Dungy hopes that NFL teams will take a chance on Burress. He feels that Burress will no longer take anything for granted and will make better decisions.

“I’ve been with Mike (Vick) and I’ve seen how kids flock to him, and I think we’ll see the same thing with Plaxico,” Dungy said.

That was the punchline of today’s Plaxico Burress press conference, wherein the National Urban League promised a “major announcement” and delivered Plaxico saying he was partnering with the National Urban League (cough) and the Brady Center to combat gun violence. I’m glad urban youths now have a strong role model to keep them from putting a gun in their sweatpants, going to a club and accidentally gun violencing themselves in the leg.

Plaxico’s announcement might as well have been labeled “Now That’s What I Call a Disgraced Athlete, Volume 1″, including chart topping hits like “I want to see every child succeed”, “I can make a difference”, and “Magic Johnson is going to mentor me and keep me from making any more bad decisions”. Well, okay, that last one wasn’t a hit (and didn’t really make sense if you listened to the lyrics), but Magic and NBC analyst (and nothing else) Tony Dungy were present to thumbs-up their mentorship. Dungy added, “Lol I ran after his car as he was leaving jail.”

So, will this make Plaxico look more appealing to NFL teams? Would you rather your kid learn not to shoot people from a guy who has never shot anyone, or has shot someone (“Himself” counts as someone) but is famous? We want to hear your opinion, so let us know what you think in our comments section. Or just lean out of your window and shout it at passersby, and I guess eventually I will hear about it.

Pretend you’re a writer. It’s easy, I do it everyday. Writing is your dream. Imagine that you’ve worked on your writing your entire life, and just before you’ve gotten that big break, someone swoops in and snatches it out from under you. That would be painful, right? But hey, there are a lot of writers in the world, so it’s tough to make it. Now imagine that you do the most specific thing in the f**king universe. Imagine that you’re a sculptor who has spent four years sculpting a big ass Larry Bird to put in front of the Hulman Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. You’ve worked tirelessly for nearly half a decade to raise money and get every wispy bristle of that Larry Bird college mustache just right. Chances are you are the only person in Terre Haute sculpting a big Larry Bird to stand outside of the arena.

Only, you aren’t.

You find out somebody is donating all the money you’ll need to reach your dreams, with one stipulation: you can’t be a part of it. The want their own guy to sculpt the statue. And they tell you by E-MAIL. God, could you imagine? You picked the most random dream of all time and somebody STILL one-upped you. How could that feel? Well, ask Vigo County sculptor Bill Wolfe.

“It knocked me for a loop,” Wolfe said Wednesday. “I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It was devastating after all the years working on this.”

C’mon Bill, you live in Vigo County, you should’ve stuck to painting Carpathians. Be sure to read the full article at TribStar.com, especially for the awful, gutwrenching e-mail.

“In closing, I want you to know that I appreciate you meeting with me and discussing this project. I appreciate you letting me borrow your replica statue to help promote the idea of Larry Legend Foundation. I also appreciate the fact that you know this project is long overdue, and at the end of the day ‘money talks,’ and we have now reached our goal of getting a statue for Larry on campus,” the email states.

All it needs is a “see ya, suckerrrrr” at the bottom. Thankfully Wolfe is already an accomplished sculptor with statues all around town, so he’s sure to bounce back. I hear he’s working on a statue of Magic Johnson right now, but can’t get the proper financial aids.

NBA legends Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas are no longer BFFs, apparently. This little tiff became public after news of the release of When The Game Was Ours, a Jackie MacMullan tome about the careers of Johnson and Larry Bird. Johnson alleged that Thomas, whose own brother was HIV-positive, told everyone that he was homosexual after Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive in 1991, but the fun didn’t stop there.

Johnson also tells the Web site that he helped play a role in keeping Thomas off the 1992 U.S. Olympic team.

“Isiah killed his own chances when it came to the Olympics,” Johnson said, according to SI.com. “Nobody on that team wanted to play with him. … Michael didn’t want to play with him. Scottie (Pippen) wanted no part of him. Bird wasn’t pushing for him. Karl Malone didn’t want him. Who was saying, ‘We need this guy?’ Nobody.’” –WaPo.

Whatever. Nobody’s really impressed with either of these guys anymore. Isiah’s coaching hoop at Florida Whatchamacallit now and Magic is making terrible commercials for tax shops when he’s not pretending to analyze basketball for TNT ESPN. But it goes to show that controversy and alleged gay-bashing can still make news. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hit Quentin Tarintino over the head with Elton John.

Unless I’m doing the math wrong (not that such a thing has ever happened before) this spring would mark the 30th anniversary of the Indiana State-Michigan State NCAA title game where Larry Bird and Magic Johnson faced off for the very first time. I don’t know if the timing of their showdown was “obvious” to the M&M people, as Sports Biz sensei Darren Rovell iterates.

I get that Bird and Magic are more identifiable when incarnated as candy colored like their professional uniforms. Most people wouldn’t understand Bird colored in Sycamore Blue or Earvin in Spartan Green. But…Magic Johnson looks like Esai Morales, for Pete’s sake. Is that really the message we want to be sending to children–eat our candy and become a handsome, out-of-work actor because of Hollywood racism? Does that contradict the traditional message of “Be completely insulated to the world until you turn 18 and then find yourself woefully unprepared for life?” Hey, I’m just asking here. By the way, I have some new toys here for that toddler of yours. I don’t know why those red Chinese labels are on there. I think that just means that those toys are “extra special.” Read the rest of this entry »

I had to sit on the phone with a lawyer for four hours going through every objectionable passage in the first draft of this book, Needless to say, when we were finished, there wasn’t much of a book left.

So a lot of crap from the book got deleted due to both legal and creative issues.  The following section, after the jump, is one of them. Hooray, table scraps!

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