Fast Break
Baseball
Manny, Dodgers owner meet
Manny Ramirez apologized to Dodgers owner Frank McCourt during a meeting to discuss his 50-game suspension for using a banned drug.
Next, the slugger might face his teammates in the next few days.
McCourt said the two met Saturday, two days after the 12-time All-Star began serving a penalty imposed by Major League Baseball.
“I wanted to meet him face to face,” McCourt said. “He started off the meeting by apologizing and acknowledging the disappointment that he’s created – not only for me but for others.”
The Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site Sunday, citing unidentified sources, that McCourt was furious with Ramirez and was demanding that the star slugger speak to his teammates about the failed drug test that led to his suspension.
Golf
Feherty sorry about joke
CBS Sports golf analyst David Feherty apologized to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a morbid joke that went bad in a Dallas magazine.
Feherty was among five Dallas residents who wrote for “D Magazine” on former President George W. Bush moving to Dallas.
Feherty wrote: “… if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”
Feherty has gone to Iraq over Thanksgiving the past two years to visit with U.S. troops, and he created a foundation to help wounded soldiers.
“This passage was a metaphor meant to describe how American troops felt about our 43rd president,” Feherty said in a statement. “In retrospect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, and for that, I apologize.”
Basketball
Basketballs aboard shuttle
The Harlem Globetrotters will soon have a presence way above the globe.
Space shuttle Atlantis will carry a pair of basketballs when it rockets away on a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Liftoff is scheduled for this afternoon.
One of the balls belongs to the Harlem Globetrotters. The other is a century-old ball on loan from the University of Chicago that was once handled by the man the Hubble Telescope is named after.
Edwin Hubble tossed the ball around in a 1909 victory against Indiana University. The 6-foot-2 Hubble was a star forward on the University of Chicago’s Big Ten champion teams of 1907-1908 and 1908-1909.