Want an Opinion? Just Give Him the Damn Show

Keyshawn Johnson of the New York Jets is one of the NFL’s most skilled receivers. He is also one of the NFL’s premier talkers, and he has no doubt that his talking skills would translate successfully into a general-talk format on television.

“They wouldn’t be able to afford me,” said the former USC player. “People would turn to my TV station and watch me. We would have the highest ratings. We wouldn’t be sitting there talking about no bunk.

“We would lay it down, me and my producers. We would tell it like it is, tell it like it’s supposed to be told.”

Yak, yak, yak.

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Trivia time: When did Stanford make its first appearance in the Rose Bowl game?

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Forgettable game: It has been reported that USC’s game Friday against Louisiana Tech will be its first regular-season-ending game against a team other than UCLA or Notre Dame since 1985.

That year, USC played Oregon in the Mirage Bowl in Tokyo, winning, 20-6. The Trojans stayed in a hotel with rooms so small that the players could hardly turn around, once they had put on their uniforms in preparation for practice.

The Mirage Bowl no longer exists. It was a mirage, after all.

We’ve always wondered: Peter Vecsey in the New York Post:

“According to 76er stat freak Harvey Pollack, Allen Iverson is the smallest player ever to have led the league in tattoos.”

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And, who really cares? John Millea of the Minneapolis Star Tribune says the sweater logo for the Minnesota Wild, an NHL expansion team that will start playing next season, “is dominated by the head of a beast that might be a bear. Or maybe it’s a mountain lion? A wolf? A very angry gopher? Who really knows?”

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No future there: Comedy writer Earl Hochman: “Because of gambling concerns, referees will now be required to submit to random background checks before working [the NCAA basketball tournament], which halts Pete Rose’s chances of becoming a hoops official.”

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Fair enough: Like his former employer, ESPN, Fox’s Keith Olbermann is putting together a list of the century’s top athletes--with at least one big difference.

“No animals,” he says. “You must be voluntarily competing. When you show me a horse that puts himself in the starting gate, he is eligible.”

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Maui madness: USC’s basketball team is among seven mainland teams joining host Chaminade for the Maui Invitational this week. As befits one of the best early-season tournaments, it’s being played in a luxurious new arena, right?

Wrong. It’s being played, as usual, in the Lahaina Civic Center, a jack-of-all-trades building that serves as a college court only three days a year.

The playing floor is new this year but the building still seats only 2,400--they cram in more than that--and when the tournament is over, the Civic Center will go back to being the home of the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We have to rent a place for the senior centers to have their meetings when the games are going on,” said Wayne Duke, the former commissioner of the Big Ten who has been in charge of the tournament for the last decade.

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Something’s missing: Defensive tackle La’Roi Glover of the New Orleans Saints, on the San Francisco 49ers: “That team without Steve Young is like Earth, Wind and no Fire. It’s like Kool and no Gang.”

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Trivia answer: Stanford played Michigan in 1902 and was routed, 49-0, in the inaugural Rose Bowl game. It was played at Tournament Park in Pasadena, attracting a “crowd” of 8,500.

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And finally: Winger Brendan Shanahan of the Detroit Red Wings, on 39-year-old teammate Igor Larionov: “He’s the Dick Clark of hockey.”