My Sports News Digest

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more golf news see: What Are the Tour and Tournament Cut Rules?.

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more golf news see: Tournament Records at The Masters.

WASHINGTON – Basketball fan-in-chief President Barack Obama is giving British Prime Minister David Cameron a front-row seat to March Madness, taking his European partner to an NCAA tournament basketball game in Ohio, an election swing state.

Obama and Cameron are attending a “First Four” matchup in Dayton, Ohio, between Mississippi Valley State and Western Kentucky on Tuesday night, a gesture of goodwill during Cameron’s official visit to the United States and a way for an incumbent president to reach sports fans in an election year.

The White House said the trip to the NCAA tournament game was intended to showcase the special relationship between the two key allies during Cameron’s three-day visit. Obama and Cameron will discuss the upcoming NATO and G-8 summits on Wednesday, followed by a state dinner at the White House.

Obama and Cameron were scheduled to appear in a live halftime interview on truTV, which was airing the game, with sportscaster Clark Kellogg. Kellogg interviewed Obama at halftime of a Duke-Georgetown game in 2010 and spoke with the president later that year during a White House game of “HORSE” aired on CBS during the NCAA tournament.

Obama was also maintaining his tradition of discussing his NCAA tournament bracket picks on ESPN, the sports network he watches on a daily basis. The president’s selections for the men’s tournament were being released Wednesday morning.

Republicans panned the trip, saying many Americans would prefer Obama to focus on more pressing issues.

“While showing off our amazing college basketball teams is great, many Americans struggling to find jobs, dealing with soaring gas prices, or concerned with our rising deficit and debt would probably like the president spend at least as much time dealing with those issues,” said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Obama’s quick trip to Ohio gives him a chance to connect with basketball fans and generate attention in Ohio, which he carried in the 2008 election and is considered one of the top toss-up states in 2012. The trip comes one week after Republican front-runner Mitt Romney captured Ohio’s GOP primary.

It also lets Obama lavish praise and attention on Cameron at a time of weighty foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. Britain has been an important U.S. ally in Afghanistan and the bombing campaign in Libya that led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi.

Cameron is frequently spotted running near his official Downing Street residence, flanked by his security detail, and follows sports like tennis and cricket. But he’s not much of a basketball fan; British Ambassador Peter Westmacott told reporters in Washington on Monday that Cameron was “busy briefing himself on March Madness.”

Basketball has been a big part of Obama’s life. At his Hawaii high school, Obama frequently carried a basketball along with his school books and bonded with his teammates on the court. His brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, played college basketball at Princeton and is now head coach at Oregon State.

The president regularly plays pickup basketball and keeps close tabs on his favorite NBA team, the Chicago Bulls. In a recent interview, the president said he gets League Pass on his iPad, letting him watch out-of-market NBA games on his tablet computer.

Obama kicked off the basketball season with a Veterans Day game between Michigan State and North Carolina on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson in November, enjoying a game on the aircraft carrier that took Osama bin Laden’s body to a burial at sea after the U.S. raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.

The president said in an interview last month with journalist Bill Simmons that the “mythology of sports” is deeply embedded in the U.S., allowing viewers to discern who is winning and who is losing- a principle that could easily be transferred to politics.

“People- for all our differences politically, regionally, economically- most folks understand sports. Probably because it’s one of the few places where it’s a true meritocracy,” Obama said. “Ultimately, who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s performing, who’s not- it’s all laid out there.”

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Associated Press writer Anne Gearan contributed to this report.

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Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ – Ken- Thomas

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more NCAA basketball news see: Obama, Cameron to attend NCAA tournament game (Yahoo! Sports).

Will this be the last Big East tournament as we know it? Was last year’s near-mythical five-wins-in-five-days run by Kemba Walker and UConn the last great March production for the league?

When conference realignment changed college football’s foundations last summer (and shook college basketball off its foundations), we knew the effects of the decisions wouldn’t be felt until months down the road.

Tuesday will bring the first tremor. It’s the beginning of the end of the glory and pageantry and importance and identity of the Big East tournament, which is to say it is the termination of all of those things for the Big East Conference as well.

How bittersweet that this is happening on the 30th anniversary of the first Big East championship at Madison Square Garden, a place so hallowed, the original organizers of the event didn’t expect to pay the rent here as soon as they did, back in 1982.

This league isn’t dying, of course, but it is changing — mutating. The Big East will lose West Virginia — two years after it dramatically won its first league championship — to the Big 12 after this season. After the next one (maybe sooner), Syracuse and Pittsburgh are gone to the ACC, which is mulling — or at least debating and is certainly tempted by — moving its conference championship to New York City.

Think the ACC can’t make the move to Madison Square Garden? Then you weren’t paying attention last summer, and with that, you’re underestimating the ambition of college presidents once again. ACC commissioner John Swofford did not toss the prospect aside when he was asked about it in September, and of course there is no more ripe market for the basketball-devoted ACC (yes, it also has been spellbound by football’s mammon) to move into than New York City.

While that future is still down the road, the Big East is already near some significant changes. Its postseason tournament, which for 20 years has consistently been the best one in college basketball, is about to change forever. We’re one year removed from an NCAA-record 11 Big East teams getting invited to the NCAAs. But what’s coming for this conference feels like a transition of identity that can’t be undone.

Others will join the league in the next 14 months, but can we acknowledge that hairy, smelly elephant standing right over there? Isn’t anyone else in the Big East secretly trying to get out now? Does Louisville want to leave? Come on. Of course! You’re telling me U of L wouldn’t get out if it had a better option for football? It would love to. What about UConn? Does it want to try and finagle a way into the ACC sometime in the next five years?

The basketball will take center stage, as it should, in Manhattan during the next five days, but the uncertainty of the Big East’s next five years will hang larger in the air than any celebratory banner waving from MSG’s rafters. The Big East has always had a rift in philosophy due to the basketball-only and football schools. Now the divide is even larger.

We’ll also be losing the coaches soon too, you know. The next wave of the old guard is leaving post. Jim Boeheim, of course, leaving along with Syracuse, and Rick Pitino said earlier this season he’ll be done coaching by 2017. Jim Calhoun, at 69, can’t coach forever, as much as he would like to forever prove critics and modern medicine wrong. Yes, change is inevitable in this regard; Hall of Fame coaches retiring is a part of the game, and when they do, it’s normally equal parts somber and celebratory. In this case, with the retirements of these giants — plus the loss of always entertaining Bob Huggins to the Big 12 — the subway car exchange of all these schools is compounded by the coaching changeover.

This isn’t like the last time. Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech don’t have the heft that Syracuse, Pitt and West Virginia do. Plus, the Big East — for good or for bad — responded to that poaching by the ACC by using its own tool of persuasion: the gravitas of the conference (and all that money) — to bring five more schools in. Cincinnati, Marquette, Louisville, DePaul and South Florida migrated from Conference USA and actually gave the league a jolt, buttressing it definitively and highly atop college basketball, where it has remained for seven years.

And this time, the trade for three more defections is Memphis, Houston, SMU and Central Florida. No matter how good those latter three teams are in a given season in the next decade, they carry as much Big East cache — and fan support — as DePaul and South Florida. Getting Memphis was huge. The Tigers are the only program that truly feels like it belongs in the home it will move into in 2013. Temple looks imminent as well, but at this point, the Big East might as well place its offices out West with the amount of plastic surgery it has done to itself. The league is indistinguishable from what it was eight years ago.

You know the great memories, the ones you can replay in your mind without the aid of audio or video: Ewing and Georgetown’s dominance in the ’80s; Walter Berry negating Pearl Washington in the final seconds of the ’86 final; Taliek Brown dead-eyeing home a 30-foot game-clincher against Pitt (I cannot believe it has already been 10 years); Ray Allen’s tripping-on-invisible-wire winner in ’96; Gerry McNamara’s ownership of the Garden — which came five years before Kemba did it; six overtimes in ’09. All great memories, the stuff that helps sell glossy magazines and keeps the prestige of the tournament going.

All I’m saying is, we’re now past the brink of losing that. It’s done. The Big East tournament could one day feel like the Big 12. A fine, worthy, watchable conference championship to help set the table for the NCAAs. But it won’t be the same. Without the teams that helped build the tournament into what it was, and still is — even for one more year — how could it?

This isn’t founding commissioner Dave Gavitt’s Big East anymore. It isn’t former commissioner Mike Tranghese’s, either, or your father’s or your older brother’s. Soon enough, it won’t be yours. So to whom does it belong? Economic swinishness and an unfamiliar conglomerate of programs that will advertise the Big East, but they won’t represent it.

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more college basketball news see: Future changes to Big East will ruin majesty of its hoops tournament.

Will this be the last Big East tournament as we know it? Was last year’s near-mythical five-wins-in-five-days run by Kemba Walker and UConn the last great March production for the league?

When conference realignment changed college football’s foundations last summer (and shook college basketball off its foundations), we knew the effects of the decisions wouldn’t be felt until months down the road.

Tuesday will bring the first tremor. It’s the beginning of the end of the glory and pageantry and importance and identity of the Big East tournament, which is to say it is the termination of all of those things for the Big East Conference as well.

How bittersweet that this is happening on the 30th anniversary of the first Big East championship at Madison Square Garden, a place so hallowed, the original organizers of the event didn’t expect to pay the rent here as soon as they did, back in 1982.

This league isn’t dying, of course, but it is changing — mutating. The Big East will lose West Virginia — two years after it dramatically won its first league championship — to the Big 12 after this season. After the next one (maybe sooner), Syracuse and Pittsburgh are gone to the ACC, which is mulling — or at least debating and is certainly tempted by — moving its conference championship to New York City.

Think the ACC can’t make the move to Madison Square Garden? Then you weren’t paying attention last summer, and with that, you’re underestimating the ambition of college presidents once again. ACC commissioner John Swofford did not toss the prospect aside when he was asked about it in September, and of course there is no more ripe market for the basketball-devoted ACC (yes, it also has been spellbound by football’s mammon) to move into than New York City.

While that future is still down the road, the Big East is already near some significant changes. Its postseason tournament, which for 20 years has consistently been the best one in college basketball, is about to change forever. We’re one year removed from an NCAA-record 11 Big East teams getting invited to the NCAAs. But what’s coming for this conference feels like a transition of identity that can’t be undone.

Others will join the league in the next 14 months, but can we acknowledge that hairy, smelly elephant standing right over there? Isn’t anyone else in the Big East secretly trying to get out now? Does Louisville want to leave? Come on. Of course! You’re telling me U of L wouldn’t get out if it had a better option for football? It would love to. What about UConn? Does it want to try and finagle a way into the ACC sometime in the next five years?

The basketball will take center stage, as it should, in Manhattan during the next five days, but the uncertainty of the Big East’s next five years will hang larger in the air than any celebratory banner waving from MSG’s rafters. The Big East has always had a rift in philosophy due to the basketball-only and football schools. Now the divide is even larger.

We’ll also be losing the coaches soon too, you know. The next wave of the old guard is leaving post. Jim Boeheim, of course, leaving along with Syracuse, and Rick Pitino said earlier this season he’ll be done coaching by 2017. Jim Calhoun, at 69, can’t coach forever, as much as he would like to forever prove critics and modern medicine wrong. Yes, change is inevitable in this regard; Hall of Fame coaches retiring is a part of the game, and when they do, it’s normally equal parts somber and celebratory. In this case, with the retirements of these giants — plus the loss of always entertaining Bob Huggins to the Big 12 — the subway car exchange of all these schools is compounded by the coaching changeover.

This isn’t like the last time. Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech don’t have the heft that Syracuse, Pitt and West Virginia do. Plus, the Big East — for good or for bad — responded to that poaching by the ACC by using its own tool of persuasion: the gravitas of the conference (and all that money) — to bring five more schools in. Cincinnati, Marquette, Louisville, DePaul and South Florida migrated from Conference USA and actually gave the league a jolt, buttressing it definitively and highly atop college basketball, where it has remained for seven years.

And this time, the trade for three more defections is Memphis, Houston, SMU and Central Florida. No matter how good those latter three teams are in a given season in the next decade, they carry as much Big East cache — and fan support — as DePaul and South Florida. Getting Memphis was huge. The Tigers are the only program that truly feels like it belongs in the home it will move into in 2013. Temple looks imminent as well, but at this point, the Big East might as well place its offices out West with the amount of plastic surgery it has done to itself. The league is indistinguishable from what it was eight years ago.

You know the great memories, the ones you can replay in your mind without the aid of audio or video: Ewing and Georgetown’s dominance in the ’80s; Walter Berry negating Pearl Washington in the final seconds of the ’86 final; Taliek Brown dead-eyeing home a 30-foot game-clincher against Pitt (I cannot believe it has already been 10 years); Ray Allen’s tripping-on-invisible-wire winner in ’96; Gerry McNamara’s ownership of the Garden — which came five years before Kemba did it; six overtimes in ’09. All great memories, the stuff that helps sell glossy magazines and keeps the prestige of the tournament going.

All I’m saying is, we’re now past the brink of losing that. It’s done. The Big East tournament could one day feel like the Big 12. A fine, worthy, watchable conference championship to help set the table for the NCAAs. But it won’t be the same. Without the teams that helped build the tournament into what it was, and still is — even for one more year — how could it?

This isn’t founding commissioner Dave Gavitt’s Big East anymore. It isn’t former commissioner Mike Tranghese’s, either, or your father’s or your older brother’s. Soon enough, it won’t be yours. So to whom does it belong? Economic swinishness and an unfamiliar conglomerate of programs that will advertise the Big East, but they won’t represent it.

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more college basketball news see: Future changes to Big East will ruin majesty of its hoops tournament.

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more tennis news see: Tomic into final of Kooyong tournament .

CALGARY – Finding each other on the ice is nothing new for Greg Westlake and Brad Bowden.

Doing it inside the new Hockey Canada arena at Canada Olympic Park is, however.

Buoyed by Westlake’s hat-trick and Bowden’s goal and three assists, Canada beat up the 2010 Paralympic champion U.S. squad 4-1 Saturday night at WinSport Ice Complex to claim the 2011 World Sledge Hockey Challenge.

“What a great way to open the building,” Canadian head coach Mike Mondin said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of championships in here by Hockey Canada.”

After emerging from a jubilant Team Canada dressing room, the captain Westlake agreed.

“We definitely kind of wanted to christen it with a win,” Westlake said.

“Maybe we’ll christen it with a Molson now.”

Canada finished off a perfect 5-0 tournament that started last Sunday with an 8-0 thrashing of Japan.

Westlake, of Oakville, Ont., and Bowden, of Orton, Ont., were dominant all week long.

Bowden led the tournament in scoring with six goals and nine assists, while Westlake finished with eight goals and six assists.

“We work hard for each other and sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s (winger) Anthony (Gale),” Bowden said. “It’s just one of those games where you have a connection with your linemate and you just know where they are.”

The U.S. opened the scored 53 seconds into the game, banging home a loose puck past Canadian goaltender Benoit St-Amand.

Canada took two penalties in the first five minutes of the game, but were able to escape unscathed.

From there, the home side took over.

Westlake was finally able to get Canada on the board at 14:44 of the first period, finishing off a Bowden feed to knot the game at 1-1.

Canada took the lead at 8:18 of the second frame when Westlake, and Bowden connected again from in close, as Westlake buried his second of the game for a 2-1 lead.

“He’s magic, there’s no question,” Mondin said of his captain. “He gets bigger as the games get bigger.”

Westlake finished off the hat-trick at the 4:25 mark of the third period, roofing a hard wrister from the slot, and 55 seconds later, Bowden slipped past the U.S. defence and outwaited American goalie Steve Cash to slide home his first of the game and sixth of the tournament for a 4-1 Canada lead. By the end of the night, the opening goal by the U.S. was long forgotten.

“I think we just went into a bit of survival mode,” Westlake said. “We gave up that first goal, we killed two penalties, and then we got two or three shifts five-on-five and we realized, ‘Hey, we can outplay these guys.’ “

St-Amand, who turned away 18 American shots on the night, knew the offence would find the mark, despite Cash playing spectacular at times and finishing with 10 saves.

“I wasn’t worried,” St-Amand said. “I knew these guys were going to score two or three right off the bat and that’s what they did.”

U.S. head coach Jeff Sauer wasn’t impressed with the way his team failed to capitalize in the first period after the opening goal and then watched as Canada dominated the final two frames.

“Give all the credit to Canada, they took advantage of our mistakes,” Sauer said. “They’re a good team and the pressure was on them.

“And they rose to the challenge.”

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by Syndicated Sports news wire and aggregation service, For more NHL hockey news see: Dynamic duo leads Canada to sledge hockey tournament title.

Two mixed martial artists from Oregon were in Los Angeles for a grappling tournament, but they ended up using their skills to do much more than win a match. They subdued an armed robber who was holding up the clerk at their hotel.

Brent Alvarez runs Twisted Web MMA in Eugene, Ore., and Billy Denney is his student. They were walking through the hotel lobby when they saw the robber, who had gone behind the hotel’s counter, pulled out a gun, and demanded money. The clerk handed over the cash, but yelled for help. Alvarez and Denney jumped on the robber, and while Denney controlled his wrists, Alvarez sunk in a rear naked choke. They held him in place until police arrived.

Alvarez is 2-2 in amateur bouts, while Denney is 7-2. According to the Twisted Web Facebook page, Denney took third at the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation no-gi worlds. (In no-gi, participants wear a rash guard or no shirt instead of the traditional martial arts uniform of a gi.) Alvarez went 1-1 in his fights.

No matter their results, I have a feeling that Denney and Alvarez will remember this trip to L.A. for something other than the tournament. Kudos to them both for being brave and using martial arts to do more than win a match.

MySportNews іѕ a sports news digest publication that compiles real time, on demand sports news, articles, аnd resources. This article was distributed by X2 news wire and aggregation service, For more news see: Fighters in L.A. for BJJ tournament stop a robbery at hotel.