Dudes on the far right: "The Wave, yes! I love the Wave. Is Barack doing the Wave? Oh, God I hope Barack did the Wave too. I'm just gonna sneak a peek. Hopefully, he's just now sitting down from having engaged in the Wave also. Is he sittin--damn! He didn't do it. Barack did not do the Wave. Ugh! I'm so stupid. Why did I do the Wave? It's so dumb. Everyone knows how dumb it is. I'm gonna start rooting for the Sox just so Barack doesn't think I'm a TOTAL spazz."

This picture tells you everything you need to know about how you see the world. It’s a Rorschach blotting, really. Is this a positive picture of the President not engaging in the wave – a gimmick widely viewed as dumb. Or is this just further evidence that our president is an emotionless automaton unable to connect to most “common folk?”

Or, is this an infuriating picture in which our president watched D.C.’s Stephen Strasburg fan more Sox than an industrial strength clothes dryer instead of toiling away at figuring out how to get money back into our pockets, tourists back onto the Gulf Coast and American soldiers back into America?

No matter how you view this photo, it seems clear Malia’s close to getting grounded for something.

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H/T Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via the Chicago Trib

Here’s a recap of the weirdest or most overlooked sports stories on the Interweb this week. Plus, as you’ve come to expect, the city of Sydney employs boats full of shark repellent to watch over triathlon … along with a nut named Quint.

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Monday Remember when Apollo “Count of Monte-Fisto” Creed used James Brown in his awesomely-indulgent entrance to the fight against Drago minutes before getting sent to the hospital in “Rocky IV?” Yeah well, here’s Bernard Hopkin’s entrance from Saturday. Boxing
Tuesday You put buttered popcorn in Kenyon Martin’s whip, he’s gonna put his hands on you. Audio! Basktball
Wednesday Take a look at an animated view of your seats from any ballpark. Baseball
Thursday A long overdue Pistol Pete Maravich feature. Basketball
Friday Young boy gets insightful/horrifying glance at what a lifetime of White Sox fandom will do to you. Baseball
Saturday “Tiger Woods, you suck! Go*****it!” It’s like he read our minds. Golf
Sunday Nothing better than watchin’ old stadiums get blown up. Football
Eighth Day You go to the triathlon, triathletes go in the water. Shark’s go in the water – our shark. Triathlon

In 1995, when Chicago’s Frank Thomas was at the height of his powers as a premiere slugger, I stayed late after the game in hopes of catching him (or anyone on the White Sox roster, really) as they shuffled into their sports cars and sport utility vehicles. I didn’t have a watch, but it felt like the few dozens waiting outside the personnel parking lot were there for an hour. Finally, a few began trickling out. They’d sign a few autographs or, at the very least, wave to the group that had been waiting.

Eventually, the Big Hurt lumbered out to his Porsche (or Ferrari or Lamborghini. I can’t be sure. I’m not a car guy. It looked fast and expensive). He didn’t immediately acknowledge the crowd, instead he took out a few supplies from his trunk in order to wax his fast, expensive car. And there he stood, waxing his car, while a few dozen fans called out to him. An autograph, a point, a wave. A smile. Something.

Everyone waited. Certainly he’d come over after he finished with his car maintenance, right? Again, no watch, but it took him 20 minutes if it took him a second. And when he was done, he returned the products to his trunk and without ever looking at anyone who had waited for the best hitter on the planet at that time to say hello, he got into his car and drove off.

If I’d had eggs on me, I’d have unloaded every last one on that man’s car.

In the hour or so I stood there, Frank Thomas went from one of the most likable players in the league to one I’d never ever forgive.

But that’s not a hockey story and the headline of this post promised the greatest hockey story of all-time.

In an interview on NHL commissioner Gary Bettmen’s satellite radio show last week, newly retired, 8-time all-star Brendan Shanahan told a story about growing up a Toronto Maple Leafs fan in the early 80s and getting a chance to meet the team’s captain at the time Rick Vaive.

Shanahan recounted the story again for nj.com:

“When I was 14 years old I was skating in the summertime at a rink in Toronto. Rick Vaive happened to be skating at an adjoining rink and we were actually in dressing rooms that were right next to each other. I went in when he was sort of settled and asked him for an autograph. I didn’t get the best response from [him] at that time.”

Sadly, Shanahan doesn’t elaborate on what not getting the best response from Rick Vaive meant, but it’s causing me to have immediate traumatic flashbacks to shammies and containers of Turtlewax.

In ’83, Shanahan was 14 years old. By 1987, he was an 18-year-old rookie playing with the New Jersey Devils. And it would be the next time he’d run into his former icon.

“It was a quiet, uneventful game. He couldn’t believe the rage I had, not only in attacking him, but it took two (linesmen) to restrain me afterwards and throw me in the penalty box. He said to one of my teammates at the time, Jim Korn, ‘By the way, what’s wrong with that kid and why was he coming after me?’ Jim Korn said, ‘Apparently he asked you for an autograph when he was a little kid and you weren’t that friendly to him.’ ”

I’m not sure where to start with the awesomeness of this story. Perhaps Vaive had a good reason for not giving Shanahan the best impression. Honestly, I have no reason to think Vaive is jerk in everyday life. But it’s easy for me to believe he was a jerk to Shanahan in that one instance 26 years ago. And for that, and for any fan who has ever asked a celebrity for something small like an autograph only to be rejected, this story is as heartwarming as a glass of eggnog.

It’s also kinda great because Shanahan clearly ended up being the better player of the two, enough so that it allowed the capper on this story to happen.

“Three years ago, [Vaive] came up to me at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto and introduced me to his 14-year-old son. I signed the autograph, took a picture and gave him a piggy-back. I didn’t want karma to come back and get me.”

Good for Shanahan, but if Frank Thomas ever asks me for anything, I fully intend to ignore him while buffing out the scratches on my Hyundai.

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Photos courtesy of Flickr

The White Sox signed veteran Omar Vizquel to a 1-year $1.38 million deal on Monday. And now all you White Sox fans are in deep, deep trouble.

Vizquel will be 43 years old at the start of next season. That’s just three years younger than Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. That’s old for a player from whom the team is hoping to get some time at shortstop.

Dude, they didn’t sign him to do wind sprints all day, dude. Yes, I know that, devil’s advocate voice. There’s no need to call me dude twice.

Clearly, Old Man River is there to teach the youngsters to keep their heads down, knees bent, to watch the ball into the glove, step into the throw and release. Vizquel’s got 14 Gold Gloves. He’ll do a fine job. At any rate, he can’t do a much worse job. The South Siders’ 4-5-6 guys made up 62 of the team’s 113 errors last season.

But the Vizquel signing signifies two things. 1) That Alexei Ramirez, Gordon Beckham and a platoon of guys that I’ll confuse with one another until the day I die are the future of the Sox and 2) Vizquel just got paid $1.375 million to be a glorified fielding coach.

Going with Beckham is a no-brainer. Even sticking with the Cuban Missile is understandable for another year. But the terrifying part about this Vizquel deal, if you’re a Sox fan, is that platoon of dudes waiting to take over in April. There’s really no reason to believe you’re going to get more than 80 games from Little O in the field (he hasn’t fielded in more than 84 games in either of the last two seasons and he’s only getting older).  So the primary responsibility will fall to guys like Brent Lillibridge, Mark Teahen and Jayson Nix. The “plan” (quotation marks implies sarcastic tone) is for Teahen (whom they traded for Chris Getz, their best 4-5-6 fielder) to take over at third, while Beckham takes over at 2B.

But Teahen had a .956 fielding percentage at third last season in 107 appearances, that’s just four points better than young Beckham and about 35 points off where the White Sox want their thirdbaseman to be.

Is Vizquel going to fix all those guys? Not unless he has magic in ‘im.

The Sox were on the right track by shuffling off Chris Getz, but for Teahen? That’s not even a stopgap. Couldn’t they have packaged a couple of those messy infielders and sent them off to the Mets or Pirates? Those teams are dumb, surely they would have traded two dimes for a quarter, right?

If there’s a silver lining here it’s Vizquel himself. He made 18 errors his first season in the league (1989!) and had a droopy fielding percentage. And although I’m not into story morals, if there’s one here, it’s that players can go from quite bad to quite good.

In the case of the Sox, they’d better or it’s going to be a long season.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr

Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via AP

That weary, displaced emotion is what I’ve been feeling about our president ever since the baseball All-Star Game. Something ain’t quite right. It’s unsettling. And it’s only getting worse.

I’m beginning to think that he isn’t really all that into sports.

On Monday, the WNBA champion Detroit Shock were the most recent in a long line of teams and athletes to visit the president’s house. During his speech to the team, Obama retold the story of his daughters watching him watching female basketball players on ESPN’s SportsCenter and how it taught his daughters that girls can be champions too.

There are three things wrong with this tale: 1) If Sasha and Malia were watching their father watching television, how can he be sure they weren’t learning a different lesson? Like “presidents can lazily watch sports highlight shows too.” 2) SportsCenter doesn’t cover anything but the Yankees and preseason football. They damn sure aren’t doing 45-second recaps of Shock games. 3) This weak recollection isn’t even new. It’s the same thing he told to the WNCAA Champion Connecticut Huskies.

If you’re going to regurgitate stories (something that almost everyone does), shouldn’t he come up with a better story to regurgitate?

But wait, it gets worse.

The NBA’s Shaquille O’Neal, in town to do some wrasslin‘, figured he was bigger than the Detroit Shock (Physically? Check. Egotistically? Check. Pop Culturally? Check.) so he tried to do a pop-in on the White House a few hours after the Shock left. It didn’t work and he was turned away by security, a site I would sell your first born to have seen. Alas, we can only assume that Obama, not unlike Jerry Seinfeld, like the pop-in.

NINA: (rolling eyes) This person does not believe in telephones, does she?
JERRY: She likes the pop-in. I’ve told her how I hate the pop-in.
(pointing to George) He likes the pop-in, too.
GEORGE: I just popped in now. I’m a big pop-in guy.
JERRY: Yeah.
GEORGE: How ’bout Kramer.
JERRY: HUGE pop-in guy!

- from “Seinfeld” Season 3, episode 21: The Letter

If Obama’s our first “basketball president,” why not let the Diesel in to take a look around the Roosevelt Room or something?

Perhaps I’m being unfair. The guy is busy … the guy is our PRESIDENT, for cryin’ out loud. He can’t love everything and lord knows women’s basketball can be unlovable. So is O’Neal come to think of it. So maybe Monday’s actions were all just a fluke. I mean, he wouldn’t seem so half-hearted when it comes to his teams, the White Sox and Bulls, right?

Ugh. Listen to the end of that link. Sox outfielder DeWaye Wise makes the biggest catch of his career, the biggest catch of the season and one of the biggest catches of all-time and the No. 1 White Sox fan in the country calls him DeWayne Weiss. This is almost as tragic as the Bob Costas interview from two weeks ago in which Obama calls Comiskey Park, the stadium in which his favorite team played for over a century – Cominsky Park.

Cominsky Park? You can’t say that. That’s like David Ortiz wearing a Yankee cap or a Bulls fan acting graciously toward the worst basketball player in the history of the NBA …

Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via AP

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Is that Bill Laimbeer! Is Barack Obama shaking hands with the guy who spent five years elbowing Michael Jordan in the ribcage anytime he went near the basket?! You see? This is what I’m talking about. If Obama was truly a sports fan, more specifically a Chicago sports fan and most specifically a Chicago basketball sports fan, there’s just no way he wouldn’t have punched Bill Laimbeer in the face here. No way. Leader of the free world or not, a die-hard woulda given him five across the eyes. Look at his left hand in this picture. It’s slightly tense, ready to make a fist, like he knows what he should do with it.

Weak sauce, Barry.

Truth is, it’s unimportant to me (and many Americans) if Obama is uninterested in athletics. I need him to care about sports about as much as I need a new hole in the head. It’s the idea that he has (or we have) projected this basketball-playing, Southside-rooting, ESPY White House guest list listing character onto him and he’s played the part instead of being it.

Be the part, Prez or quit playin’.

Here’s a recap of the weirdest or most overlooked sports stories on the Interweb this week. Plus, as you’ve come to expect, definitive proof of what happens when you let futbol-ers have it their way.

Monday This Canadian Football League catch is 10 types of nifty; 20 types if you pretend it happened in the NFL. Football
Tuesday A last-place open water swimmer took so long, they were handing out medals while he finished. Swimming
Wednesday Miami Airport is looking for ways to depress passengers even more. I’ve got it! Install a horse track. Horse Racing
Thursday Former unknown White Sox pitcher discusses reasons for juicing that don’t make him sound like a d-bag. Baseball
Friday THIS is how you volleyball! Volleyball
Saturday It’s not the shark mascot who’s banned from the uppity club, it’s his fancy clothes … and perhaps his flute? Cricket
Sunday The best picture of a) Shaq and b) a panda you’ll ever see … ever. Basketball
Eighth Day These soccer jerseys are just begging for the Hamburglar to bring the ruckus.

Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images

For as few people who talked about Jonathan Sanchez’s near-perfect no-hitter 13 days ago, the crush of baseball fans discussing Mark Buehrle’s perfect game evens things out a bit.

Not only is Buehrle the 18th person to throw a perfect game (17th to do so in the regular season), the sixth to throw both a no-hitter and a perfect game and the first to do it for either Chicago team, but Buehrle’s game also had what may be the greatest catch in baseball history, considering the direct impact it had on the game’s outcome. DeWayne Wise just bought himself a season’s worth of goodwill on the south side of Chicago after pulling Gabe Kapler‘s no-hitter-ruining homer back into the ball park. Sox manager Ozzie Guillen put Wise in as a defensive replacement for just the final inning. I’ll let some other less clever bloggers make the “Wise choice” pun.

I’m above such silliness.

Great catch. I’ll listen to Willie Mays‘ catch in the ’54 World Series as being better but … yeah, that’s about it.

That catch was astounding enough that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that play becomes more famous in retrospect than the perfect game itself. True, Wise’s leap will forever be handcuffed to the context in which its greatness was born but the replay ability of that moment might render it more recognizable; not unlike Mays’ catch being shown outside the context of that World Series.

Now go wipe the shaving cream off your face, ’cause there are some other facts that need to get sorted out after the jump:

• Even though Buehrle has only has one perfect game to his credit, he’s also the only pitcher in history to face the complete game minimum of 27 batters on three separate occasions: Thursday’s game (obviously), his no-hitter two seasons ago (he walked Sammy Sosa and picked him off later in the inning – classic Sosa!) and July 2004, when he threw a two-hitter in which both batters were retired on double plays.
  

• Sandy Koufax is the only other pitcher to toss two complete game no-hitters while facing the minimum 27 batters.
  

• Josh Fields hit a grand slam in the third inning of Buehrle’s no-no, which was only the third no-hitter in which one of those had ever been hit. What makes this noteworthy is that Buehrle’s first no-hitter was one of the other two games. Jermaine Dye hit the salami.
  

• Both of Buehrle’s no-hitters lasted exactly 123 minutes. Of that 2:03, he was only on the mound for 32 of those minutes.
  

• The oddest stat of all: The ump behind home plate of this game was the same ump behind home plate to call Buehrle’s first no-hitter. Both the ump, Eric Cooper, and Buehrle wear No. 56.
  
  

This last bit begs the question, if you’re Eric Cooper and it’s the seventh inning of Buehrle’s second no-hitter on your watch, do you subconsciously expand the strike zone because you’re only human and can’t help but tingle at the idea of being a part of a perfect game? Or do you shrink the strike zone the same way a scrupulous coach/father avoids playing favoritism with his kid – by being a bit harder on him than all the others?

Or is it possible that umps can remain totally unfazed for the duration of the game?