Obligatory Sports Babe

After watching Ana Ivanovic have to save two match points against unheralded Lucie Hradecka to progress out of the first round of Wimbledon yesterday, I figured I’d better get the obligatory Obligatory Ana Ivanovic picture out of the way before she’s bounced from the tournament. So… here we have it.

 Mocking The Draft

Shame on me for needing Deadspin to point out this fantastic post from the Vancouver Province’s awesome Orland Kurtenblog, who’ve broken down all the cliche phrases you can expect to hear during Friday’s NHL draft. So, for example, if you hear the word “monster”, that’s “any kid who Pierre McGuire has seen make a good play.”

The String Theory

“When Michael T. Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling,” begins the late David Foster Wallace in a fascinating 1996 essay for Esquire, which was pointed out this week by the New York Times’ Straight Sets tennis blog. “His face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him -- he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. “ (Also recommended: Wallace's 2006 Times piece Federer as Religious Experience)

Performance Enhancers Nothing New

“In 1961, during his home run race with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle developed a sudden abscess that kept him on the bench,” says Zev Chafets, author of an upcoming book about the Hall of Fame, according to a post at Fanhouse that gives us a few reminders of how ballplayers have always cheated. “It came from an infected needle used by Max Jacobson, a quack who injected Mantle with a home-brew containing steroids and speed.”

Quickly

The BBC gives us a brief history of grunting in tennis.

A teammate of Brandon Jennings, who faced Ricky Rubio last season in Europe, scouts the two supremely-talented but seldom-seen young, draft-eligible point guards for True Hoop.

The Globe and Mail’s Roy MacGregor lament’s Mario Lemieux’s loss of privacy after photos of the victory party at his ridiculously awesome mansion showed up on the web last week. Oh, did they?

The TV audience numbers for last weekend’s Much Music Video Awards was about a quarter of the size of what was being shown on the CBC: 15,798th repeat of Happy Gilmore.

Now This Is How You Auto-Tune

In case you missed it yesterday, or saw a link and didn’t bother to give it a watch, this Kissing Suzy Kolber-made auto-tune mashup seriously is really well done.