Tiger Woods returned to the top Sunday like some inexorable force, stalking with an almost frightening purposefulness to overtake Sean O’Hair and his five-stroke lead in the Arnold Palmer Invitational. As has become his custom, Woods delivered the stunning coup de grâce with a flourish on Bay Hill’s 18th green, sinking a 15-foot putt in the heart of the hole as darkness fell.

Just as he did a year ago, and as he did in 2001 in his second of six victories in this tournament, Woods waited to erase doubts until every shot had been hit. Then he stroked the winning putt. This time it was for a round of 67 and a five-under-par 275 total, one stroke better than O’Hair, who closed with a 73.

Woods’s climb from five strokes back matched the largest comeback in his PGA Tour career. He also came back from five down at the 2000 Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Sheesh. I happened to catch the highlights of this victory this morning on Sportscenter. Loved seeing that last putt. He is just a marvel to watch. Read it all.

For the next two days, Butler, Dayton, Arizona, even North Dakota State can bask in the same euphoria and hope as Louisville, Pittsburgh, Connecticut and North Carolina.

There are 65 teams in the NCAA tournament, and every single one of them is thinking “Why not me?” After the craziness in college basketball this year, who’s to say any of them are wrong?

“I really do think it’s wide open,” Louisville coach Rick Pitino said Monday. “I think any of us can get beat. I don’t think there’s a dominant team out there.”

I am really looking forward to it. Read it all–KSH.

Clay Caulfield balanced a worn Bible in his lap as he grasped the outstretched hands of fellow worshippers in the cramped church office. His eyes closed tight, he bowed his head in prayer, his words spilling forth in a fervent stream.

“We pray for your guidance, God, as you change us and make us grow,” Caulfield said to a chorus of “Amens.”

This time last year, the tall, toned 23-year-old would have been on the mound, pitching for the College of Charleston Cougars. Those days are behind him.

Just weeks after being drafted by the New York Yankees last June, the hard-throwing right-hander decided to hang up his cleats and pursue a higher calling: working as a servant of God. Caulfield walked away from the Yankees, gave up his sports scholarship and hasn’t played baseball since.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

There are moments in time, moments in sports that we never forget. Moments emblazoned on our hearts and on the consciousness of a community.

For fans who were at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night/Friday morning, the quarterfinal classic between Syracuse and Connecticut was one of those moments. Syracuse prevailed, 127-117, in the longest Big East tournament game ever played and one of the longest college games ever played: a six-overtime marathon.

This was not a classic case of execution ”” five players missed an opportunity to hit a game-winning shot ”” and in terms of an N.C.A.A. tournament berth there really wasn’t much on the line for either team. Instead, it was the game itself, an exhibition of will, emotion and fortitude, that gave the matchup meaning. It reminded us why we continue ”” despite scandals and hypocrisy that so often occupy our attention in sports ”” to embrace games.

Whether it’s Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer playing the Wimbledon final at dusk last summer or the Immaculate Reception by the Steelers’ Franco Harris in 1972, memorialized by a statue of Harris at the Pittsburgh airport, there are unforgettable moments that lift the spirit.

Read it all.

Astonshingly moving–I wept. Watch it all (Hat tip: SS).

The Louis Mulkey story is headed to the silver screen.

ESPN Films said Friday it is developing a movie based on the inspirational story of Mulkey, one of nine Charleston firefighters killed in the Sofa Super Store fire on June 18, 2007. Mulkey also was a coach at Summerville High School and provided the inspiration for the boys basketball team that won the 2008 Class AAAA state championship.

“Louis would be absolutely humbled and thrilled to know that his life and the relationships he so deeply cherished with his players and his brothers at the fire department would be worthy of so much positive public attention,” his widow, Lauren Bennett Mulkey, said in a statement.

Read it all.

Needless to say, any nervousness that Woods had felt was not there for long. A majestic three-wood and a superb second shot to within five feet threw down an immediate marker and gave the impression that he had never been away. But he had been absent for almost nine months and had registered his first birdie within ten minutes of his return. Not only that, but he followed up with a “gimme” eagle at the next and was on his way. Two up after two holes. Not bad.

Some had argued that Woods had made a wise choice in picking a matchplay event for his comeback. He was bound to be rusty but could work on the principle that he could survive a few bad holes. Which is how it proved.

The man is a marvel–I just love to watch him play. Read it all.

Watch it all–a very interesting report.

Until this week’s Super Bowl XLIII between the Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals, Tomlin had never had the international platform to follow his mentor Dungy and speak about his faith in Jesus Christ. But that’s exactly what he did before hundreds of reporters in Tampa.

“First and foremost, I want people to know who I am and what the most important thing is in my life, my relationship with Jesus Christ,” Tomlin said in response to a Baptist Press question about his personal faith.

“Football is what we do; faith is who we are all the time.”

Tomlin, who attends Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Center Alliance Church, was mentored by Dungy, who hired him as a defensive backs coach with Tampa Bay before Dungy moved on to Indianapolis.

When then-Pittsburgh coach Bill Cowher retired, Tomlin was ready for the promotion, stemming from his time with Dungy, leading men onto the football field and leading men’s hearts off the field.

“I want to lead with a servant’s heart,” Tomlin stated to media members who will be covering Sunday’s Super Bowl.

Read it all.

His voice shaking at times, Alex Rodriguez met head-on allegations that he tested positive for steroids six years ago, telling ESPN on Monday that he did take performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers during a three-year period beginning in 2001.

“When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day,” Rodriguez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons in an interview in Miami Beach, Fla. “Back then, [baseball] was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young, I was stupid, I was naïve. I wanted to prove to everyone I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time.

“I did take a banned substance. For that, I’m very sorry and deeply regretful.”

Read it all.

In 2003, when he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, four sources have independently told Sports Illustrated.

Rodriguez’s name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball’s ’03 survey testing, SI’s sources say. As part of a joint agreement with the MLB Players Association, the testing was conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.

When approached by an SI reporter on Thursday at a gym in Miami, Rodriguez declined to discuss his 2003 test results. “You’ll have to talk to the union,” said Rodriguez, the Yankees’ third baseman since his trade to New York in February 2004. When asked if there was an explanation for his positive test, he said, “I’m not saying anything.”

SI has too much of a reputation and this is too well sourced not to be taken seriously.Read it all–KSH.

Sunday’s Super Bowl kept the officials scrambling to review hard-to-call plays on the field, so maybe it’s no surprise that the TV ratings needed a thorough look too.

After examining the numbers more closely, Nielsen Media Research said Tuesday that NBC’s game actually delivered an average of 98.7 million total viewers, making it the most-watched Super Bowl ever and the No. 2 telecast of all time, behind only the 1983 series finale of “MASH” with 106 million.

Read it all.

Some might argue there have been better Super Bowls. Legendary quarterback Joe Willie Namath, who handed the Lombardi Trophy to Steelers owner Dan Rooney after the confetti fell last night, played in a pretty remarkable one in Super Bowl III, leading the New York Jets past the ridiculously favored Baltimore Colts. Much more recently, the New York Giants stunned the world by upsetting the unbeaten New England Patriots last year in Super Bowl XLII.

But this one beat ’em all.

Four scores in the final 7 minutes, 33 seconds? Arizona going from 20-7 down to 23-20 ahead in — what — a blink of the eye? Roethlisberger leading the Steelers 78 yards in the final two minutes-and-change to win it on wide receiver Santonio Holmes’ fabulous 6-yard touchdown catch with 35 seconds left?

You gotta be kidding.

Certainly it was one of the best, anyway. Read it all.

Wow. My heart is in my throat. What a catch by Santonio Holmes!

Read it all.

It was not quite another tennis masterpiece. The much-anticipated rematch between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer lacked the consistent quality and, above all, the crescendo finish of their five-act drama in fading light at Wimbledon last year.

But this Australian Open final was certainly epic entertainment, too. It also lasted five sets and more than four hours. It also featured plenty of abrupt reversals of fortune and unexpected breaks of serve, and it also ended with Nadal triumphant and Federer devastated.

Federer, the 27-year-old Swiss star, needed just one more victory to match Pete Sampras’s all-time record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. But he faded badly in the final set on Sunday night and was then unable to keep his composure after Nadal’s 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (3), 3-6, 6-2 victory.

In the post-match ceremony, Federer choked up after receiving the runner’s-up plate from one of his idols, Rod Laver, and was unable to get more than a few sentences into his speech to the crowd before he began to cry in earnest.

I ended up only catching part of it this morning on the early run before I had to leave the house. What a rivalry. Congratulations to nadal. Read it all

I was worried when it was 16-14 in the fourth quarter. Troy Polamalu played an unbelievable game.

They beat the Eagles and are going to the Super Bowl.

During his football career, Aeneas Williams earned a reputation as a quiet leader who professed a deep Christian faith. Behind the eight Pro Bowl appearances and a Super Bowl loss was a man often sought out in the locker room to help put things in perspective.

Now, the 40-year-old Williams leads a small start-up church that meets in rented space at a hotel in suburban St. Louis, where he weaves lessons from life and football into his sermons.

With football in its most important time ”” the college bowl season is over and the Super Bowl is looming ”” the strong evangelical faith of high-profile players and coaches has been getting attention.

Read it all.

I enjoyed the games very much and with my wife being a Steel City native you can imagine our response to the last one. I feel very bad for Tennessee and Coach Fisher who beat themselves.

Back in July, in a ballroom in a Birmingham, Ala., hotel during Southeastern Conference media days, a reporter asked Tim Tebow the following question:

“I don’t mean to sound cynical, but between winning the national championship and winning the Heisman, saving the world in the Philippines and all, did you ever, like, sneak a cigarette when you were in high school? Do you ever do anything wrong? Do you feel like everything off the field is sort of on cruise control for you?”

Come on, now, you know you want to see how Mr. Tebow responded. Read it all.

They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas.

It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.

Did you hear that? The other team’s fans?….

“I never in my life thought I’d hear people cheering for us to hit their kids,” recalls Gainesville’s QB and middle linebacker, Isaiah. “I wouldn’t expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids. But they wanted us to!”

Makes the heart very glad–read it all (Hat tip: TCW).

He sits by himself in a corner of the dressing room, hunched forward on a metal chair, the same kind you’d see at a Methodist picnic. He tugs at his ears and fiddles with his glasses. He’s already taken his hat off, so he puts it on again, then sets it down, smooths his white hair and rubs his forehead with both hands.

He stands up. He has to. He shifts his weight, touches his chin and fingers the gold whistle around his neck.

Then John McKissick, the coach with 565 wins, more than anyone else in football at any level, calls out to his Summerville team, the 75 or so players dressed in kelly green and gold.

He walks between the bunch, seated on a wooden bench and rows of metal chairs, and lectures them about Gaffney, their opening-round playoff opponent.

He tells ’em the truth: This is the only game that matters.

Read it all.

When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 ½-year-old son, Noah, she instantly said, Where can I get it and how much does it cost?

“I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it’s good to match them with the right activity,” Ms. Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor Soccer in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between juice and potty breaks.

“I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration,” she said.

In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child’s natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child’s cheek and along the gums to collect DNA and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.

Read it all.

A native of Galloway, N.J., [Myron] Rolle arrived at Florida State from the Hun School in Princeton as the country’s No. 1 football recruit. He has had an all-American-caliber junior season, but Rolle’s list of off-field accomplishments is as lengthy as it is daunting.

He graduated from Florida State in two and a half years with a degree in pre-med and a grade point average of 3.75. He is so studious that the Seminoles’ defensive coordinator, Mickey Andrews, publicly criticized him for studying too much last year, saying it affected Rolle’s preparation for football. Rolle said the criticism was a “little unfair.”

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” Rolle said of Andrews. “I don’t think he’s ever sat through an organic chemistry lecture and seen just how difficult it is. He’s been through a couple ballgames, but that’s a different arena right there.”

Outside of class, Rolle was awarded a $4,000 grant for cancer research over the summer, and also started a program to help educate Seminole Indian children in Okeechobee, Fla., about the importance of health and physical fitness. He belongs to a fraternity, helps tutor his teammates, has studied in London and has written for The New York Times.

As he has been deluged by interview requests this week ”” including three reporters traveling with him on the plane to College Park ”” Rolle said he welcomed carrying the brand of the university.

“I have no problem holding the weight of that on my shoulders,” he said. “I think it’s more of a privilege and an honor than a burden.”

Read it all–what a remarkable young man. Later in the week, you guessed it, he won the Rhodes scholarship. His story was used in this morning’s sermon by yours truly–KSH.

Perhaps making it interesting to the point that everyone dismissed their chances was the only way for the Rays to do it.

It worked all season, as they proved their impressive spring training record could carry over into the regular season; as they recovered from a skid heading into the All-Star break many expected to finish them; as they responded to the loss of two of their best players in August by putting together their best month of the season.

Simply an amazing turnaround from last season–congratulations to them. Read it all.

“Remember, no one saw Martin Luther King coming,” Edwards says. “He was a young, second-level preacher. Nobody saw Malcolm X coming out of prison. Nobody saw Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Harry Edwards coming out of San Jose State. I’m convinced that, irrespective of what we think we see from a social and political standpoint relative to this generation of athletes, there’s somebody out there whom we simply don’t see coming. I don’t think we are wise enough or visionary enough to say that this generation is lost or that this generation can’t get it done. Keep the faith.”

We know what the hope is. But what about the reality, in light of all the money on the table and its tremendous power to manipulate? Think about those antiprotest waivers, the ones everybody is apparently all too willing to sign, and tell me that any modern-day star will use his or her platform to speak up about terrorism, sweatshops in third-world countries or other unspeakable human rights violations.

Which leaves us with a question: Do we even care anymore? The way Tommie Smith and John Carlos did””and still do?

Read it all. The protest of Smith and Carlos happened 40 years ago this week.

A video which reminds us of some of what 1968 was really like is here.

His head bent, bat in hand, David Ortiz trudged to first base. He was out, as he has been so many times this postseason. He walked to the dugout, to teammates who suffered the same fate at the plate. He looked broken. And as he limped back, boos were heard at the once-beloved slugger.

Then the ball lifted, lifted and carried, and dropped into the right-field stands. He had broken out and brought his team back into a game and a series that was seemingly over. It was a three-run home run in the seventh, bringing the Sox within 7-4, and the Rays were the ones suddenly reeling. It wasn’t enough, but he didn’t need to do it all.

He left that to his teammates.

Read the whole article.