is the fact that I have had one job and one wife."

• Triva answer: Wade Boggs. Although Boggs played most of his Hall of Fame career with the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, it was his last team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, that decided to honor the five-time American League batting champion by retiring his number. Boggs collected his 3,000th hit in 1999 – a home run with the Devil Rays. That made him the only member of the 3,000-hit fraternity to belt a round-tripper to achieve the milestone. Ironically, he was always known as a singles hitter.

• Now that the University of Florida has strung together an unprecedented triple – national championships in men's basketball sandwiched around one in football – the logical question is: What next? Will the school become an even greater athletic power and possibly make off with the Director's Cup, presented annually to the university with the most successful all-around athletic program by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics?

Stanford, which does well in tennis, golf, volleyball, and other less-covered college sports, has absolutely dominated this award, having won it the last 12 years. Florida finished fifth last year, and has been third three other times.

Even though the Gators are sixth in the current standings (Wisconsin barely leads Stanford at the top), they might move into contention with a strong showing in spring sports. And clearly, Florida, with an annual athletic budget of $70 million,  is looking to add more depth to its portfolio and has placed an ad in the NCAA News for a coach for its new women's lacrosse program, which will be launched in the spring of 2010.

In the short term, Gator backers worry about a wholesale exodus of its men's basketball team, with its key players likely to move on to the NBA and Coach Billy Donovan rumored to be the front-runner for the vacancy at Kentucky. If he stays in Gainesville, he'd probably face a major rebuilding year or two, whereas at Kentucky he might be able to catch a perennial power in an off-peak period but ready for a resurgence.

But who knows, if everybody stays put, a three-peat basketball championship would be a strong possibility at Florida. And wouldn't that be an interesting counterpoint to baseball's Florida Marlins, the kings of one-and-done, having gutted two World Series winners before the paint was dry.

• March Madness wasn't as much fun in the men's bracket this year without an underdog like George Mason advancing to the Final Four. Those who prefer seeing nontraditional powers excel, however, should have tuned in to the women's National Invitation Tournament, won by Wyoming. The team was pretty much an afterthought for many years. When Joe Legarski arrived to coach the Cowgirls four years ago, they had only 16 season-ticket holders. Now there are about 1,000, and that number could grow significantly in the least populous US state after Wyoming's NIT championship before 14,000 home fans. A team featuring three Aussies and a Pole knocked off defending champion Kansas State in triple overtime in the semis before toppling Wisconsin, 72-56, in the final.

• There's no doubt in my mind that being a sports fan is one way to increase a person's geographic literacy. Take, for example, the recent announcement that the 2011 World Track and Field Championships will be held in Daegu, South Korea. I'd never heard of the city before, even though it's the country's fourth-largest. I can thank the Olympics for many of my other geographic discoveries, such as Sarajevo, Albertville, Sapporo, and Nagano.

• For all the talk about the Cubs not winning the World Series since 1908, let's not forget that neither Texas team has even made it to the World Series, much less won it. The Astros date to 1962 and the Rangers, if you include their years as an expansion franchise in Washington, D.C., to 1960. The other major-league clubs never to have played in the Series, with their first year of existence in parantheses, are the Seattle Mariners (1977); Colorado Rockies (1993); the Washington Nationals, the ex-Montreal Expos (1969); and Tampa Bay Devil Rays (1998).

• My wife is pretty amused by how basketball players chew on their mouthpieces. My pet peeve is how some players colorize these teeth protectors, leaving the appearance that there are teeth missing.

• Lindsey Harding, the Duke senior who captured most of the national player of the year awards this season, looks to have star potential off the basketball court as well as on it.  About a week after she missed two last-second free throws in a heartbreaking regional loss to Rutgers, ESPN brought her onto its set at the women's Final Four. Host Trey Wingo grilled her about the missed foul shots and Harding handled the questions with dignity and poise. She didn't shy away from offering thoughtful answers about what had to be the low-point of her college career. I expect to see her back, working as an analyst someday.

• It's understandable that President Bush would want to present the Commander-in-Chief's trophy, awarded to the military academy football team that wins the annual three-team rivalry. But is it really that important that Navy, last season's trophy winner, be invited back for a Rose Garden salute for a fourth straight year?  Bush did the honors Monday, but missed the Washington Nationals home opener because of scheduling difficulties. It was his second straight year he didn't make it to RFK Stadium to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. President Howard Taft started the tradition when he did the honors in 1910. According to the Baseball Almanac, one newspaper account of the toss described it this way: Taft threw the ball "with his good, trusty right arm, and the virgin sphere scudded across the diamond, true as a die to the pitcher's box, where Walter Johnson gathered it in."

• The San Francisco Giants say they hope to send a message to their fans by installing 590 solar panels at AT&T Park. Actually, the team's role is to provide a high-visibility location for utility PG&E's installation above the port walk that rings the outfield.  Utility customers, in fact, will foot the bill, paying between $1 million and $1.5 million for the installation of equipment that will collect as much solar energy as 40 home roof systems and connect it to the San Francisco power grid. The Giants figure the project casts their energy-conserving park in a favorable light. The stadium uses fluorescent lighting, motion-sensor lights, and has a new high-definition scoreboard that uses 78 percent less energy than the old board.

• In a wonderful tribute to Hank Aaron, the Georgia State University baseball team is wearing specially designed uniforms this season made to resemble the one Aaron and his Atlanta Braves teammates wore in 1974. That's the year he broke Babe Ruth's career home run record with No. 715. Credit Georgia State coach Greg Frady with coming up with the inspired idea, just as Barry Bonds begins a countdown to surpass Hammerin' Hank's career-ending total of 755. Frady grew up as a huge fan of Aaron's and figured this would be the ideal time to honor the slugger who played just blocks from the Georgia State campus, and has continued to represent his city and sport well. As a gesture of appreciation, Aaron met with the team and agreed to be photographed with them for the school's baseball media guide.

• High-scoring Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards got called on the carpet recently by the NBA for making $10 challenge-type bets with Trailblazer fans during a road game in Portland. In one case, Arenas bet he'd hit the winning basket, and when he lost that wager he said he'd use the fan's e-mail address to pay up. The league spoke to Arenas and got him to cease and desist such misconduct. The NBA, however, has to be careful in handling such infractions, since it doesn't seem totally averse to pushing back from modern gambling culture. The league held this year's All-Star Game in Las Vegas, the Boston Celtics have a tie-in with the Massachusetts Lottery with a $5 instant-ticket promotion, and the Connecticut Sun team of the WNBA, an NBA subsidiary, plays its home games at Mohegan Sun Arena, which is part of a casino complex.

• Although baseball's Giants and A's share the Bay Area, they can seem poles apart. Certainly that's how actor Tom Hanks felt as a teenage soft drink vendor at A's games. "They might as well have been the Peking Giants. They were in a different world," Hanks told Dan Rosen for an article in last fall's World Series program. "I didn't pay much attention to them." One of the occupational hazards of hawking sodas, he remembered, was going home with sticky pants from all the soda that sloshed onto them. Hanks remains such a big fan of the game that he and fellow celebrities Ron Howard and Dennis Miller went on a seven-ballpark tour last summer.

• After 10 years spent in the University of Kentucky's basketball pressure cooker as coach of the school's men's basketball team, Tubby Smith probably is going to enjoy getting out from under it in his new job as coach of the University of Minnesota's Golden Gophers. Smith had the misfortune, if you want to call it that, of taking Kentucky to a national championship in his very first season in Lexington. That set up unrealistically high expectations in a state where many people don't suffer even just good teams lightly. In Minneapolis, though, fans should be happy with any incremental improvement after Minnesota won just three of 16 Big Ten Conference games this season and was 9-22 overall.

• By writing blogs, athletes can exercise their own power of the press and go right to the people, essentially bypassing reporters, who may misquote them or take their comments out of context. In Boston, some sportswriters are wary that Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling may be using his "38 Pitches" blog to circumvent the local beat writers and columnists and better control his image and relationship with the fans. Be that as it may, Schilling claims he's not trying to sanitize what people say about him on "38 Pitches," and professes to let people even rip him on the site, so long as they don't use foul language.

• In a revealing story about college basketball team managers, Pete Thamel of The New York Times notes that the three managers at the University of Memphis make themselves available to the coaches 24/7 by living in the team's practice facility. Sleeping on couches in the players' lounge might not be ideal, but there's no rent and ready access to a big-screen TV and pool table.

• The women's basketball Final Four doesn't start until Sunday in Cleveland, but I think we can already pick the player with a name that most belongs in the city's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Epiphanny Prince of Rutgers. If the name sounds familiar it may be because the talented freshman scored a national high school record 113 points in a single game last year while playing for Murry Bergtraun High School in Brooklyn.

• Harvard University couldn't have been too pleased with the Boston Globe article that pointed out that the school doesn't have a single black coach in charge of any of the school's 41 varsity teams. That could change any day now, since Harvard has reportedly interviewed two African-American candidates for its  men's basketball head coaching vacancy: Tommy Amaker and Mike Jarvis. Amaker's previous stops have been at Seton Hall and Michigan, which just fired him. Jarvis's head coaching jobs have been at Boston University, George Washington, and St. John's. He's the local guy made good, having started out just blocks from Harvard at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, where he coached future Georgetown and New York Knicks star Patrick Ewing.

• Any hopes for an orderly succession in the New York Yankees' hierarchy have hit a major bump in the road. The guy whom owner George Steinbrenner had previously mentioned as his likely successor is Steve Swindal, Steinbrenner's son-in-law. But Swindal's wife has just filed for divorce. Steinbrenner's two sons reportedly haven't been interested in assuming the reins, but one or both of them may be forced into taking a more active role soon.

• I think it's safe to say that if freshmen had been eligible to play when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) entered college, UCLA's monopoly of the NCAA men's basketball championship wouldn't have been interrupted. UCLA won back-to-back titles before he arrived, and began a streak of seven straight in his sophomore year. In 1965-66, however, Texas Western (Texas-El Paso today) came out of nowhere to beat Kentucky for all the marbles while Alcindor bided his time on the Bruins' freshman team. When he became eligible the following season, he launched his varsity career by scoring 56 points against crosstown rival Southern Cal. UCLA went on to a perfect 30-0 season and another NCAA championship. Abdul-Jabbar, who is now a special assistant with the Los Angeles Lakers, is the co-author of a new book, "On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance."

• If North Carolina and Kansas had reached the Final Four, instead of losing in the regional finals, there was the possibility for a 50th anniversary rematch of their famous 1957 showdown, in which the Tar Heels outlasted Kansas and super soph Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime.

• Even if swimmer Michael Phelps comes up short in his quest to win eight gold medals at the current world championships in Australia, you've got to give the guy a lot of credit for sticking around after a spectacular effort at the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he won eight medals, including six gold.  After that, you might have thought he'd lose his hunger to compete.

• According to Wikipedia, and I have no reason to doubt it, the term March Madness far predated its current association with the NCAA men's basketball tournament. An Illinois high school sports official is credited with coining the term in 1939 and, years later, a book about the state's basketball tournament took "March Madness" as its title. Broadcaster Brent Musburger, who spent his early years in the business in Chicago, is credited with helping to identify the college tournament season as  "March Madness"  in the early 1980s.

• Correction: A few blogs ago, I said that CBS college basketball commentator Billy Packer would be working his 25th Final Four. While he's been the lead analyst for the network that long, this actually will be his 33rd consecutive year dissecting Final Four action, having done his first star turn for NBC in 1975 alongside Curt Gowdy. That was a historic occasion to be breaking in, since it was the last season for UCLA coach John Wooden. Packer was at the mike for the final, in which the Bruins beat Kentucky for their 10th title under the Wizard of Westwood. Packer has been a broadcast voice for so long that many viewers probably know nothing of his credentials. The son of a college coach in Pennsylvania, Packer was an all-Atlantic Coast Conference guard at Wake Forest, where he helped lead the Demon Deacons to the Final Four in 1962. Besides his on-air work during the basketball season, he spends most of his time as a real estate developer in North Carolina, although at various times he has organized bicycle races, including the Tour DuPont on the Atlantic seaboard and the Tour of China.

• You've got to love the ingenuity of zealous sports fans like Aaron Goldsmith, who rushed into new Busch Stadium last year in search of several "firsts," including first hot dog sold at the park. He had a friend videotape him running up to an outfield concession stand as soon as the gates opened, then managed to sell the hot dog for $270 to a Tampa, Fla., radio talk show. It cost $77 to express-mail it in dry ice, but regardless of the profit, it makes for great storytelling. Goldsmith, a huge Cardinals fan, also claims to have been the first to sit in many of the bleacher seats, zig-zagging his posterior over rows at a time. Maybe best of all, he left a record of his historic visit, using duct tape to adhere a custom-designed logo to commemorate the occasion on a hidden part of a steel support beam.

• If anyone knows of a more sensational effort in a basketball championship game than Anthony Atkinson's, please speak up. Atkinson scored 10 points in the last 39 seconds to lead North Carolina's Barton College past Winona State of Minnesota in the Division II men's title game. These points were critical in Barton's 77-75 win, since Atkinson's next-to-last basket, on a driving reverse layup, tied the game with 11 seconds remaining, and his final basket came on a layup after a steal and pass from teammate Bobby Buffaloe as time expired. The stunning loss snapped the two-year, 57-game winning streak of the defending-champion Winona State team.

• Imagine getting fined $30,000 for carrying on a conversation with the spectator sitting next to you. That's what happened to Danny Ainge, the executive director of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics, when the NBA disapproved of his chatting with the mother of University of Texas freshman phenom Kevin Durant during this month's Big 12 Conference tournament. The NBA deemed this excessive contact with a player who hasn't yet declared himself eligible for the NBA draft. So the Celtics are out 30 grand, but what gets overlooked here is how an NBA executive winds up in the middle of the Longhorn rooting section. It's possible somebody with the university may be partly responsible for this costly outcome.

• Greg Oden, Ohio State's All-American freshman center, is almost certain to head for the NBA next season, but until then he's a student, right?  Well, up to a point. Sports Illustrated says he's only taking two courses this quarter, sociology and the history of rock and roll.

• The last time Ohio State won the men's Final Four, in 1960, the star of the team was Jerry Lucas. But while Lucas led the Buckeyes over the University of California in the championship game, with 16 points, Ohio State got 15, 13, 12, and 10 points from its remaining starters, who included John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried, who both went on to play for the Boston Celtics. Bob Knight was an Ohio State reserve who took one shot, but didn't score.

• A "We're Just Fans" reader wrote in to question my opinion that women's basketball doesn't have enough depth to put on a competitive 64-team NCAA tournament, and that this leads to more lopsided games than in the men's bracket. She cites this statistic from the current tournaments: First-round blowouts, decided by 20+ points: men (11), women (13). "Maybe neither tournament should be at 64," the fan concludes.

• New York Giants All-Pro defensive lineman Michael Strahan needed an appellate court ruling to put a hold on his $6.5 million in divorce payments to his ex-wife, all of which makes me wonder how many athletes get their future spouses to sign prenuptial agreements.

• During March Madness, the ball can't be brought across midcourt without millions of eyes noticing the blue center-jump circle emblazoned with the letters "NCAA." Increasingly, courts are treated as huge billboards, causing some to wonder about visual clutter, says the in-house NCAA News. Rules prevent commercial logos from being any larger than 8 ft. x 10 ft., but there's a trend to supersize school names and icons. At the University of Kansas, for example, the Jayhawk mascot that's painted at center court measures  28 ft. x 31 ft.

• Subscribing to the theory that it's always better to play before a packed smaller house than a half-full larger one, I'd urge organizers of the women's NCAA basketball tournament to rethink where they hold games before the Final Four. During game telecasts over the weekend, there definitely were way too many empty seats visible in the background, even in a basketball hotbed like Greensboro, N.C. I'd suggest seeking out mid-size cities willing to virtually guarantee sellouts in mid-size arenas.

• In the National Football League, where spectating opportunities are limited to once a week, ticket demand is high for most games. Surely, this has been the case of late. The league just announced that it set a paid attendance record for all games for a fifth straight year in 2006. Average regular-season attendance was 67,738, with the Washington Redskins topping the chart with 87,631 per game. That's nearly capacity at 91,704-seat FedEx Field, the league's largest by far.

• Even if you're not a college hockey fan, you've got to love a sport that provides a showcase for the Universities of North Dakota and Maine, which join Michigan State and Boston College in this season's Frozen Four. If you name where the former two schools are located, go the to top of the class. The answer: Grand Forks, N.D., and Orono, Maine.

• For Duke's top-ranked women's team, losing to Rutgers 53-52 in a NCAA regional final was especially heartbreaking for two reasons: 1) Duke had beaten Rutgers in New Jersey by 40 points in December, and 2) the captain of the Blue Devils, senior Lindsey Harding, missed two free throws with one-tenth of a second left. Both clanged off the back of the rim as she made sure not to come up short. Ironically, she wouldn't have been on the line at all if she hadn't made a sensational steal at midcourt with five seconds left and been fouled after a heroic drive to the basket.

• Little-known Marist College is out of the NCAA women's basketball tournament now, but, hey, it's not too late to place an online order for Marist "Sweet 16" T-shirts and other apparel. The Red Foxes had their Cinderella run in the postseason ended by Tennessee.

• Tiger Woods said he expects the PGA Tour will fine him for letting tennis player Roger Federer, his new friend, follow him from inside the gallery ropes during a practice round in Miami for the CA Championship. Clearly, this sort of thing could quickly get out of hand if you let it, with all sorts of tag-along cronies and VIPs, including sponsors, garnering fairway-access privileges. Federer's case does raise some interesting questions, however, among which is how does a celebrity golf fan avoid being hassled by the crowds?  Maybe every player should be allowed one premium pass for a walk-behind fan who must abide by certain rules.

• In all my years watching college basketball, I never saw two teams play with more defensive zeal and ball-hawking skill than UCLA and Kansas did last Saturday. There were an amazing 32 steals, with Kansas enjoying a slight 17-to-15 edge, even though UCLA won to advance to the Final Four.

• Do you think more college basketball recruiters may start booking flights to Cameroon, given the presence of two key players from the African republic on UCLA's current roster – sophomores Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Alfred Aboya?

• Correction: A few blogs ago, I said that CBS college basketball analyst Billy Packer would be working his 25th straight Final Four. He's been the leading analyst for the network's college basketball coverage that long, but his work at the Final Four dates back even further, to 1975, when he joined with Curt Gowdy on NBC to call John Wooden's swan song game at UCLA, the Bruins' victory over Kentucky. That means Packer will be working his 33rd straight NCAA championship game next Monday night (April 2), which must be some sort of record.

• That team that you hear screaming "Argh!" must be the University of Massachusetts men's hockey squad. It beat the University of Maine four times this month (twice in back-to-back games that closed out the regular season and twice in Hockey East tournament action) only to lose their fifth meeting Saturday, 3-1, in NCAA tournament play.