Happy October 19th! Season 4 of NBC’s woefully-undersupported-by-anyone-without-a-Tumblr ‘Community’ begins tonight!

To celebrate, this week’s Sports On TV column looks back at the 20 greatest sports moments from the show’s first three seasons. It’s a confusing mass of spaceships and ‘Glee’ slams and paintball epics, and it’s absolutely worth revisiting and celebrating.

Here’s the best way to enjoy tonight’s premiere: read this column. Click the like button. Share it on Reddit or Facebook or Tumblr (especially Tumblr). Drop a comment in the comments section about your favorite episodes, moments, quotes and character pairings. Come up with a fun name for them (suggestion: StarPelt). Flip through the 20 greatest sports moments dozens of times over the next few hours. Then, totally forget that ‘Community’ actually comes on television and decide to watch it on Hulu tomorrow morning. Because guess what? That’s the only way ‘Community’ has ever worked.

Please enjoy ‘Community’s’ 20 Greatest, Streets Ahead Sports Moments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people, when news broke that the New Orleans Hornets were changing their name to the Pelicans, I was all like, “Pelicans? That’s a stupid mascot,” as I hid my Magic gear from plain sight. But thankfully I follow some diehard New Orleansonians on the Tweeters, including our good friend Chris Trew, and I now believe that with the bird’s actual legacy to the city combined with how amazingly nasty they are in nature, the Pelican is a phenomenal choice for a mascot.

However, some people are still making snap judgments based on ignorance, chief among them former Hornets guard, all-around good person and graduate of the LeBron James Institute of Get Me the F*ck Out of Here, Chris Paul.

Pelicans??? #ImNotRollin

— Chris Paul (@CP3) January 24, 2013

Don’t bother going to check the responses to that Tweet, because I can sum them all up for you with this sentence: “Gooooooooooooooooooo f*ck yourself.”

Local news anchor Scott “Not That Governor Dick” Walker perhaps shared the loudest sentiment with the athlete who famously forced his way out of New Orleans by reminding him that nobody in that delightful party town really cares what Paul thinks. And then Walker was reminded that Twitter is an awful place full of awful people and it really needs an IQ requirement.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, this happened:

The Denver Nuggets prevailed over the OKC Thunder in a hard-fought, overtime thriller. The biggest beef of the game, however, was between Russell Westbrook and Nuggets mascot Rocky. Russ trolled the fans in Denver by goaltending two of his halfcourt attempts. Per the Denver Post: “Fans now have a villain,’ Ty Lawson said.

I’m not sure whose side I’m on. Regular readers know that I’m a sports mascot enthusiast, so I usually take their side, and my first reaction to Goaltending A Lion-Gate was the headline. After reading about it, the half-court shots were an attempt to win Q’Doba queso for the arena … if Rocky makes any of those shots, everyone gets a coupon for a bowl of cheese.

So do I side with the anthropomorphic lion because goaltending is an assy move, or do I side with Westbrook for preventing a few thousand people from downing a styrofoam bowl of hot cheese they wouldn’t have wanted or eaten unless it was free?

You make the call. Video is below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: Part 2 is now up. Check it out!

Back in September, we shared A Golden Treasury Of Cheesy Late-80s/Early-90s WWF Promo Photos, a collection of the best photos from pro wrestler 8x10s. If you missed that … yeah, you should click the link.

Anyway, I was never a WWF kid when I was growing up. I was born in southern Virginia and was raised on the National Wrestling Alliance — if you’re a WWF lifer, that means we had Ric Flair when you had Hulk Hogan — and eventually what the NWA became, World Championship Wrestling. You may remember WCW from its sudden, crazy popularity in the late 1990s when Hulk Hogan became a bad guy, Sting became The Crow and WWF put as many curse words and dick jokes on television as they could to combat it. Spoiler: the dick jokes won.

That said, WCW is still my favorite thing, and if I’m going to share the worst of WWF’s promo photos, I might as well dip into the endless well of embarrassment that is the WCW library. What follows is only part one of a series, because holy shit you will not believe some of these pictures.

Enjoy, and show this to everyone you’ve ever known.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever wanted to see a bear try to slam dunk while being attacked by a gang of sharks, now’s your chance.

Conan O’Brien put together a dunk contest of mascots that should never dunk, and it’s … almost majestic. The aforementioned bear takes on a giant thing of non-dairy creamer, the Olive Garden never-ending pasta bowl, a CD discount bin, and more. I won’t spoil it for you, but one of them actually connects on a dunk. It’s my new favorite thing, and I wish it’d gone on for 90 minutes.

Video is below.

Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time, sports mascots will “fight.” It’s usually in the form of the Phillie Phanatic taking big, Curly-from-The-Three-Stooges wind-ups and knocking out a Mr. Met lookalike or whoever, and it’s all in good fun. When one of the mascots shows up to the comedy fight trying to dropkick the other, it becomes a for-real living Muppet shootfight.

Yet that’s precisely what rabid prep basketball fans in Kentucky received on Tuesday night, when Louisville’s crosstown rivalry between Louisville (Kent.) Male High and Louisville (Kent.) DuPont Manual High devolved into a massive brouhaha between the two teams’ mascots. (via Prep Rally)

As you can see from the video after the jump (forgive the vertical video syndrome and the guy getting so into the fight that he just films the armpits of the people around him), the ram mascot figures out the combination to the bulldog’s throwdown vault, and the two pretty much hockey fight. You can only hurt the other guy so much when you’re haymakering a big foam head, but they’re really going at it.

Check it out:

Read the rest of this entry »