ESPN The Magazine has released a batch of photos from the 2011 installment of their annual “The Body Issue”, and while full-on nudity isn’t something we can really share with you at With Leather, we can’t see a picture of Blake Griffin dunking with his pants down and not share it with you. It gives the whole “dunking over a car” thing an extra degree of difficulty.

This year’s issue isn’t as conservative as 2009, when most of the athletes were wearing shorts, but it remains tasteful and doesn’t tread near the whole “seeing Patrick Willis’ pubic hair” thing from last year. There are a lot (a lot) of gorgeous women from nearly every corner of the sports world featured, including-but-not-limited-to Hope Solo, LPGA rookie Belen Mozo, foxy roller derby star Suzy Hotrod, the WNBA’s statuesque Sylvia Fowles and the lady pulling a LeBron James in the image up top, Olympic silver medal gymnast Alicia Sacramone. I’m really glad that isn’t LeBron James.

Of course, the following gallery is only a sampling, and you should head on over to ESPN The Magazine The Website to see more, including the pictures I’m not authorized to show you (or, “Wow, time to Wikipedia the sh*t out of Stephanie Gilmore”). Also, consider buying the magazine itself, if that’s your bag. Now please click through and laugh at that weird picture of Jon “Bones” Jones peeing in his swimming pool.

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It’s official: Mexico is officially too violent for women’s golf. The LPGA Tour recently postponed the Tres Marias Championship, based in Morelia, Mexico, due to what is being called drug violence in the area. I never would have expected this to happen to a sport that wasn’t subsidized by the NBA.

While the tournament contract goes through ’12, an LPGA official said they would need to see significant improvement before returning.

The event was slated for April 21-24. There’s now a three-week gap in April between the Kraft Nabisco and the Avnet LPGA Classic in Mobile, Ala.

–GolfWeek, via Twackle.

That’s sound policy for a nation that has murdered three of its mayors in the last month.

The LPGA has struggled over the last few years to maintain eyeballs and sponsorships, and that league has been hurt by the retirements of stars Annika Sorrenstam and Lorena Ochoa. Their No. 1-ranked player is Korean, and the ladies even have one tour stop without prize money. So basically nobody’s getting paid and nobody is recognizable? Sounds like a perfect fit with Mexico to me.

It’s the age-old question that men have wondered about women forever. Sure, they’re not physically capable of peeing standing up or opening a jar of mayonnaise (like you need the extra calories, sweetie), but can a well-endowed lady overcome her two biggest obstacles and routinely hit great golf shots?

In the mid-nineties, outspoken golf analyst, Ben Wright was quoted as saying, “Women are handicapped by having boobs. It’s not easy for them to keep their left arm straight, and that’s one of the tenets of the game. Their boobs get in the way.” That… and a number of other inflammatory statements… ultimately got the bombastic broadcaster fired, but the issue of “breasts and the golf swing” has never gone away, and… it’s important to note… there are some who feel breasts can actually give a woman an advantage.

–Golf Girl’s Diary

It’s almost unfortunate that none of this applies to the trannies, who now have been given the red light to play on the LPGA after that league removed a clause from its rules requiring players to be “female at birth.” Those ladies get to play with a man’s hands, a man’s legs and other genetic material that we won’t address specifically. Oh, but they’re totally equal. Whatever.

Women’s golf “star” Natalie Gulbis blew off a practice round for the US Women’s Open to hang out with her old boyfriend, Big Ben. And what Gulbis blew after that is anyone’s guess.

Gulbis, the tour’s calendar girl, went to Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier Tuesday and played some golf with Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, her former boyfriend.

Roethlisberger, who has not been cleared by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to rejoin his teammates for voluntary offseason workouts, has said he has maintained a friendly relationship with Gulbis, a one-time winner on the LPGA Tour. –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Keep in mind that Gulbis is the same brainiac that got the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial confused, so there’s no telling what her special day with The Ben entailed. I’m sorry, I’m not big on the name-calling or the sarcasm, but I’m blown away that she couldn’t name a monument that any 9-year-old in this country would recognize. Of course, that all works in Ben’s favor. Ben probably built a fort out of couch cushions and told her it was his summer house. And it worked, too, because girls like to travel.

Sad news out of Nevada today. Pro golfer Erica Blasberg was found dead in her home Sunday afternoon.

Henderson police spokesman Keith Paul said Monday that authorities were investigating the 25-year-old American’s death. It was not immediately clear whether foul play was involved.

Paul said police responded to a 911 call and were dispatched to Blasberg’s suburban three-bedroom house around 3 p.m. on Sunday. Paul declined to say who made the call, saying it was part of the investigation. –Y! News, as reported by GolfWeek.

We love the LPGA Tour (the truck-driving-lesbian image of that promotion has died out, thankfully), and this is just another horrible thing that they’ll have to deal with. There’s no correlation here between Yeardley Love or Dylan Steigers, but I would prefer that we could go a couple weeks without another person in sport suffering a tragic death. Unless it’s Joe Buck. Pretty sure I could handle that one. via Deadspin.

Lorena Ochoa is walking away from golf, and normally we wouldn’t care about this sort of thing. Usually we just post pictures of the hotties and let those athletes with any sort of resume continue to flail in obscurity. That’s how we roll. But Ochoa’s abrupt departure is coming as a big shock to the LPGA, and it’s one that, considering the state of their game, they’re not exactly sustained to withstand.

Ochoa’s decision to step down now, at 28, makes her the second LPGA star, after Annika Sorenstam, to walk away from the game in less than two years. Couple that with a steep decline in sponsorship, plunging TV ratings and a surviving tour roster with few well-known personalities and commissioner Michael Whan finds himself battling to keep the LPGA relevant six months after taking the job. –GOLF.com, via T&R.

Ochoa’s departure leaves that league without a legitimate star, or at least one that can consistently find the leaderboard (sorry, Michelle Wie, but you still suck). This could mean the end of lady golfers running around in those fun little outfits, which would leave us with nothing to oogle other than women’s tennis, beach volleyball, lingerie models and Olympians. Way to ruin it for the rest of us, Lorena.