Category: Sports

Mostly stuff about football…

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Sean Payton punks Jerry Jones

Now this is just 29 different kinds of awesome! From si.com:

On Friday night, the Saints’ staff at the combine gathered in a private room at St. Elmo Steakhouse, an 108-year-old Indy landmark, for a final celebratory nod to the Super Bowl win over the Colts. This is a group that likes its wine, and likes to have fun.

At the restaurant, word passed that Dallas owner Jerry Jones would have his Dallas group in this exact room Saturday night for a team dinner. Jones had even phoned ahead, according to a waiter, to make sure a magnum of a wine he loved, Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, was ready to be served at dinner.

Sean Payton told the waiter he’d like to have that wine, too. The waiter told him: Sorry, sir. We have only one bottle left, and it’s reserved for Mr. Jones.

Payton said he’d like to have the bottle nonetheless. I assume there was much angst on the part of the wait staff at that point. My God! Who do we piss off? One of the most powerful owners in the NFL, or the coach who’s the toast of the NFL, the coach who just won the Super Bowl?

Here came the bottle of Caymus Special Selection, and the Saints’ party drained it.

But drinking Jones’ wine wasn’t enough. Payton gave the waiter some instructions, took out his pen … and, well, the Cowboys party found at the middle of their table the next evening an empty magnum of Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, with these words hand-written on the fancy label:

WHO DAT!
World Champions XLIV
Sean Payton

That’s the kind of thing Jones will get a big laugh out of. And remember.

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Georgia Tech hires Groh

I think this is good news. Opinions may differ:

Al Groh says he’s heading to Georgia Tech to be the Yellow Jackets’ defensive coordinator.

The former Virginia coach told The Associated Press on Friday that he set out several criteria before deciding where he wanted to coach in 2010, and Georgia Tech meets them. The top priority was taking a job where there’s a chance to win championships.

The Yellow Jackets are coming off their first outright ACC title since 1990 and played in the Orange Bowl. But they struggled on defense, firing coordinator Dave Wommack shortly after the season.

via Groh heading to Georgia Tech to run defense.

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R.I.P. Chris Henry

Chris HenryLike any other red-blooded Steelers fan, I hate the Cincinnati Bengals. However, I’ll take a pause from that hate to mourn with the team for wide receiver Chris Henry, who died this morning after a bizarre accident here in Charlotte.

It seems that Henry got into an argument with his fiancee, and the woman tried to leave in a pickup truck. Henry then jumped into the bed of the truck as she sped away, only to fall out a short while later, suffering severe injuries. According to a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, Henry died at 6:36 a.m. Thursday morning. He was 26.

Henry was one of the most troubled players in the NFL, with a history of off-field troubles that reaches back to his college days at West Virginia, where he was ejected from one game and suspended for another by coach Rich Rodriguez, who called him an “embarrassment” to the team. In 2005, Henry was arrested for marijuana possession early in the season and a gun charge after the Bengals lost to the Steelers in the playoffs. In 2007, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell  suspended Henry for half a season for violating the league’s conduct policy. After his fifth arrest in that same year, he was released by the Bengals, only to be given a second change with the team in 2008.

Henry had decent seasons in 2008 and 2009, but broke his forearm in a game against the Baltimore Ravens on November 8th.

He was in town visiting his fiancee’s parents, who live in the Queen City.

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Tuesday’s News Roundup

– It’s funny that record companies should have such a strict stance on their customers respecting copyrights… while they themselves seem to flaunt it at will. Ars Technica is reporting about a lawsuit in Canada where Canadian record companies are being sued by their own artists for up to $60 billion! It seems that there was a change to Canadian copyright law in the 1980s which allowed record companies to use tracks from artists pending approval of the license. So if a record company wanted to release a “Best of the 80s” compilation, it no longer had to have a license in hand to use A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran” – it only had to have a application “pending”. But it seems that the record companies never bothered or even intended to follow-up on those applications, and have since released thousands of compilation albums without having the proper licenses. And the best part: the labels don’t even deny that they did this! I think it’s only fair that if Jammie Thomas was forced to pay $80,000 per song in her non-commercial piracy case that the record labels should be forced to pay the same, since they were actually making money off the deal (and yes, I know – Capitol v. Thomas was an American case, and this case is in Canada).

– Speaking of music, every year the BBC makes a list of up and coming artists they think might make it big in the upcoming calendar year (you might remember that I discovered La Roux via the 2009 list). Well, the 2010 list is out, so go and have a listen and stay ahead of the “coolness curve”!

– One last thing about music: if you’re an aspiring pop star and you’re going to be on live television, you might want to sing into the right end of the microphone.

– Smoking, estrogen and family history all contribute to breast cancer… but if studies from the University of Chicago are correct, loneliness might actually triple a woman’s chance to getting breast cancer. Studies so far have only been carried out on animals, but scientists are fairly certain that it would apply to humans as well. And given the jaw-dropping results – lonely rats had 84 times the amount of cancerous tissue their non-lonely but genetically similar counterparts did – you have to wonder.

– Brian Bonsall, who played little Andy Keaton on Family Ties, has been arrested. Again.

– Hines Ward is the NFL’s dirtiest player? Not with Flozell Adams around:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7qye-KxaFc&feature=player_embedded#

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January in a Jersey!

OK, so I know this is almost a month old by now, but I just had to share this with you: on November 11, Mad Men star January Jones appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. As luck would have it, Pittsburgh Steelers star Troy Polamalu also appeared on the show that day.

During Polamalu’s bit, Fallon put on a helmet and shoulder pads while Polamalu showed him how to go after a blocking sled. January watched… while wearing a Polamalu jersey!

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Continue reading “January in a Jersey!”