Pre-show notes

- Thank you for bearing with the semi-lateness of this week’s reports. I managed to attend SummerSlam live, so the report gets that cool live review feature some of you enjoy. The bad part about that is that SummerSlam is half a country and two time zones away from me, so I spent the entirety of Monday on a variety of airplanes. This report’s pretty long, though, so enjoy that, and I’ll have a thorough Raw report ready for you on Wednesday.

- Your comments, likes, tweets, Touts and whatever are appreciated. This column sorta lives and dies by your participation in it, so anything you can do to pitch in and spread the word is appreciated. Shout out to my Reddit homeboys, who I’d talk to all the time if I wasn’t 200 years old and could figure out Reddit. Somebody Reddit for me.

- Follow us on Twitter @withleather, follow me personally @MrBrandonStroud and like us on Facebook.

- If you read the report in its infancy earlier today, all the pages have been uploaded and the full thing is a thing. Enjoy!

So at long last, please enjoy The Best And Worst Of WWE SummerSlam 2012, sponsored by THQ. No, seriously.

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The immediate future, I guess.

If you wanted to feel really f**king super old today, this year’s college freshmen were born in 1994. This is a drag, especially for freshman-level college professors who accidentally say “Pulp Fiction” in class and get stared at until they mention it’s what Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam were parodying in Space Jam. Then you have to explain what Elmer Fudd, Space Jam, movies, parodies and references are. (Tip: they’re the thing from Family Guy.)

The Beloit College Mindset List helps combat that by putting out a yearly list for college professors, reminding them via nonscientific study that kids born in 1994 “see the world in a different way”. If you’re wondering what this has to do with sports, one of the notes mentioned is that kids grew up in the 1990s having no idea that L.A. had a football team (much less two of them) or that Cal Ripken wasn’t just given the consecutive games record by default.

From CF News 13:

Remember when suitcases had to be carried instead of rolled? Or when an airline ticket was a booklet of pages separated by carbon paper? Maybe you remember when Lou Gehrig held the Major League record for consecutive baseball games played.

This year’s college freshmen don’t.

They never lived in a world where Kurt Cobain was alive or an NFL team played its home games in Los Angeles. The Class of 2016 has no need for radios, watches television everywhere except on actual TV sets, and is addicted to “electronic narcotics.”

The article goes on to say kids think ‘The Twilight Zone’ is about vampires and quickly includes a quote from an 18-year old saying “no we don’t”, so remember that this is intended to remind teachers how ignorant their kids are gonna be and is in no way accurate. I mean, hell, I know Cleveland had an NHL team even if they merged with the North Stars two years before I was born and like 27 years before I moved to Ohio.

For anyone reading this who sincerely doesn’t remember the Los Angeles Rams, watch this video. Never forget.

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As has been evidenced by his attendance at practically every Los Angeles Lakers game, soccer superstar David Beckham has definitely made himself a home here in the good, ol’ U.S. of A. Obviously it helped that he finally led the L.A. Galaxy to a MLS Cup victory in 2011, after signing with the team in 2007, but once he signed a new two-year deal and talks of his eventual ownership of the team surfaced, it was a certainty.

But apparently Becks and his wife Sporty Scary Dopey Grumpy Hefty Posh Victoria have been sold on L.A. for a few years and have been quietly waiting for the right time to sell their massive British home. That time is now, the price tag is $28 million and you don’t even have to guess who wants to buy it, because of course it’s Kim Kardashian.

Kim is said to be planning to snap up the property – which comes complete with helipad, petting zoo…

Must… fight… urge…

… swimming pools and a recording studio – to use as a European base for her family including sisters Khloe and Kourtney and mother Kris Jenner. (Via the Winnipeg Free Press)

Obviously, my first thought was: “No way that this jaded fame whore family can honestly be dumb enough to throw down $28 million on an estate in a country full of people who might not give two soggy crumpets about them.” But don’t worry, they have a plan. They’re going to rent out rooms in the estate to their wealthy fans. I don’t even have a joke for that.

As for the Beckhams, why did it take so long for them to list their mansion?

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In the best “whoops, I picked the wrong hotel” story since the Milwaukee Brewers ended up in cohabitation with a Furries convention, 31-year-old Luis Rosales tried to rob a Koreatown Los Angeles hotel and got choked the f**k out by two guys who stepped off an elevator while it was going down and just so happened to be Jiu-Jitsue No-Gi Championship competitors. Maybe if they’d been wearing gis he would’ve seen it coming.

The play-by-play, from our friends at Cage Potato:

Brent Alvarez, 33, who owns Twisted Web MMA, a 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu affiliate in Eugene, Oregon and Billy Denney, 28, who is one of his students, subdued the struggling assailant and Alvarez used a body lock and rear naked choke to hold the man until police arrived. Apparently he thought a Twister would be too flashy.

Throughout the incident, the pair tried to reassure the thief, who was begging them to let him go so he could see his young daughter who he claimed was the motivating factor in the robbery, that he had simply made a bad decision that will do his family more harm than good.

“He wasn’t trying to punch us; he just seemed like someone who had run out of options,” Alvarez said Friday evening. “I think back now and wonder what the hell was I doing? I should have hit him and knocked him out.”

These guys rule. Cage Potato has video of the entire incident, so if you want to see the unedited version of a robber going from gun-waggling to “I’ve made a terrible mistake” in one choke, head over and check it out. I don’t compete in mixed-martial arts (gi or no gi) nor am I a 10th-anything affiliate, but I did recently spend a week in a Koreatown-area hotel, so the better parts of me say I would’ve tried something similar even if it’d ended up looking like this …

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Two men enter! One man leaves! With a giant hole above his eyeball, I should add. While a random Mexican streetfight is hardly sports news, I can at least hide behind my flimsiest of claims – at least it’s competitive. But when said story involves graphic detail that is so delightfully stomach-turning, I just have to make an exception.

Last Friday, 29-year old illegal immigrant Luis Miguel Aguilar attended a friend’s house party near Buena Park in Los Angeles, and he got into a bit of a skirmish with a 41-year old guest. As the two began fighting in the street, Aguilar bit the other man above the eye and ripped his entire eyebrow and surrounding flesh from his face. Then he chewed it and spit it back at the man. Your move, Mike Tyson.

The man actually tried to save the chewed up piece of flesh, Luong said, but it was so torn up that doctors were unable to reattach it. The corporal described it as a chunk containing the victim’s right eyebrow “about the size of an egg.”

“He’s got to get reconstructive surgery,” Luong said of the victim.

(Via)

Aguilar claimed that he bit the other man’s eyebrow off in self defense, which I completely believe because every time that I’m in one of my illegal underground street fights and a guy starts punching me, my krav maga training tells me to sink my teeth directly into orbital flesh. Or curl up in the fetal position and piss myself. One or the other, I get them confused a lot.

Remember when Donald Trump decided that being born in Hawaii didn’t make you a U.S. citizen and spent months trying to get Barack Obama to show everybody his birth certificate? Remember how stupid that made everybody feel about everything? Obama finally shows everybody a birth certificate, but it isn’t authentic enough. So it gets authenticated, but it isn’t printed on nice enough paper, and then the paper is nice enough but it was bought at an Office Max outside of Washington D.C. and that is unpatriotic, and it just keeps going and going because nobody really cares where Obama was born, they just don’t like him and have to have a sh*t-talking point.

Yeah, that’s exactly what basketball needed.

“He wasn’t born and raised in L.A,” [Milwaukee Bucks guard Brandon] Jennings told ESPN the Magazine’s Chris Palmer regarding [Kobe] Bryant, who attended Lower Merion near Philadelphia. “You gotta be from L.A. for Drew. Show me a birth certificate.”

Brandon Jennings hates Kobe Bryant. Nobody is really sure why, or if he’s just kidding or what. If Kobe Bryant agrees to play in the Drew League-Goodman League rematch, thousands of people from L.A. will show up to see him, and everyone from Commissioner Oris “Dino” Smiley all the way down to the Chinese kid who is secretly Kobe’s nephew will love it. Everyone except Jennings, of course, who is the type of guy to post passive-aggressive pictures of himself wearing novelty t-shirts (like the one pictured right) on the Internet. And yeah, Kobe is from Philadelphia, but he’s been synonymous with Los Angeles since 1996. He’s 33 years old and has spent the last 16 in L.A. How long do you have to live somewhere and how much do you have to contribute before you’re “from” there?

And while you’re contemplating whether or not letting a resident of nearly two decades in compromises the integrity of a glorified rec league, consider what Jennings used to say when someone brought up Kobe.

“The [Lakers] got the best player in the game right now, Kobe Bryant, hands down,” Jennings said. “The guys has five rings and won two of them without Shaq. The man is the best player in the league.”

I think the most important question is this: how can we use this to call the Miami Heat the Tea Party?

[h/t Los Angeles Times]