There's news out of Chicago on the potential sale of the sports world's most inept and disappointing professional franchise, the Cubs:

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban remains as interested as ever in buying the Chicago Cubs, dismissing a report that Major League Baseball might not want him as an owner.

According to a Chicago Sun-Times report that cited a baseball source, there was "zero chance" of Cuban taking over the Cubs.

The Sun-Times source said the Internet billionaire would meet with resistance in trying to get approval from Major League Baseball.

Things I know, or think I know, about Mark Cuban:  1) he went to IU; 2) he has made a gazillion dollars in the high tech world; 3) he now owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise; 4) he has spent a lot of money on amenities for the Dallas Mavericks players; 5) he has been somewhat controversial with his unusually intimate involvement in games, perceived bad calls, and interactions with fans both live and online; and 6) the Mavericks have not won an NBA title despite all the money Cuban has thrown at them.

Things I know about the Chicago Cubs:  1) they have not won a World Series Title in 100 years, and counting.

That said, do I want Mark Cuban to be the new Cubs owner?  I don’t know.  The MLB owners are private citizens, running privately held businesses, and apparently they can make whatever decision they want on whether to allow a person, group, entity, or combination thereof to take over an available MLB franchise.  I can’t begin to name the owners of all the MLB teams, but certain owners come to mind, like Steinbrenner, Selig (Yeah, I know, he’s technically the commissioner and his daughter owns the team.  Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not.  Who  knows, and who really cares?), Peter Angelos, maybe Ted Turner if he still owns the Braves (can’t remember - he may have sold the team but still hangs around).

Are the four guys I can name off the top of my head somehow in a different class than Mark Cuban?  I doubt it.  I can’t say I’d want to spend 5 minutes with any of them.  Well, maybe Steinbrenner just to be sniggering in my head thinking of Larry David’s Steinbrenner the entire time I’m listening to the real thing.

But the Cubs could do a lot worse than having an owner who’s freakishly wealthy, freakishly involved in the team's operation, and freakishly willing to try to throw money at the team to make it into a winner, and maybe even a place where winning players want to be.

I’m just saying, the past 100 seasons without a title don’t exactly recommend the approach the owners have been taking.  Of course, as I noted above, Cuban’s Mavericks haven’t managed to win a title either.  So it’s a crap shoot.  But I would love to know what the criteria are that the other MLB owners use to evaluate a potential new owner.  A really good investigative reporter would get that story for the public.  Cubs fans need to know.

A news story at Bloomberg.com contains the following interesting update on scientific research:

The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” from 1977 has 103 beats a minute, close to the number of chest compressions needed for cardiopulmonary resuscitation to work, according to a study at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.  Students who listened to the tune while practicing CPR on a dummy learned to give the right number of pumps, an abstract of the research in the Annals of Emergency Medicine said.

And later notes:

The results will be presented at a meeting of the Dallas-based group later this month, in Chicago.

So disco music may somehow wind up being involved in helping mankind.  Who would have thought?

It’s especially nice that this research is being presented in Chicago, where disco music has a somewhat less glorious history:

Disco Demolition Night was a promotional event that took place on July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago.  It was held during a scheduled twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. During the event, rowdy fans surged onto the field, and a near riot ensued.

If you follow the link above for the background information on Disco Demolition Night, and a more complete description of the event, in which approximately 75,000 fans staged the “near riot” between the doubleheader games, resulting in forfeiture of the second game, you won’t be disappointed.  I remember Disco Demolition Night dimly from my youth, but know the story well from having heard the radio hosts involved in the promotion, Steve Dahl and Gary Meier, for years afterward on Chicago radio.

I don't think Steve and Gary are on the air anymore.  If they are, it would be a nice touch for them to get press passes for the medical conference so they can provide full coverage of this latest "threat" of the return of disco.

Listening to PGA Tour radio last week, I heard a couple of facts that surprised me, but in retrospect they shouldn't have.  I remember years ago hearing that Tom Kite had managed to make it to the top of the Tour lifetime money list, so I understand that you can be a good player, but not a legend, and in today's world of ever-higher prize money you wind up looking like potentially the best golfer of all time.

But I was still surprised to hear that Jack Nicklaus, winner of 18 professional majors and runner-up in another 19 (I think), along with winning many other tournaments and championships over the course of his career, earned "only" $5.7 million on Tour in winnings.  Over the long trajectory of his career, that's not as much as I would have guessed given his success.  I realize the dollars available on Tour have exploded with the rise of Tiger, but I would have speculated that Nicklaus easily earned about twice the number cited.

And to really blow me away, the news blurb on PGA Tour radio noted that Nicklaus is now number 155 on the Tour Money List, having just been passed by Anthony Kim (oops - my original post mistakenly referred to "Andrew" Kim).

From Bloomberg.com:

Olympic organizers struggling to stem an algae bloom at the sailing venue in Qingdao are turning to another threat: a plague of locusts heading for Beijing.

Uh oh.  But, the Olympics being such a hugely important event, and with the eyes of the world watching, surely the ChiComs will find a way to deal with the algae bloom and locusts using organic, earth-friendly techniques, right?  And if they don’t, the environmentalists will be in an uproar, right?

Well....

The northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia has mobilized 33,000 people to repel swarms of locusts

Sounds good so far.  Use superior human resources to somehow “repel” the swarms.  But let’s see, the story tells us that the locusts:

have infested an area of 1.3 million hectares (5,000 square miles)

Hmmm.  Each of the 33,000 Chinese will somehow “repel” the locusts from an approximately 6.5 square mile area?  I wonder how they’ll do that.  Oh:

Locusts in full flight may not be so easy to tackle. Inner Mongolia authorities are using 200 tons of pesticides, 100,000 sprayers and four airplanes to kill the pests...

Let’s just hope that’s 200 tons of hemp-based, organic, earth-friendly pesticides sprayed by solar or bio-diesel powered, zero emission airplanes.

Perhaps there’s better news on the algae front:

The locust alert comes as 10,000 workers scoop up blue- green algae along the coast...

Sounds earth-friendly, again using immense man-hours to somehow scoop up the algae.  And they’ve already had some reported success:

About 4,000 troops are helping the Qingdao clean-up, which has removed 150,000 tons of algae since June 25...

Wow.  That's a lot of tonnage to remove in a week's time using environmentally friendly techniques.  But I'm sure the ChiComs have been environmentally responsible.  Best of luck in their continuing cleanup and preparation for the Games.

I read a fascinating book over the weekend by Mark Frost titled The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever.  Frost tells an amazing and true story about a 1956 best ball golf match played at Cypress Point ostensibly to "settle" the question, still unresolved at that time, whether top flight amateur golfers or professional golfers were better.  What does this have to do with the title of this post?  I'll get to that in a minute.  Here's the quick and dirty synopsis of the book:

Eddie Lowery, who started his rise to fame and fortune as Francis Ouimet's 10 year-old caddy when Ouimet won the U.S. Open in 1913, backed a team of amateurs, comprised of a young Ken Venturi and another young player named Harvie Ward.  Lowery claimed there were no two golfers in the world who could beat his team of amateurs.

George Coleman, a wealthy industrialist, avid golfer, and long-time friendly golf rival of Lowery's, made Lowery put his money where his mouth was and put up a professional duo made up of Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan.

From Frost's description of the match, there isn't a golfer alive who wouldn't record the broadcast had there been cameras on the course.  Thankfully, Frost was able to get the story from Ken Venturi (the only surviving member of the foursome) and others who were at Cypress Point that historic day, as well as friends and family of the deceased golfers.

Frost also wrote The Greatest Game Ever Played, about Ouimet's 1913 U.S. Open championship upset of Harry Vardon.  This story may not translate as well into a movie, but it was a first rate golf, human interest, and popular history story just the same.

So who has the most recorded voice in history?  This was just one of the almost throw-away pieces of information I found in the book.  For whatever reason, it stuck in my head.  Certainly the answer was someone I and probably every person over the age of 30 in this country will have heard of.  But I never would have come up with the right answer if I had been given 100 guesses.

I'll update this post with an answer, but figured I would leave it hanging out there for now to see if anyone happens to drop by and wants to take a guess, or perhaps already knows who it is.

UPDATE:  Some excellent guesses, certainly from the right time period, and the Mel Blanc guess is, in it's way, very close.  According to The Match, and from taking a quick look online I see that the Wikipedia page for this person makes the same claim, though that's certainly not an exhaustive search, the most recorded voice in history belongs to....

Bing Crosby.

Crosby started the celebrity pro-am golf tournament with his Crosby Clambake, which moved up the coast from Rancho Santa Fe to the Monterey Peninsula after WWII.  It was during dinner at Crosby's house at the start of festivities surrounding the 1956 Crosby that the wager creating the fabled match between Hogan, Nelson, Venturi and Ward was made, and during the practice rounds the next day that the fabled match took place.

I knew about Crosby's connection to his own tournament, of course, but didn't realize the depth of his  passion for golf.  He was a caddy at a young age, and was a single digit handicap, taking his tournament invitations and golf matches very seriously.  And if I knew it I had forgotten that Crosby died of a massive heart attack suffered walking off a course in Spain after finishing a round of golf.

Between his radio, film, television and recording careers, Crosby's voice is apparently the most recorded ever.  Kind of surprising.  I thought perhaps a long-time broadcaster, like Winchell, Cronkite, etc., might have the distinction.

How is Mel Blanc related?  Well, there are several Looney Tunes cartoons in which Bing makes an appearance, along with other Hollywood stars of the 30s, 40s and 50s.  Blanc did the voices for the Looney Tunes characters, though I'm not sure if he also impersonated the stars who appeared in the cartoons.

The Bill Belichick / New England Patriots "Spy-aquiddick" affair involving the stealing of the opposing team's signals and play calls through the use of sideline cameras has been slowly working itself out since last fall.  There are a couple of very interesting articles up this morning on this topic.  First, Geoffrey Hunt at The American Thinker pooh-poohs Sen. Arlen Specter's attempt to get a Congressional investigation going to look more deeply into what in the world Belichick and his staff have been up to for at least the past 8 years.  I have some sympathy for his position from the standpoint of wondering whether this is really something we need to throw taxpayer money at, in much the same way I have never been much of a fan of the ongoing steroid/perjury investigation in Northern California and surrounding Barry Bonds.

But reading through Gregg Easterbrook's latest piece on ESPN.com, I think Easterbrook clearly has the better argument that something is indeed very rotten in Bill Belichick's football operations, and the NFL needs to do a lot more to address this before fan reaction and disaffection has a chance to get a lot worse.  A congressional investigation may not be the way to go, but true transparency and complete disclosure seem to be the best way to get past this episode, along with some type of truly significant penalty for Belichick and his staff.

So there will be sufficient space for female students to exercise with proper male supervision.  The excellent blog, Urgent Agenda, has a post on this article from the Washington Post.  Here’s the snippet that caught my eye:

Powerful religious clerics also ban sports for girls in public schools, deeming it un-Islamic, and recently canceled two rare all-women's events, a soccer match and a marathon. Gyms for women were closed in the early 1990s and have been allowed to reopen, but only when affiliated with hospitals.

Further in we find:

Banning the opening of these sports centers is not a ban on sports. A woman can practice sports at home, and there are many ways to do that, or she can race her husband in a deserted area, like the prophet Muhammad ... who raced with his wife Aisha twice.

So what will Harvard do when their Islamic overlords in Saudi Arabia, who have most likely donated millions of dollars to fund various things at Harvard, point out that they don’t want women using gymnasiums?  Will the whole separate but equal system for Harvard’s recreational facilities collapse?  Will there be a re-thinking of Title IX as culturally insensitive to the wealthy donors who call the shots at Ivy League universities?

I heard last week that David Beckham scored his first ever goal for the Los Angeles Galaxy.  Which of course made me, as a sports xenophobe, shake my head and wonder why people still try to force soccer onto the American public.  Beckham was signed by the Galaxy in January of last year.  And we're getting news 14 months later that he's finally scored ONE GOAL?

As much as I want my kids to run around outside and be active, I'm kind of glad so far that neither of them has shown the slightest interest in soccer.  Kind of reminds me of the old bumper sticker about the Air Force and schools, though for my tastes, I'd love to slap one on my car that says, "It will be a great day when baseball diamonds are full with kids playing pickup games, and soccer fields are empty."

Sports is a pretty fluffy topic on its own.  But when you get sports mixed with sexual scandal, you get fluffy and (arguably) very amusing stuff.  First, St Louis Arizona Cardinals quarterback Matt Leinart's situation:

After seeing Internet photos of Matt Leinart partying last weekend at his Arizona home, Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt said he was "disappointed" in his quarterback.

Among the four photos splashed across Web sites thedirty.com and TMZ.com over the weekend, Leinart was shown assisting a co-ed drinking from a beer bong in one and sharing a hot tub with four women in another. The photos ran on SportsCenter on Tuesday.

"Matt called me Monday morning and we spoke for a while," Whisenhunt said in a statement obtained by the East Valley Tribune. "I reiterated to him the type of behavior that we expect at all times from our players. He understands that as well as the level of scrutiny that he's under because of who he is. It's being handled internally.

Not great publicity for Leinart, the Cardinals, or the NFL.  But hey, at least Leinart didn't have a story like this come out about him (h/t Mark Steyn at NRO's The Corner for the Euro version):

    The son of infamous British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley is filmed romping with five hookers at a depraved NAZI-STYLE orgy in a torture dungeon. Mosley— a friend to F1 big names like Bernie Ecclestone and Lewis Hamilton— barks ORDERS in GERMAN as he lashes girls wearing mock DEATH CAMP uniforms and enjoys being whipped until he BLEEDS...

    At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old—who publicly likes to give the impression he has put his father's evil legacy behind him—yells "she needs more of ze punishment!" while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette's naked bottom.

    Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German: "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf! Sechs!.."

    Last month the urbane president of the FIA—Formula One's governing body—hit the headlines when he announced a crackdown on racism in the sport after McLaren ace Lewis Hamilton was abused by Spanish spectators.

    But on Friday the only ‘crackdowns' married Mosley was interested in were on bare buttocks...

    The 6ft 2in former barrister once helped his father try to restart his political career in the Sixties with a new fascist Union Movement party. He was even a prospective parliamentary candidate himself.

    But the party that got his vote on Friday was one involving violent perversion in a rigged-up basement torture dungeon.

Certainly sounds a little worse than Leinert's frolics, from a public relations perspective, anyway.  So what's the reaction in the world of Formula 1?  Well, here's the initial response:

Formula One chief executive Bernie Ecclestone told at least one London newspaper that Mosley's job was not in jeopardy.

"I find it difficult to believe. It's his business but it sounds to me like a set-up. Has he in any way damaged F1? No," he told the Daily Mail.

Later Monday, the Times Online reported that sources close to Mosley said he wouldn't resign.

Ecclestone's quote is classic:  I don't believe it.  It's his own private business.  He was set up.  This has nothing to do with F1.

I think the only things he missed were the normally kiss-of-death vote of confidence and a promise of exoneration.

UPDATE - Fixed the spelling of Leinart's name in the title of the post and body so that it's consistent with the story.

Sad news from the world of sports on the retirement of a living legend:

BERLIN -- Two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt ended her show career on ice with a final performance as Carmen -- the role that defined her greatest triumph.

Witt drew thunderous applause in Hannover on the last night of her farewell tour Tuesday, capping her six routines with bowls of fire around the rink.

"I have to say, honestly, that you prepare a tour like this and think of everything," Witt said. "Then I totally forgot to think of what I would say at the very end. Maybe just: Thank you."

The 42-year-old former East German, dubbed "the most beautiful face of socialism" by Time magazine, drew worldwide fame by beating American rival Debi Thomas at the end of the Cold War in a politically charged duel for the 1988 Olympic gold.

The story goes on to note that Witt won her first Olympic gold medal in 1984, the same year Evander Holyfield competed in Olympic boxing.  Amazing that both of them would still be out performing / competing after this long a time.