They are up 3-0 on Russia and are headed to the final against Germany.

I hate penalty kicks, but felt relief for Spain since they so often have come out on the wrong end of these.

The Cubs rally from 4-1 down to go up 9-4 against the White Sox. They have a seriously good offense this year.

Update: the Cubs went on to win 11-7.

“Football is like chess without the dice.”

–A German football player as cited in Der Spiegel in an article on the greatest football quotes in Germany, cited on this week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell me show (Go here and click on the “Lightning Fill in the Blank” segment, then begin listening at 2 minutes 55 seconds).

Woods revealed Wednesday he has been playing for at least 10 months with a torn ligament in his left knee, and that he suffered a double stress fracture in his left leg two weeks before the U.S. Open. He said he will have season-ending surgery, knocking him out of the final two majors and the Ryder Cup.

“Now, it is clear that the right thing to do is to listen to my doctors, follow through with this surgery and focus my attention on rehabilitating my knee,” Woods said on his Web site.

He sure wasn’t listening to doctors by playing the U.S. Open, a victory that now looks even more impressive.

Out of competition for two months because of April 15 surgery to clean out cartilage in his left knee, he suffered a double stress fracture in his left tibia two weeks before the U.S. Open.

Read it all.

Tiger Woods will have season-ending surgery to repair his left knee, the Golf Channel and Associated Press reported Wednesday.

According to the network, Woods experienced a small stress fracture in his surgically repaired left leg in the weeks leading up the U.S. Open, which caused him pain en route to winning his 14th major championship.

A source told the Golf Channel that doctors feel the world’s top golfer needs ACL surgery to fully repair his knee, on which he has underwent three previous surgeries.

Read it all.

A incredible mental effort given the challenges.

He isn’t playing well for him, and still manages to force a playoff.

Three goals in the second half to come back from being down 2-0. Wow.

Simply amazing–watch it all.

“The Buffalo Bills organization is devastated in hearing the news of the passing of Tim Russert. Tim, as everyone knows, was a tremendous Bills fan. He was always so proud to let people know just how much he loved our team and was such a great ambassador for Buffalo. So many times he ended his “Meet The Press” show with his patented “Go Bills!” that it became part of our Game Day morning rituals. He was a true friend and we will miss him immensely. Our sincere sympathies go out to his family and our team carries a heavy heart tonight as we mourn the loss of this great man, Buffalo’s native son and a Bills fan forever.”

Watch this NFL.com video also.

After 11 innings–rah!

Jim McKay, 86, a longtime television sports journalist, has died of natural causes in Maryland, according to a statement from the McKay family.

McKay is best known for hosting “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” and 12 Olympic Games.

McKay won numerous awards for journalism, including the George Polk Memorial Award and two Emmys — one for his sports coverage, the other for his news reporting — for his work at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which were tragically affected by the Black September terrorists’ attack on the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village.

“There are no superlatives that can adequately honor Jim McKay. He meant so much to so many people. He was a founding father of sports television, one of the most respected commentators in the history of broadcasting and journalism,” ESPN and ABC Sports president George Bodenheimer said in a statement.

Read it all.

Already, pressure is building in Chicagoland, like tectonic plates grinding up against each other ”” the weight of 99 years of being the second-banana Second City, this bustling, cultured and sometimes even beautiful city by the lake.

Terrible signs are pointing toward disillusionment. Fans are wielding signs that say It’s Gonna Happen. And just the other day, a Republican legislator sent a letter to The Chicago Tribune advocating the state’s desired purchase of historic Wrigley Field ”” “at the same time as we are planning for a World Series this fall.”

Oh, dear. This is the legislative version of the dippy enthusiasm that in 2003 led a decent and knowledgeable Cubs fan to stick his hands where they didn’t belong ”” interfering with a foul fly ball about to nestle into the glove of Moises Alou, after which calamity struck.

Overcoming 99 years of heartbreak will be much harder than the Angels’ winning the 2002 Series in their 42nd season, after several gruesome collapses, or the Red Sox’ eight straight victories at the end of 2004, eradicating all the silliness about the jinx of the Babe, or the White Sox’ winning in 2005 for their first time since 1917, before the gambling scandal of 1919.

Read it all.

Go Cubs go! It is a long season but one is entitled to hope…..

Watch it all.

I found watching the penalty kicks in the rain excruciating.

Eight is an auspicious number in Chinese tradition, and 2008 was supposed to be a joyful year, a time for celebrating at the Beijing Olympics and basking in international recognition of the country’s tremendous progress under the careful leadership of the Communist Party.

It has not turned out that way.

An uprising in Tibet on March 14 focused the world’s attention on the long-festering issue of China’s abuse of human rights. The worldwide Olympic torch relay, conceived as a “journey of harmony,” turned into a magnet for protest, embarrassing Olympic organizers, angering nationalistic Chinese and souring the mood for the Beijing Games.

And now a violent earthquake has devastated a broad patch of central China, particularly here in mountainous Sichuan province, killing up to 50,000 people. The scale of destruction is so vast — and the horizon for a return to normalcy so distant — that it is difficult to imagine a carefree crowd in Beijing when the Games open Aug. 8.

The clouds over 2008 have not only darkened prospects for a celebratory Olympics. They have compromised what was shaping up as a golden opportunity for President Hu Jintao and other leaders to rally support among China’s 1.3 billion people for continuing the party’s monopoly on power indefinitely.

Read it all.

A short video is here and a good ESPN article is there. Really touching.

Alicia Shay has had a steady stream of visitors to the Flagstaff, Ariz., home that she and Ryan moved into a year ago. Her former Stanford teammates have come to train with her, including Lauren Fleshman, the 2006 U.S. 5,000 champion. Ryan Hall, the Olympic trials marathon champion, and his wife, Sara, stayed with Shay in January. Her parents and two sisters have been regular visitors.

“I was amazed being there seeing first-hand how she deals with Ryan’s death day to day,” says Sara Hall, who was a bridesmaid in the Shays’ wedding. “She told me before that God was meeting her every need each day. To actually be there and see that was incredible. Her faith is very real.”

So is the pain that can surface suddenly. “All day I have thoughts and memories of Ryan and us moving into my mind,” says Shay, who hosted an Easter brunch for 35 that included many runners. “When I’m not with people I can let down with, I’m constantly overriding and repressing those thoughts, memories and emotions. That’s when a small thing can set me off and it all comes crashing down.

“A lot of times at night, it really gets hard. You lay there and there’s nothing to distract you. Sometimes If I can say it out loud, I can move on. Or I cry and five minutes later, I can handle the rest of the day.”

Elizabeth caught this one in yesterday’s USA Today–read it all.

I watched it live streaming on Italian TV but couldn’t ever find any audio accessible in the U.S. It will be interesting to see if they can successfully defend the title with only about one week to go in the season.

Watch the whole thing, and do not to forget to enjoy that great Maine landscape.

As the Dalai Lama begins a contentious two-week visit to the United States and the Olympic torch continues its tortuous journey across six continents toward Beijing, the 2008 Games, already tarnished, have become a political as well as an athletic spectacle, with vying theories of human rights and how best to promote them.

Groups devoted to causes as diverse as press freedom, Falun Gong, Tibet and autonomy for Uighur Muslims in China’s far west have used the Games as leverage to highlight issues that had been relegated to advocacy chat rooms during most of China’s long economic boom.

Aggressive street demonstrations in London, Paris and the United States, and mounting calls for President George W. Bush and other world leaders to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in August as a show of protest against China’s internal policies, have produced a nationalist backlash in China. There, both the leadership and ordinary people resent what many see as a plot to disrupt the Games and damage China’s image as a rising power, which the Olympics once seemed likely to burnish.

Politics has not intruded on the Games to this extent since Soviet bloc countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation for a United States-led boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Read it all.

A failed jump by one of the world’s finest riders and a spate of deaths have unnerved the equestrian community.

Darren Chiacchia, 43, who helped the United States Olympic team win a bronze medal at the Athens Games and was considered a favorite for this year’s team, was training a horse on an intermediate course in Tallahassee, Fla., last month when the stallion crashed over a fence, crushing ”” and nearly killing ”” its celebrated rider.

Mr. Chiacchia spent a week in a coma and is now recovering at a rehabilitation facility near his home in Buffalo. Meanwhile, the sport he devoted his life to faces an identity crisis. Considered alongside the deaths of 12 riders worldwide over the past year and a half, his crash has reignited a fierce debate over whether the risks involved with the equestrian discipline known as eventing ”” an arduous three-phase competition ”” have become too great.

Top competitors and coaches argue that the sport’s growing popularity has attracted inexperienced riders who take too many risks, and amateur riders complain that courses are being designed beyond their skill level in order to challenge elite riders. There is also frustration that the governing bodies for eventing have not mandated the safety improvements they identified after another cluster of deaths nine years ago.

As many of you know, our youngest daughter is now eventing with horses, so this is of more than passing interest here–KSH.

If you’ve been listening to political candidates, you probably think that America is fragmented by religion, gender, race and ethnicity, as well as wealth, class, age and manual dexterity ”” do you text-message or are you all thumbs?

No wonder sports can seem comforting. In what I call Jock Culture, there are only two kinds of Americans ”” winners and losers.

The political season will be over in a few months (with its winners and losers), but the sports seasons will roll on, one after another, often concurrently, and the messages will be drilled into our minds: First place is the only place. Win or die a little. Losers slink home.

In sports, the pressure of those messages to win has given us recruiting scandals, academic cheating, helmet-spearing, bean balls, steroids and industrial espionage ”” the New England Patriots used video cameras to gain an edge. In real life, those messages about winning have been performance-enhanced to bring us dishonesty in banking, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, energy and foreign policy.

There’s a connection between cutting corners to win a football game and to start a war. For many Americans, certainly for the majority American boys, the most vivid and lasting lessons are learned in the sports they play and watch. Jock Culture is the incubator of most definitions of manly success.

Read it all.

One of the all-time greats in baseball was Babe Ruth. His bat had the power of a cannon, and his record of 714 home runs remained unbroken until Hank Aaron came along. The Babe was the idol of sports fans, but in time age took its toll, and his popularity began to wane. Finally the Yankees traded him to the Braves. In one of his last games in Cincinnati, Babe Ruth began to falter. He struck out and made several misplays that allowed the Reds to score five runs in one inning. As the Babe walked toward the dugout, chin down and dejected, there rose from the stands an enormous storm of boos and catcalls. Some fans actually shook their fists. Then a wonderful thing happened. A little boy jumped over the railing, and with tears streaming down his cheeks he ran out to the great athlete. Unashamedly, he flung his arms around the Babe’s legs and held on tightly. Babe Ruth scooped him up, hugged him, and set him down again. Patting him gently on the head, he took his hand and the two of them walked off the field together.

–Source Unknown

Ugh–I was just starting to get excited about the new season beginning.

Moves to punish China over its handling of violence in Tibet gained momentum Tuesday, with a novel suggestion for a mini-boycott of the Beijing Olympics by VIPs at the opening ceremony.

Such a protest by world leaders would be a huge slap in the face for China’s Communist leadership.

France’s outspoken foreign minister, former humanitarian campaigner Bernard Kouchner, said the idea “is interesting.”

Kouchner said he wants to discuss it with other foreign ministers from the 27-nation European Union next week. His comments opened a crack in what until now had been solid opposition to a full boycott, a stance that Kouchner said remains the official government position.

Read it all.

In March 1944, basketball players from the North Carolina College for Negroes played a secret game against military medical students from Duke University.

Rabid segregation kept the teams from playing together in public, and by the end of the clandestine matchup, the North Carolina players had soundly beaten Duke, 88-44.

The secret game was just one of the historic incidents featured in a new ESPN documentary about early African-American basketball pioneers and the historically black colleges and universities that nurtured them. Black Magic tells the stories of many of the players who gradually broke through the barriers of segregation and racism and set the standard for the basketball stars of today.

Read it all–something else to look forward to on television.

As athletes train for the summer Olympics in China, a new book claims that the country’s vast spy network is gearing up for a different challenge – keeping an eye on journalists and potential troublemakers.

French writer Roger Faligot, author of some 40 intelligence-related books, has penned ‘The Chinese Secret Services from Mao to the Olympic Games’, due out February 29.

His findings claim that special teams are being formed at the country’s embassies abroad “to identify sports journalists … and to define if they have an ‘antagonistic’ or ‘friendly’ attitude in regards to China.”

Read it all.