Some weeks ago, we brought you news of poor Kevin Garnett, the 21-year-old basketball player whose club didn't understand him. Kevin, along with his agent, was offended that his club, the Minnesota Timberwolves thought he was being greedy when he turned down a new contract worth $103.5 million over six years. The club was, he said, being unreasonable because he was just trying to weigh up his options, to take some time out and, to see where his life was going.
Well now the indecision is at an end and Garnett has decided he does wish to stay with the Timberwolves after all. The only thing to change since the earlier negotiations? Well, of course, the offer had gone up to $120 million and this week, the star forward was telling everybody how there's nowhere on earth he'd rather play ball.
Touching, isn't it.
It seems that some of Leicester City's players may have had their reasons for wanting Atletico Madrid to go through to the second round of the UEFA Cup this week.
When Garry Parker, Scott Taylor and Tony Cottee decided to get involved in a card game with striker Steve Claridge on the plane out to Spain a couple of week's ago, they clearly didn't anticipate what they were letting themselves in for. Within a couple of hours, the trio were £1,300 out of pocket.
Claridge is up for sale now, but let's face it, there's nothing like insurance, so the defeat in this week's home leg may have been the surest way for the lads to keep their wallets full to capacity.
Certainly, Claridge knows it was an opportunity missed. The with the 31-year-old admitted: "I could have done with the plane going to Russia."
Which reminds us, just how does Keith Gillespie enjoy the away trips?
A more bizarre football trip, meanwhile, might be the Leeds United end-of-season tour. These sort of things tend to be a chance for the players to unwind and the club to earn a few bob by playing meaningless matches in some distant part of the world. Wild tales of drunkenness tend go hand in hand with such trips.
This year, however, Leeds are offering the chance for two supporters to travel with the team - an all-in package is being offered as first prize in a fantasy football competition in the club's programme. "You do what the players do, you go where the players go," says the blurb for the competition which sounds more like a threat than a potential treat.
Those wonderful people at Sky, the home of quality drama have got a new soap opera in the pipeline with The Dream Team scheduled to be launched towards the end of this month.
Ron Atkinson plays the manager of Harchester United a team which, surprise surprise, is finding the going tough at the wrong end of the table. John Hollins is another of well-known football names to appear in the series, which will run twice weekly for 32 weeks.
Most of the drama surrounds the younger players at the club and we can but hope that the producers are a little more clued in about the Irish than their counterparts at the Beeb because one of the main characters will be one Conor, "a young Irishman who is caught in the headlight somewhat by his new environment," according to Rod Brown, an associate producer on the programme.
Whatever about racial stereotypes, the producers are certainly worried about the programme suffering from that affliction common to football dramas - `Escape To Victory' syndrome.
In an effort to avoid the abysmally-wooden playing sequences which took up so much of that film, it seems that the producers are looking at ways of superimposing Harchester's purple colours onto footage of real matches so that what viewers will see will be genuine Premiership action.
The purple apparently works best when transferred to teams playing in blue, so look out for footage of Chelsea, Everton and Leicester City in the early shows.
Congratulations to everyone at Adidas's marketing department on their new tennis promotion. The ad, which went out during this week's Champions' league coverage, features Tim Henman as a lone Brit fighting to destroy the legend that no Englishman can ever win a Grand Slam title.
Nice that this ad is getting a run on network television stations so soon after Henman was overhauled in the world rankings by Greg Rusedski, who made it into the top 10 by reaching the final of the US Open last month.
Normally, of course, this is the sort of thing that we have come to associate with Nike, a company who for years appear to have doomed athletes to failure by featuring them in the promotions. But for once, the company, who sponsor Rusedski, have been beaten to it.
On the subject of sponsorships, Jessica Rizzo was busy getting her name on shirts this week in Italy when she concluded deals with Lazio rugby club and a women's soccer club in the town of Montecatini in Tuscany.
None of which would be in the least bit remarkable if it were not for the fact the Rizzo is one of Italy's leading porn stars and the shirt-sponsorship deal is aimed at promoting sales of decoder cards for her hard-porn television station.
Steve Collins may have announced his retirement from the ring this week, but across the Atlantic, Oliver McCall is back after Nevada boxing officials, never ones to pass up the opportunity to involve their sport in a fiasco, voted unanimously to cut short the one-year suspension he was serving.
McCall had, in fact, agreed the suspension as well as a $250,000 fine for his memorable performance in February against Lennox Lewis - whose run of fights against the sport's most bizarre characters continues this evening when he takes on Andrew Golota. During the fight, McCall began to cry and repeatedly declined to defend himself, although Lewis still failed to knock him out and it took the intervention of the referee in the fifth round to put an end to the debacle.
Anyway, promoters Main Events and McCall are now embroiled in a court action over his $3 million purse and the Nevada officials are claiming to have taken pity on a man who says he needs a fight because he needs the money.
Earl Woods, meanwhile, has waited nearly 20 years to hear the fate of the man after whom his son is named. As it turns out, Col "Tiger" Phong was dead within a few months of their last meeting.
Woods, a former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, came up with the name for Phong himself, apparently in recognition of his South Vietnamese colleague's bravery and gave it to his son as a tribute to the friend he had left behind when the Americans and their allies were defeated.
In this month's Golf Digest, journalist Tom Callahan writes of how he went to Vietnam to trace Phong's whereabouts and how he quickly discovered that the officer had died while in captivity after the war. Woods is said to have been deeply distressed by the news.
Bertie Ahern will be one of an estimated 1,300 runners in the 14th Annual Dublin Simon Five Mile Road Race tomorrow in the Phoenix Park. The start is scheduled for around 2.30 p.m. and anybody wishing to join in can do so for £6 by registering at the organisers' caravan in Westmoreland Street today or at the start, by the Papal Cross, tomorrow.
Well, it that time of year isn't it. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Rough Guide to European Football is this week's best selling sports book at Sportspages' shops in England. Garry Nelson's second volume about his life as a journeyman footballer in the lower leagues is also doing well, while Spike Lee's book of basketball memoirs is the fifth best seller for the past seven days.
The full list is as follows . . . 1. European Football - A Fan's Handbook - The Rough Guide by Peterjon Cresswell and Simon Evans (Rough Guides, paperback, £14.99).
2. Dickie Bird - My Autobiography by Dickie Bird and Keith Lodge (Hodder and Stroughton, hardback, £17.99).
3. Left Foot In The Grave? - A View From The Bottom Of The Football League by Garry Nelson (Collins Willow, hardback, £14.99).
4. Official NFL 1997 Record And Fact Book by the National Football League (Workman, paperback, £14.99).
5. Best Seat In The House - A Basketball Memoir by Spike Lee (Fourth Estate, paperback, £9.99).
6. Racing Post Jumpers To Follow 1997/98 edited by Nicholas Godfrey (Racing Post, paperback, £7.99).
7. Dicks Out 2 - You`Re Not Singing Anymore by Rob Merrills (Red Card Publishing, paperback, £9.99).
8. Best Seat In The House - The Lions In South Africa by Miles Harrison (Aurum, hardback, £14.95).
9. Kicker Fussball Almanach '98 by Karl-Heinz Heimann and Karl-Heinz Jens (Copress Verlag Munchen, paperback, £9.95).
10. The Sunday Times History Of Twentieth Century Sport by Chris Nawrat, Steve Hutchings and greg Struthers (Hamlyn, Hardback, £25.00).
List supplied by Sportspages Bookshops, 94-96 Charing Cross Road, London and St Ann's Square, Manchester. Phone: 0044 171 240 9604.
Please send any correspondence to On The Sidelines, Sports Dept, The Irish Times, 11-15 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail emalone@irish-times.ie
