Catching up on a lot of stuff, Andrew Golotta seems to have had a reason for not answering the bell in the third round of his fight with Mike Tyson. Lots of "experts" and even his trainer were questioning his courage after the fight. Well, it seems that he had a minor concussion and a broken bone in his face and a herniated disk in his neck. He has been released from the hospital, but that set of "problems" would qualify as ones that might make a person refuse to continue in a boxing contest.

Now they are finding that competitors in the Paralympics are also using drugs. Why not give this up and organize a set of games called the Pharma-lympics where everyone is required to have taken steroids and to submit to blood doping as a prerequisite to competing. Then we can take that story off the sports pages.

In college football, Brown beat Cornell 56-40 and Brown generated 690 yards of offense. What happened to defensive football?

Both USC and UCLA lost again. Stanford beat USC on the last play of the game and UCLA lost to Oregon State because they gave up 44 points. A writer for the LA Times suggested that USC and UCLA should petition the NCAA to declare their game as a bowl game because that is the only way both of them will play in a bowl game this year.

A loyal reader asked me if I knew about an OL in a high school in NJ who is purportedly 6'10" tall and weighs 520 lbs. I do not. But if one exists, I would be willing to bet that colleges who try to recruit him will have to do a budget impact study to account for the extra food they will need to buy for the buffet table.

The Boston Bruins have fired their coach after 7 games and a four game losing streak. Given the tight purse strings in Boston and the loss of so many quality players, it is hard to imagine who could make that team a winner. Rumor is that Mike Keenan will get the job. Give me a break. Keenan wins Stanley Cups and is so "difficult" that he gets fired. Imagine him with a team that will struggle to break even. This is an accident waiting to happen.

A warrant for the arrest of Derrick Coleman was issued in North Carolina because he was driving illegally. His license was revoked in North Carolina for refusing to submit to a sobriety test last year after an accident that seriously injured a teammate. This year, Derrick is not participating in training camp as he adjusts to a new medication he needs to take to control an irregular heartbeat. I'll be only mildly suspicious if he is fully acclimated to the new medicine just after the final pre-season game and just before the first regular season game…

The Sixers lost Speedy Claxton - their first round pick last June - to a major knee injury. He will be out all year. His loss makes dealing for Allen Iverson much more difficult.

Unlike previous years, I did not bring home any NBA futures bets this time. The Imperial Palace increased the line for all the over/under bets to -115 and they did not allow any parlays of the bets. But for the record, here are the bets that seemed interesting:

Wizards over 31 wins. I think the team will be better this year and they will face a weak schedule in the East.

Grizzlies over 26 wins. Time for the bear to wake up from a LONG hibernation.

Knicks under 49 wins. They benefit from the weak East schedule too, but not by that much.

Frankly, I have had enough of the Roger Clemens/Mike Piazza feud. It is time for the media talking heads to drop this. When Clemens threw the bat, he was obviously not trying to hit Piazza with it; had he done that, it would probably have hit him or made him fall to the ground. But that does not excuse Clemens for being a psycho on the mound; self-control is one of the unwritten but very real expectations of a player in a baseball game. Once Charlie Relliford did not eject him from the game - I would have because of all the history that led up to that incident - the matter was over. The find levied by MLB is stupid. On one hand, $50K is a middling amount of money to Clemens; on the other hand, it is one of the largest fines in the history of baseball. This just cannot be the single worst thing a player or manager ever did in the midst of a game.

In that game, I think that Bobby Valentine did one of the biggest "over-managing" jobs of the year. Losing 6-0, he takes out Mike Bordick and replaces him with Kurt Abbot. Kurt struggles to hit his weight. So in the ninth inning after scoring 5 runs to bring it to within one run with two men out, up comes Abbot. Watching him face Mariano Rivera - even a struggling Rivera - could only recall to mind Lou Costello yelling "Heeey Abbot!!" Bordick may not be the offensive player of the year, but tell me who you would rather see in the batters box at that point? All that because of overmanaging by a self-proclaimed genius. Someone observed that Joe Torre knows everything about the game and he shows you how it is done. Bobby Valentine also knows everything about the game and he tells you about it.

The Pirates hired Lloyd McClendon as their manager. This is his forst managerial job. Jim Leyland put all this in perspective. Leyland said: "He's like any other manager; if his players do well, he'll do well." And to get things off to a running start, the Pirates also announced the signing of Adam Hyzdu - whoever he is. That ought to put them over the top and get them to the 90 win level.

The Rams defense finally gave up more points than the offense could cover. No matter. The Rams are still the class of their division by such a margin that they can coast to the playoffs - even with Trent Green at QB.

At the end of the Browns/Steelers game, Cleveland had sub-QB Spergon Wynn in the game because Doug Pederson had demonstrated conclusively that he still stinks. Remember on SNL how they would often break into the "newscasts" to give you the late breaking story that Generalissimo Franco was "still dead"? Well, Doug Pederson "still stinks". But even a brief glance at Spergon Wynn tells me that if he starts a game, it will be too easy to call him Spergon Lose. Against the Steelers, the Browns total offense was 104 yards on 42 offensive plays.

It is a shame that Vince Tobin was fired. He had the best "deer in the headlights" look on his face every time the cameras panned to him. But his firing shows up a key problem with firing football coaches in mid-season. An owner is almost bound to pick one of the assistants to finish out the year and on the Cardinals you have the situation where all facets of the game are suffering from either underachievement or abject stink-a-tude. So the Cards chose as their leader the defensive coordinator who put together the masterful game plan that allowed 48 points to the Cowboys. And they gave up 5 yards per carry in that game too. Oh, swell!

Baltimore has now gone 246 minutes without a TD. Tony Banks has reverted to his previous incarnation as a bonehead; Trent Dilfer is not the answer - unless the question is who is simultaneously the slowest, goofiest looking and scatter-armed QB in the NFL? The Ravens held Tennessee to 7 first downs and under 200 yards of offense and held the ball for over 36 minutes. But 4 INTs and 7 fumbles - all of which the Ravens recovered - managed to stop what precious little offensive momentum the Ravens managed to generate.

The Broncos defense must have forgotten to leave a wake-up call. Cory Dillon broke Walter Payton's single game rushing mark and Scott Mitchell played more than half the game and the bungles still won. On a key third and long in the 4th quarter, Mitchell "ran" a naked bootleg which accomplished two things:

1. It gained about 11 yards and a first down.

2. It consumed 3 minutes off the clock and started a Richter Scale 3.1 tremor as Scott went into his slide.

I brought home two tickets from Las Vegas that would have been worth a combined $195 if the Dolphins had won outright on Monday night. I was feeling pretty good as the fourth quarter began, but all of a sudden, the Dolphins defense stopped being aggressive and territorial and it morphed into a "prevent" defense. Why that was a necessary alteration of game strategy was not clear then and is certainly not clear now.

Steelers fullback Jon Witman broke his leg a week ago and the Steelers inserted 265 lb Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala at the position. Last Thursday nite, Chris Berman was interviewing Jerome Bettis about this and at the end of the interview, Berman said that all Chris had to do was be "one big Ma'afala". Good line. And someone else said that Fuamatu-Ma'afala is a shoo-in to lead the league in vowels. Another good line. Problem is that now Chris is hurt and will be out 4-8 weeks with a broken foot.

Finally, for all the tennis fans out there - are there really enough of you to form a softball team? - the Slovak Open is underway in Bratislava, Slovakia. Having breezed through Bratislava, I think the cash crop of the area is rust. There is more of that than about any other visible thing. So, maybe the winner could get a trophy made from the rusted out chassis of a Yugo? They can't pay big money there because in Slovakia, there are no longer any Czechs. (BaDaBing! BaDaBom!)

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