Look Out, Don Francisco

Spain backup keeper Pepe Reina desperately needs his own variety show. Here he is moving the crowd like Rakim at Spain's celebration after winning the Euro. Be afraid, Don. Be very afraid.

When I Cook Beef, The Smoke Will Never Clear

Bill O'Reilly is going be pissed when he finds out that his trumped-up war between GE and himself doesn't carry any weight. The real war doesn't even include him. We're talking News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch vs. Keith Olbermann.

Murdoch recently spoke at a Wall Street Journal conference and covered a wide range of topics from the presidential election to newspaper industry's decline. He was also asked a question about Keith Olbermann and whether he would hire him.

"No, I fired him five years ago...He's crazy."

Olbermann wasted no time in responding and elaborated on the circumstances of his firing from Fox Sports. It turns out he may have gotten involved in affairs that did not concern him such as the potential purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers by Murdoch. Unfortunately he didn't have a sprightly Chinese sidekick to save his ass from the ax.

Here's Olbermann's response in full from Mediabistro.com.

Firstly, the quote is, according to AlleyInsider.Com, "he was crazy."

I appreciate the difference and apparently Rupert does, too.

But this is actually quite a news story (for a very small group of people who worked with me at Fox Sports, and people who covered tv at the time). I had already been the host of Fox's Baseball coverage for two years when, in April of 2001, I got a tip from outside NewsCorp that Rupert was unofficially shopping the Los Angeles Dodgers, which Murdoch at that time owned. I confirmed the story with an excellent baseball source, then immediately went up my chain of command at Fox. They all said "if it's solid, go with it," but I suggested we get the corporate viewpoint on this, so they put me in touch with Rupert's PR guy in New York.

I said, in short, this is your candy store, if you don't want me to run this, I'm not running it, and I'm not leaking it, but at minimum you should know the story's out there. And the guy's answer was, thanks for thinking of us, here's our official denial, please report it and whatever your sources tell you, just please make clear that none of your sources are within the company (baseball was, and is, extremely touchy about when a team is, or isn't, "officially" for sale, and woe betide the owner who makes a deal before the "officially" kicks in).

So I ran the Dodgers-Are-Unofficially-For-Sale story (with the "the sources aren't NewsCorp" caveat taking almost as long as the story itself) and everything was swell. And two weeks later, the day before the annual Fox Baseball Meeting convened in L.A., my agent was suddenly notified "he's no longer the host for baseball." This is a week or so before our first game of the week. A day or two later it was "come in and clean out your office."

And a day or so after that I got a call from a friend who's a prominent tv sports beat writer, and he says, I'm hearing Rupert Murdoch just found out about your Dodgers story and personally ordered you fired.

It had never crossed my mind that the two things weren't coincidental. I never could prove that that's what happened, but nor did I ever get any other answer as to why they took me off, considering that in two years we'd been twice nominated for the Emmy for best studio sportscast — and won once (with our competition being all the ESPN shows and hour-long NFL extravaganzas). Months later, the guy who ran sports, David Hill, told another tv sports beat writer that he still thought I was the best sportscaster in the world.

So: I appreciate Rupert finally owning up to firing me because I followed his rules.

And as to the "crazy" part, he had to pay me $800,000 for the rest of 2001, and lord knows how many tens of millions I've helped MSNBC take out of his pocket ever since — so: who's crazy?

Don't you know you don't cross Elliot Carver and his Aryan henchmen? I guess Olbermann didn't know the ledge. However he did get the better of Murdoch in Round 1. It's also interesting to see that Fox Sports is run in a similar fashion to Al-Jazerra English. Don't stray too far from the party line, Brett.

Shocking! A Discriminatory Policy in NASCAR

The fact that NASCAR is involved with a discriminatory policy probably comes as no surprise to many of you. However it wasn't enacted by NASCAR and it harms a group not used to oppression. NASCAR fans who attend races.

Tennessee passed the Non-Smoker Protection Act which bans smoking in public places such as arenas and racetracks. The result is that smoking is no longer allowed at Bristol Motor Speedway. That doesn't sit too well with racegoers.

"You can drink as much beer as you want and get in your car and drive home, but you can't come in here and smoke a cigarette," [Freddie] Lochner said Saturday, while waiting out a rain delay in the track's concourse. "Now, which would you rather have: A guy smoking a cigarette sitting next to you, or a guy who drunk all that beer driving down the road next to you?"

Cars can smoke but not people?? Well let's not be too harsh. Drunk gets you laid and makes you funny to your platonic and sexual mates. Secondhand cigarette smoke just gets in your eyes and causes cancer. It also interferes with the awesome smoke coming from the #3 car and incredible amounts of smoke coming from the other cars and race equipment at track level.

This does seem rather silly at a track when there are numerous other ways to kill yourself like getting in the way of flying debris or as Freddie said, getting hit by a drunk driver. One could also get cut real good by a ripped tall boy can. There's always the option of going as any other black guy besides Brad Daugherty. NASCAR ain't no joke.