Seen and heard

This is a smorgasbord post of little things from the past few days I have come across.

• Venus Williams's Wimbledon win made the cover of TIME magazine's Best moments of 2007. Pretty impressive given that tennis doesn't get all that much attention in the US.
• Former national champion Christopher Bowman died from an apparent drug overdose. Bowman "the Showman" was always a little bit of the wild child on the ice skating scene and had drug problems after his skating career ended. Last I had heard though he had straightened out a bit when he became a coach. Seems the former child star syndrome strikes athletes as well (though Bowman was also a child actor--he had a part in Little House on the Prairie.)
• A commercial for the Big Ten Network--on a Massachusetts radio station. I live far outside Big Ten country now and was quite surprised to hear the network advertised out here. Of course the commercial was touting all the men's basketball you could ever want to watch. Interesting given that much of the promotion of the network has focused on the diversity of events shown--especially the number of women's sports that have been/will be featured. I guess they didn't think that would sell here. Though, from what I have read, the network isn't selling all that well anywhere.
• I just love to read about sports bras and even though this article seems to be a big promotion for Champion I did learn an interesting (and slightly disturbing) fact: you're supposed to replace your sports bras after 100 wears. I think I need to go shopping.
• I probably should have devoted a whole post to the latest episode of "Sports Commentators Behaving Badly: Racist Comments" but I found out about the Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman lynching Tiger comments fairly late in the game. The Huffington Post has a brief entry on the incident. The interesting part is the comment section.