Stick To Hoops, Please

Kobe Bryant played to mixed reviews in his debut as a rapper.

“It was nice seeing him,” Bernice Sanchez of West Covina, Calif., said after Bryant performed at the House of Blues in Los Angeles on Sunday night. “But I think Kobe should stick to his day job.”

Bryant, who turns 22 next month, presented lyrics such as: “My skull is the holster, my brain is the gun,” and “If you live life fast, you’ll probably die slow.”

“He said God has his back, I like that, and all the spiritual stuff,” said Young Bo, a promotions employee for rapper Master P’s No Limit Records. “I think of him now as a spiritual rapper. He’s really good.”

“People see an athlete do something like this and their first thought is it’s not a serious thing,” Jerrod Washington, CEO of Bryant’s label, said. “But this is very serious. Music is his second love… . If he wasn’t a professional athlete, he would have become a rapper.”

Thank goodness for basketball.

Gotta hurry to the traffic jam

Baseball Hall of Famer Cool Papa Bell was said to have been so fast that he could turn off the light switch and get into bed before the room went dark.

To which comedy writer Jerry Perisho added, “Prior to this, the fastest thing known was a Dodgers fan leaving the stadium in the top of the seventh inning.”

NFL takes a back seat

The debut of Formula One racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has filled the city’s hotel rooms and left the Jacksonville Jaguars without a place to sleep. The Jaguars will stay in Muncie - 60 miles northeast of Indianapolis - for their Sept. 25 game against the Indianapolis Colts, one day after the Formula One race.

Long odds

With oddsmakers in Lake Tahoe establishing a betting line on the men’s 200-meter race at the U.S. Olympic trials, Gil LeBreton of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wonders what happened after Michael Johnson and Maurice Greene pulled up lame.

“The odds of a Capel-Heard-Miller trifecta would have had to be astronomical,” he wrote.

Stating the obvious

Women’s fastpitch softball is one of the fastest growing college sports, but it invariably draws comparisons with the slowpitch game. Says Jody Roginson, who coaches the University of Washington: “A fastpitch enthusiast would say slowpitch is something you play when you want to retire. Or drink beer.”

The last word …

“We have the greatest fans in the world. We raise more money per win than any school in the land.”

- South Carolina football coach Lou Holtz, whose team went 0-11 last season.