But the business scandals and their intersections with the sport world are not finished. San Diego Padres' owner, John Moores, made his fortune – or a large portion of it – through a computer software company called Peregrine Systems. That company is under a Congressional subpoena for documents and is the defendant in several class-action suits by shareholders and employees and is the subject of an investigation by the SEC. At least Bud Selig made his money in the used car business where shady dealings are an expected and even necessary part of the industry…

Worldcom bankruptcy update: the MCI Center will retain its name. It will for now anyway but I wonder if some judge will decide at some future time that this is not a proper expenditure of funds when creditors are being stiffed for at least 50 cents on the dollar.

There is a report that coaches in a New Jersey Little League told kids on one team to throw a game against another team. An investigation is beginning by Little League officials and by the mayor of the NJ town where this is alleged to have happened; I can't wait for them to depose and cross-examine a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds. The kids need Johnny Cochran to advise and represent them. I can hear the kids now:

The coach said, "Lose."
We tried to refuse.
But he was the man
With the keys to the van.
Only one team could win,
But the fix was in.

I said last year after the Danny Almonte fiasco that it might be time to take a critical look at Little League baseball and how it is run. This story underlines the need to do it now. If we can lead some former corporate CEOs out of a building in cuffs and down to a jail for booking, then maybe the same thing could befall the pooh-bahs who have made Little League baseball into an embarrassment. The thing that is lost here is that this is an organization that ought to make it easy for kids to play baseball. Somehow, it has been hijacked by adults who make a living off it or who live vicariously through it. Maybe we should kill it off and make way for the Cal Ripken Youth Baseball Program?

I notice that several NFL teams are putting players on the "Physically Unable to Perform List" as training camp begins. Now I'll prove to you again why I did not have a long and successful career in marketing or advertising. Why aren't the Viagra people all over the players on the "Physically Unable to Perform List"? These people are the best possible spokespersons for Viagra; that is what Viagra is for. This is a made-to-order opportunity for them and they can't seem to get their hands on it – so to speak.

John Daly is not a MENSA candidate. Somehow he got a piece of glass embedded in his hand and played the final dozen holes of the British Open one handed. Then he had surgery to remove the glass and immediately went to Europe to play in a pro-am and the Dutch Open. In the pro-am he opened the wound and blood gushed out. At that point, you might think he would pack it in and go find the First Aid Tent. Not our hero. He closed the wound with Super Glue; he glued the wound shut and finished the round. I admit I never made it to med school, but this sounds very dumb to me. Almost as dumb as the guy who burned his face bobbing for French Fries…

The guy who runs the LPGA Tour found himself in the crosshairs of the women's sports screechers yesterday. Christine Brennan was on ESPN Radio complaining that he should be fired for bringing in a woman to advise players on how to dress and do their hair and wear make-up. Brennan was also outraged that none of the star players was sufficiently angered by this that they walked out of the briefings. In one sense, I am an objective observer here because I would not watch a women's golf tournament – or a men's golf tournament for that matter – unless someone had nailed my tongue to a plank covered with poison ivy and watching was the only way to get out of that predicament So let me offer one datapoint here. The leading money winner on the LPGA tour this year is Anika Sorenstam who has won a half dozen tournaments and placed in the top ten in a bunch of others; she won just over $1.3M the last I saw. Ernie Els won almost $1.2M last Sunday.

The "LPGA problem" is the same as the "Senior PGA problem". They don't have ratings and a gate sufficient to make them a serious player in the "golf boom" that is happening. And if they aren't going to get rich in boom times, what will happen to them when the golf bubble bursts? And that bubble surely will burst. Maybe, having the ladies on the LPGA tour sell attractiveness along with athletic prowess is a wrongheaded move. Time will tell. But Christine Brennan wondered aloud in her radio rant why, in 2002, we have to continue to market women's sports to the frat house mentality. One answer might be that marketing athletic prowess alone just don't feed the bulldog…

The BBC commentator, Peter Alliss, who did the British Open, has been credited with two very good lines. Of course I did not hear them live; I did not have my tongue nailed to a plank covered with poison ivy over the weekend. But here they are for people who have not seen/heard them:

Describing the weather on Saturday: "One good thing about rain in Scotland is that most of it ends up as scotch."

Describing Duffy Waldorf's first five holes on rainy Saturday: "A 5-5-5-4-7. It's like the dialing code for Tierra del Fuego."

Dennis Connor resurfaced in sports news yesterday and I guess he hopes his yacht will resurface too. The boat was a new vessel that cost in the range of $5M and it was intended for the America's Cup time trials. It is now adorning the sea floor under more than 50 feet of water off Long Beach, California. When asked about the sinking of the boat, Connor demonstrated that he has not lost his annoying pedantic touch by saying:

"Technically, it was not a sinking. It was a grounding and a swamping."

Finally, Longwood University named Bill Fiege as the assistant athletic director for development and Bonnie Robertson as the assistant athletic director for business. Who knew that Longwood U had an athletic department?

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...