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San Antonio Spurs shooting guard Manu Ginóbili shut down a pesky bat with his bare hands during the Kings-Spurs match on Halloween night, which means that, Manu Ginóbili should be hired to take down Edward Cullen.  From the video evidence there is no indication that Manu took a flop to lure the bat in.  [via]

You know what the definition of the best is?  It is this.  This is my high school, where two basketball score keepers got into some fisticuffs ( Watch the video).

The even better part is that I used to umpire baseball and the dude that got punched in the face used to be a coach.  I won’t say he deserved to get punched, but he did.  If not for throwing water on another dude’s face then for being douchy.

The incident, caught on camera, shows two score-keepers engaged in an argument. The Watertown score-keeper Josh Bellini removed a cap from his water bottle and then tossed the water on the Lexington score-keeper Nick Santosuosso.

Santosuosso then punched Bellini in the head.

The game was stopped and Santosuossa was escorted from the gymnasium by officers.

Students said they were surprised by the adults’ behavior.

“People come here to watch the game and it’s really too bad we have to talk about this instead of what a good game it was,” said Joe Lepera, a junior at Watertown High School. “You know it really is a shame.”

“You have two grown men fighting over a high school basketball game?” said Adam Koot, a junior. “You kind of should be trying to set an example or something.”

The school superintendent said they are taking a closer look at this fight.

Both scorekeepers will be summonsed into Waltham District Court to see if there is enough evidence for assault and battery charges.

Also the best?  WHDH in Boston treating this like it’s the Zapruder film and someone just got JFK’d.  This kind of thing probably happens every other week when, crap, I was going to use some random Irish surnames for my fictional story to illustrate how this happens all the time, but then I realized I know guys with those random Irish surnames and I don’t want them to think I was actually talking about them.

Anyway, disappointments aside, watch the video because the guy from Lexington, Mass. throws one hell of a left-hook.  Sadly, for me, this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my little Boston suburb – if you don’t count the time one of our residents flew his plane into the Empire State Building, but that was back in 1930-something or other so it doesn’t really count.

It should have been historic.  It should have been life changing.  It should have defined a team and brought the players closer together for the rest of their lives.  It should have made all the difference.

It didn’t.

Imagine if heartbreak and tragedy were bestowed upon the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins football team.  Imagine if fate had a different plan for you – as if you were to pay penance for an eternity because of a single glorious night.

Now imagine you are the basketball players for the North Jackson Cheifs, from the tiny rural town of Stevensen, AL.

Stevenson lies between two ridges in north Alabama, by the Tennessee River, a dark blue vein on the earth. There, on Valentine’s Day 1992, the North Jackson Chiefs hosted the Fort Payne Wildcats in high school basketball. It was not a playoff game, not even a conference game, and neither team was especially good. But in the 117-year history of organized basketball, it was one of the few times a team with only two remaining players beat a team that still had five.

If this were a movie, the story would end at the final buzzer. The winners would always be winners, fists in the air and black jerseys glistening, and the losers would always hang their heads. This is not a movie. Morning came and they all woke up.

This is the bifurcated story of exhileration and heartbreak; the story of a team who beat the odds, who won a basketball game in overtime when all but two of their players fouled out; the story of a poor community that had nothing except each other and then this basketball win that is still talked about in the bars and restaurants.  The real story, though, is the heartbreak that would occur in the ensuing decade with players being shot, going to jail, ending up fighting with each other. Tearing the community asunder.

It is at once profoundly sad and breathtakingly exciting.  This is the single best piece of sports writing I’ve read this year.  Kudos to Sports Illustrated and Thomas Lake.  [2 on 5]

So, yeah, we chose to take yesterday off, since it was the first day of the Big East Basketball tournament. We’re not hugely into sports, but we do enjoy tourney week, Selection Sunday and then March Madness. How could you not with office pools, chicks picking winners based on school mascots or uniforms, dudes tirelessly scouting teams to find sleepers – only to have their picks lose anyways. It’s just a great time to be a sports fan.

So we were elated and dejected yesterday while watching our beloved Syracuse Orange take on UCONN yesterday afternoon. It was a great performance from the boys as we took down our hated rival for the third straight year in the Big East Tourney!

But what’s up with those unis? It looks like Helen Keller picked them out.