The Houston Chronicle reports:

One-time NBA star Dikembe Mutombo has made a worldwide name for himself sponsoring humanitarian projects and noble causes in his native Africa, so it was only natural that two State Department officials would meet with him in November 2010 as part of his effort to bring more attention to the bloody trade in conflict minerals that has bedeviled his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Less than two weeks later, according to a U.N. report, Mutombo was in New York on a more personal cause — trying to interest a Houston oil executive in a $10 million deal to buy 1,045 pounds of gold from the mines of eastern Congo, the heart of the conflict mineral trade.

If Mutombo had reservations about the apparent contradiction between word and deed, he did not show it. He eagerly explained how he and his family had 4 tons of Congolese gold just waiting for a buyer.

Because of an internal ban on mining and exports, imposed to try to stop the main revenue source for the mafia-like militias that controlled them, the gold could not be taken to market in usual ways. What Mutombo needed was somebody with money, connections and the ability to put a deal together.

Enter Kase Lawal. As chairman of CAMAC, a Houston energy company, Lawal knew Mutombo from the latter’s final days with the Houston Rockets — and he knew how to do business in Africa. Lawal moved to Houston from Nigeria as a young man and built a company that prospered in large measure because of his operations there and in neighboring countries.

Better yet, he had millions of dollars at his disposal, a corporate jet big enough to move extra cargo and an old family friend, Carlos St. Mary, with experience trading Third World minerals.

St. Mary said the deal was described as lawful in Kenya, where it would take place. He started work immediately, hoping the transaction would be done before Christmas. The gold was “dirty,” still in nugget and dust form, but that hardly mattered. St. Mary had expectations of his biggest payday ever with his share of the profits.

The rest here.

The U.S. international-squad star scores three goals in Fulham’s 4-0 shutout of Charlton in the FA cup’s third round. Next up, Everton, featuring fellow U.S. player Landon Donovan.

Newlywed Manchester City fan Karen Bell put new meaning to “something blue” as she created her wedding dress out of her groom Simon’s Manchester City jerseys. The bride told the Manchester Evening news that their team had a game that day and they were thinking of showing up to their wedding wearing City jerseys when the thought occurred to her to create her wedding dress out of the team jerseys. After their wedding, the couple went straight to the game.

Perhaps you were among the 800 crazy folks in south Jersey this weekend competing to be the “World’s Toughest Mudder“:

Take a second and think back to how you spent Saturday night into Sunday morning. Warm and toasty in your feet pajamas after sipping late-night cocoa with mini-marshmallows from your “World’s Best Mom” (or Dad) mug? Nuzzled, while you slept, by a down comforter, your head resting on a pillow softer than a Michael Buble ballad?

Well, here’s how hundreds of weekend warriors from all over the country spent it: sopping wet and shivering uncontrollably in a medical tent at Raceway Park in Englishtown, wrapped in a sheet of mylar that couldn’t keep a Yankee Stadium hot dog warm, covered in mud and blood, their teeth chattering “What the hell was I thinking?” in Morse Code.

In the World’s Toughest Mudder competitions — the rage in extreme fitness competitions — athletes navigate an obstacle course laid out over 10 miles and designed to turn tough guys (and women) into shattered egos left hugging their cross-training sneakers in the fetal position, waiting for an ambulance.

Or their mommy.

And if a 24-hour race isn’t enough to get the blood pumping, there’s always next year’s race. It will be 48 hours.
 

Who knew watching soccer can make you ill? At least that’s the case with a woman in England who was made sick when watching certain matches involving Manchester United, the team she supports. However, it was not all matches that had a negative effect on her, only those which were close and intense. 

Close matches that involved serious competition from serious rivals such as Chelsea and Manchester City stressed her out and triggered symptoms in her Addison’s disease, which is caused “by problems with the adrenal gland, which can interrupt the supply of hormones such as cortisol, normally released when the body is under stress.” When games involved lesser competition, she was fine, though.

Doctors in Trafford General Hospital wrote in the British Medical Journal “that our patient was having difficulty mounting an appropriate physiological cortisol response during the big games – we present this as the first description of Manchester United-induced Addisonian crisis.”

One wonders what she was doing during the recent Manchester derby when Manchester City thrashed Manchester United 6-1 at Old Trafford. 

The good news is that nobody seems to have been seriously hurt, so I can ask, who was the “superhero” who bailed out of the cart rather than figure out how to stop it? You’ll see what I mean when you watch the video. The crash starts at the :17 second mark:

Explanation of how the cart got loose in the first place here.

La Liga team Sevilla has a novel way to increase revenue. The team sells space on the back of their players’ jerseys — 24 euros for the season — where fans can place a photo of themselves. However, if you think you’ll see your smiling face, think again: the images are nearly microscopic — two millimeters square — and many images are crammed together in the numbers. You’ll need a powerful telescope to actually find your face, if you can keep up with your chosen number.

Iñigo Martínez of La Liga club Real Sociedad is more than lucky. In a match against Real Betis, he scored his second goal from midfield just a few weeks after his first of the season against Athletci Bilbao. Seeing Betis’s goalkeeper off his line, the defender decided to try his luck again and it was with him, giving his club the victory during extra time. Luckily it went in, as the victory ended his team’s winless streak of eight games. I wonder if the third time will be a charm . . . 

Cricket? The Telegraph reports:

Cricket is being destroyed by this indecent obsession with money

By neglecting the Test match, greedy officials are undermining the essence of the game

Rather more than 2,000 Test matches have been played since Australia defeated a touring England XI by the handsome margin of 45 runs at Melbourne in March 1877. After this first contest, Test cricket very quickly developed into a major art form, in part because the game included so many disparate and sometimes contradictory elements.

On the one hand, there is the raw, elemental and often heroic struggle between the outstanding cricketers of rival nations. But each of these sportsmen is playing not just for his team but for himself – one of the deep fascinations of Test cricket is the tension between the selfish desire to put in a strong personal performance, and the duty to serve the team.

A batsman may, for example, be required to risk throwing away his wicket in order to chase quick runs or, in harsher circumstances, to restrain his natural attacking game in order to save his side from defeat.

In the best Test matches, the initiative changes hands many times before the result is decided. By the end of such games, the crowd feels exhausted, a feeling comparable to the state of catharsis – the purging of pity and fear – which, says Aristotle, is the outcome of great drama.

The rest here.

From the NYT, a warm article about Eritrean soccer players whose only hope is to defect in order for a better chance elsewhere. While athletes here debate over wages and leagues are cancelled, all these guys want to do is play.

Coach McQueary will not coach today; claims he’s in “protective custody” and “double-fisting” drinks.

Dead at the age of 67.

And for those who never saw Smokin’ Joe fight, here’s the “Fight of the Century,” Ali vs. Frazier I.

USA Today:

During an awards roast Williams said about winning the Bridgestone Invitational with Adam Scott was the best day of his life and added “it was my aim to shove it right up that black a——.”

Typically, soccer players’ names are displayed on the back of their shirts. However, Mexican club Jaguares de Chiapas decided to display the Twitter handles of their star players on the backs of the jerseys.

They did one better over La Liga’s Valencia, which displayed the club’s Twitter address on their jerseys. 

Back in September, Jone Samuelson made headlines for scoring probably the longest headed goal in soccer in the Norwegian league for his team Odd. Now, Ryujiro Ueda’s headed goal could challenge Samuelson’s accomplishment. In the J-League, Japan’s premiere soccer league, Udea scored for Fagiano Okoyama against Yokohama FC with this long-range header that made the goalkeeper scream in anguish at his mistake.

Jack Warner continues to lash out and blame everybody else for his downfall and resignation from FIFA. The former member of the FIFA Executive Committee, who was implicated in corruption and forced to resign his post, now blames Zionism “for the circumstances that led him and the former Asian Football Confederation chief Mohammed Bin Hammam being forced out of world football.” Writing to the Trinidad Guardian, Warner said that he “will talk about the Zionism, which is probably the most important reason why this acrid attack on Bin Hammam and me was mounted.”

This is just another new low in the long and very storied career of Jack Warner. For FIFA watchers and the sport’s enthusiasts, Warner continues to make himself look more outrageous. The Jews are now being accused of running world football! 

Chivas Guadalajara midfielder Marco Fabian may face sort of disciplinary hearing from his club’s hierarchy after carrying out what they deem is a violent goal celebration. After scoring against rivals Tecos, he is seen carrying out a mock execution with a teammate who falls to the grass (it is seen more clearly in a replay towards the end of the video). “The players who participated in this celebration will be called into account because they are role models for children and youth of our country.” In August, Marco Fabian gained more favorable headlines — for his play (a bicycle-kick goal in a friendly against Barcelona) rather than is play-acting. 

Two-time Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon died in a horrific crash Sunday during a race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Details here.

One excerpt that deserves a mention:

Drivers had been concerned about the high speeds at the track, where they were hitting nearly 225 mph during practice.

“We all had a bad feeling about this place in particular just because of the high banking and how easy it was to go flat. And if you give us the opportunity, we are drivers and we try to go to the front. We race each other hard because that’s what we do,” driver Oriol Servia said. “We knew if could happen, but it’s just really sad.”

Asked about speed after the crash, Wheldon’s former boss Chip Ganassi said, “There’ll be plenty of time in the offseason to talk about that. Now is not the time to talk about that.”

NPR has more on the track conditions:

The fiery 15-car pileup Sunday that took the life of two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon was the type of disaster that drivers had been concerned about before the race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, WDET’s Quinn Klinefelter said earlier on Morning Edition.

With a large, 34-car field on the relatively small, 1.5 mile track, drivers had said before the race that they were worried about what would happen if something went wrong as they tore around the oval at speeds topping 220 mph, Quinn said.

“No normal human being really has the reaction time to avoid anything” if cars started to collide at those speeds on a track that small, he added. Compare the field and track to this year’s Indianapolis 500, which Wheldon won: in that race, there were 33 cars on a 2.5 mile oval — meaning there was much more room to spread out and avoid trouble.

“It’s unfortunate that early on in the race they’ve got to be racing so close. …,” Team Penske owner Roger Penske said afterward, according to The Associated Press. “You always worry about those at these mile-and-a-halves at the speed and with this many cars.”

So why had the IndyCar series packed that many cars on the Vegas speedway? Race organizers “wanted to make it a real spectacle,” Quinn said, with lots of tight passing at high speeds.

Adding to the drama: If Wheldon had won the race, he would have shared in a special $5 million prize. The prize, to be split with his race team and a fan selected at random, had been offered to any non-IndyCar series driver who won the race. Wheldon was the only such driver in the race.

More to come for sure.

In further bad news for Jack Warner, who resigned from FIFA earlier this year because of allegations of corruption, taped footage in which he is explaining the nature of ‘gifts’ for Caribbean soccer delegates has been released. Early in the recording he asks, “Is media here?” He explains that Mohammed bin Hammam (once opposing candidate to Sepp Blatter in FIFA’s presidential elections before he himself was forced to withdraw due to allegations of corruption) was concerned about the amount of luggage he had to carry — silver plaques and other bunting — would be too much, so Jack Warner suggested a monetary value be put on the gifts. Sounds like bribery to me.

Yesterday’s New York Times contained a pair of stories that showed the Times’s policy-oriented approach to sports coverage at its best and worst.

The best was a long but interesting article about the Vikings’ so-far unsuccessful efforts to get Minnesota taxpayers to build them a new stadium. The Vikings already have a stadium, the Metrodome, which is perfectly acceptable (although ugly as sin, but that’s been true for decades), except it doesn’t have quite as many bells and whistles as Vikings owner Zygi Wilf would like. So the team wants a new home, mostly paid for with public money, of course, and in years past this would have been no problem.

Unfortunately for Wilf, due to what the Times quaintly calls “the country’s emergent political philosophy: smaller government and lower taxes,” it probably won’t happen. After seeing any number of expensive white elephants get built (such as Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey), nobody believes the old line about stadiums paying for themselves in tourism and taxes, so the Vikes are forced to fall back on “Don’t you love us, Minnesota?” And so far the response from the taxpayers has been, “Yes, we do, but not $650 million worth.”

At the other journalistic extreme is an article about the New York Rangers waiving Sean Avery. Avery is a particularly flagrant example of that NHL staple, the enforcer. His playing style is perhaps best summed up in a limerick:

There once was a forward named Avery
Who practiced all manner of knavery.
From cheap shots to late hits
To crude mockery, it’s
No surprise that his rep is unsavory.

OK, perhaps not. Anyway, the Times explained how people around the NHL feel about Avery with this paragraph, which no other paper in the U.S. or Canada could have written (emphasis added):

For all of his popularity in New York, Avery was widely reviled in hockey circles. In a 2007 poll of 283 N.H.L. players, 66 percent said Avery was the most hated man in the league. He came by that judgment honestly, sucker punching opponents on the ice and insulting them off it. But he also earned admiration in many quarters for his public support of same-sex marriage legislation in New York State.

Yes, I’m sure his stand on that issue won him plenty of locker-room cred . . .