sport

It's a holiday weekend in America and, this week, the most important issue hasn't been the national debt or the dearth of novel political thought.

It's the entry of Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks into the national consciousness.

Just this morning, ESPN announced that it had fired an online headline writer for offering this on Lin's first defeat as a starter: "Chink in the Armor."

And now, as I am torn between my affection for a former Golden State Warrior (most do better when they leave) and my fondness for the Cubans … Read more

Those who use numbers to define life frighten me. Especially when they're right.

How, then, might Ed Weiland be feeling this week when his numerical analysis-- one that no one believed-- came true over the last two weeks? Yes, this is man who had a feeling--no, a certainty-- that Linsanity was going to happen.

Should you have been an unusually devoted fan of the Charlotte Bobcats lately, you might not have noticed that the NBA has gone all Lin, all the time.

Jeremy Lin, the Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, has brought things to the New York Knicks that were in short … Read more

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She's billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from "Hockey Night in Canada" and you can't beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm Robotis.

The challenges facing Chris Iverach-Brereton and colleagues on the University of Manitoba team include getting the robot to hit the puck from a sideways orientation and improving her skating skills. She's not ready to join the Winnipeg Jets just yet.

"We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling," Iverach-Brereton told Postmedia News. "By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide." … Read more

Spring training has barely begun, but Baseball Boyfriend already has people thinking about which player they would most like to "date" this season.

Baseball Boyfriend is a $2.99 mini-game add-on to CBS Sports' fantasy baseball offerings. (Disclosure: CNET is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) Users choose a single draftee and collect points based on the player's performance. You can keep or dump a draftee, depending on his stats and your level of emotional attachment.

The app offers three looks: clean, original, and pirate. The original look could have been cobbled from a love-struck … Read more

Surfers, snowboaders, skaters, and action sports enthusiasts everywhere, there's finally a smartphone just for you.

Sony has partnered up with action sportswear company Billabong to release a special edition model of the Xperia Active. The Billabong Edition features a special back cover and comes preloaded with exclusive screensavers, videos, and a Billabong Live app, which offers live streaming, as well as photos and news, of the company's surf contests. In addition, you get a copy of the Billabong Surf Trip game.

Like the regular Xperia Active, the Billabong Edition has a dust-proof and water-resistant design with a 3-inch, … Read more

When saints become sinners we all breathe more easily, because we all realize the distance between them and us is not so great.

Many will feel their lungs expand, therefore, on hearing that the New England Patriots' quarterback and all-around perfect human being watched last year's Super Bowl illegally on his laptop.

You might think I exaggerate, but no. The Associated Press heard him make the admission quite casually in a Super Bowl news conference.

Here are his reported words: "Last year I was rehabbing my foot in Costa Rica, watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Super Bowl takes place in just over 72 hours, and Brian Grey and his lieutenants are trying to plan what is by far their most important day of the year.

Grey is the CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the largest sports Web sites in the U.S., and a place nearly 26 million people visited in January for the latest insights into their favorite teams.

Unlike many sports publications, Bleacher Report doesn't concentrate on breaking news with a team of paid writers. Instead, it relies on sports enthusiasts around the country and the world who are … Read more

Just a few days short of Super Bowl Sunday, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced today it had seized 307 Web sites that either live-streamed sports or sold fake NFL paraphernalia.

The federal agents also arrested a Michigan man on criminal copyright infringement charges who allegedly operated nine of the streaming sites.

"While most people are focusing on whether the Patriots or Giants will win on Sunday, we at ICE have our sights on a different type of victory: defeating the international counterfeiting rings that illegally profit off of this event, the NFL, its players and sports … Read more

"I have the cancer of a 95-year-old Jewish man."

That's how TV writer Jason Elia described his current physical condition to ESPN 97.5 radio in Houston.

It seems to be a condition that became a deal-breaker for his girlfriend, who, he says, left him because she didn't want to, well, deal with his bladder cancer-- even though he has an 87 per cent chance of survival.

He says that she was so compassion-free that she still wanted him to give her the Super Bowl tickets he had bought for them both. Well, he'd only … Read more