During this year’s Summer Olympics, NBC’s best play-by-play analyst was Retta, who plays Donna on ‘Parks And Recreation’. Her tweets about chocolate tumblers and the Olympics trying to break a bitch were amazing, and as sports bloggers it’s our duty to shine the spotlight on every legitimately hilarious person who touches sports.

Not only is Retta’s show one of the best on television right now, it’s also one of the most sports friendly. That makes it a perfect fit for Sports On TV, our column dedicated to the best sports moments of shows about something other than sports. This is the first still-on-the-air show we’ve attempted to cover, so if you’re reading this a year from now and are all, “HEY, WHERE’S THE EPISODE WHERE MCKAYLA MARONEY SHOWS UP AND ANDY WINS THE LONG JUMP” or whatever, give us a break, we aren’t time travelers.

With greatest possible love to Retta, Michael Shur, Greg Daniels and the rest of the talented people making my favorite 30 minutes of any given week, here are our 20 favorite sports moments from ‘Parks And Recreation’. I don’t know what this is, but I want you to read all of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Funny Or Die has done a lot of things to warm my heart — pissing off Tom Brady, making Kris Humphries call himself a douchebag and threatening to kill Blake Griffin with a miniature puppet version of himself — but none have made me quite as happy as watching 1996 Olympic gold medalist and pro wrestler Kurt Angle trying to get back into the 2012 games.

The best part is that it’s based on real events … the 43-year old Angle tried his best to make the 2012 team, but came up short due to hamstring and knee injuries. Actually, I take that back. The BEST part is watching him Angle Slam a badminton player through a totally unexplained freestanding table and/or bashing a fencer in the face with a steel chair. God knows I would’ve been one of those random wrestling fans who showed up with signs to watch Kurt Angle play table tennis if I could’ve been.

Video is below. It’s more Funny than Die, but there’s a lot of dying going on anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cheers to Boston.com and Getty Images for putting together this remarkable gallery of the women's fencing competition in Beijing.  Rule of thumb: huge-ass pictures make even the boring Olympic sports look dramatic and cool.

Some of the better photos are thumbnailed below, and just to make things interesting I've included a couple Photoshops from Something Awful's compilation on how to spice up the Olympics.  See if you can spot the fakes.  Hint: if you guessed the one where the fencers are wearing stilts on a high-wire during a lightning storm with a jumbo jet closing in on them… I'm sorry, that's incorrect.  That's an actual photo of the event.  At least that's what the Chinese government told me.

Height-challenged Scientologist Tom Cruise bolsters his flagging movie career and creepy Stockholm syndrome marriage by befriending other famous rich people, then participating in the kinds of activities that are usually reserved for the eccentric billionaire villain in Bond movies.  Example: Cruise hangs with pals Will Smith and David Beckham while fencing.

Smith said, “Tom has a room for training. We don't get enough time to hang out, just us three guys, so this is his way of getting together and bonding. David and I go to his home and just do fencing. It's a lot of fun."

"We wanted an activity that was strenuous, but we're getting older – we have to think about slowing down. We've got to watch our joints," he added.

The fencing training room is easy find.  Turn left after you come into the foyer, enter the study, pull the candlestick hanging on the wall to reveal the hidden staircase, go straight past Katie's cell and the sacrificial altar, and turn right at the vat of sulfuric acid filled with the bones of inquisitive reporters.  If you get to the Doomsday Device, you've gone too far.

[The Sports Point]