Rick Telander: You might think a billion-dollar corporation propelled by skilled performers who bring in mountains of money for the enterprise would take care of those same performers when they had given their all for the company. But if you were talking about the NFL, you'd be wrong.
Rick Telander: This is a bulletin for all those people who never have seen ''Bull Durham'' or ''Major League.'' To wit: Major-league ballplayers are adolescent boys.
Rick Telander: The big white bus with ''COACH USA'' sat in front of Halas Hall on Sunday afternoon, and I kept waiting for Cedric Benson to get on. That was silly. The bus was for rookies leaving Lake Forest after the just-completed minicamp, taking them to O'Hare, some never to return.
Rick Telander: It's seldom we see a major-league star look so abruptly lost as Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano. His shockingly bad play in the field in St. Louis against the Cardinals on Friday night was something to behold. I remember so well then-Cubs president John McDonough saying upon Soriano's arrival at Wrigley in 2006 that here was Chicago's first ''six-tool player.''
Rick Telander: We could have had a Lee Elia moment here, folks.
Rick Telander: Seemingly lost in the haze of the endless NBA playoffs was Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard's little weed tale. Last Friday, just a few hours before the Mavs' critical Game 3 against the New Orleans Hornets, Howard said on a radio show that he likes marijuana and smokes it during the offseason.
Ienjoyed my time with Tony Mandarich. It was the spring of 1989, just a short time before the NFL draft, and the superstar Michigan State offensive tackle was getting ready to go higher in the draft than anybody wearing No. 79 ever should go.
Rick Telander: This is out of control. The lava-hot, first-place Cubs should stop the regular season and start playing one of those Sox teams, Red or White, doesn't matter ... in the World Series. Oops, did I say those terrifying words? Did I pull a Ronny Cedeno?
Rick Telander: Ryan ''The Riot'' Theriot could hardly have a better last name to split. Things are getting nutty at standing-room-only Wrigley Field, and the good-time, riotous atmosphere is propelled at least in part by the Cubs' feisty shortstop who just won't quit.
Forget what's fair or unfair, why we have contracts (to establish order amid chaos) or why an aging Brian Urlacher might want to renegotiate his own multimillion-dollar contract with the Bears when he has four years left on it.
NEW YORK -- The new stadium sits across the street from the old one like a prom queen next to her mother.
Rick Telander: Trusty ol' Dusty leaned forward, elbows on the batting cage, shades down, toothpick shifting like a metronome, watching his red-capped/black-billed team take its whacks. An hour later the former Cubs manager would jog out of the Cincinnati Reds dugout with the lineup card for the evening's contest and take his whacks, too.
Rick Telander: It was nice that Major League Baseball players and owners agreed Friday to a drug-testing plan that includes giving amnesty to all the players implicated as dopers in the Mitchell Report. Among other things, the deal threw out the 15-day suspensions of Jose Guillen and Jay Gibbons. ''It is time for the game to move forward,'' commissioner Bud Selig explained.
