Watchdog

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is scheduled to appear at the NBA Store on Fifth Avenue Thursday, where he will be interviewed on Sirius Satellite Radio at about 2:30 p.m.

Thursday also marks the debut at the store of what sounds like a cool exhibit about vintage basketball cards.

Why do I not just insist these friendly p.r. people buy ads in Newsday if they want people to know this stuff? I don't know.

I guess I figured some of you might find it interesting if you happen to be in the neighbhorhood.

Click below for part of the news release on the card thing.

Time Magazine was impressed and inspired by the NBA's recent marketing campaign. Seriously.

Candace Parker can play, obviously.

And sell stuff, too, presumably.

Danica Patrick is going to be on with Letterman Wednesday night, by the way.

One night before Brett Favre.

Dave really likes athletes.

I have to stop now. I have to get back to my real job, which is writing newspaper columns that inspire people to post comments about how clueless I am.

That's what's going on with my Tuesday newspaper column if you want to jump in.

Enjoy Hofstra-Stony Brook lax on MSG Plus at 7 p.m.

Since throwing out the idea Thursday for a column on best/worst sports-themed TV shows, I've gotten more excited about the idea.

So let's really concentrate on this, people, and get together a good list I can steal.

I'll take care of some non-blog duties this morning and check back in with you this afternoon.

Thanks for doing my job for me.

I have seen every NCAA Tournament since 1970.

I never, ever have seen anything like what Stephen Curry is doing.

John Thompson will be doing analysis for Georgetown games in the NCAAs for Westwood One again this year.

It has been unkosher in the past and remains unkosher, technically. But it's not the end of the world, is it? It's not as if listeners are not aware of his potential bias. And he does know his son's team well, presumably.

If Westwood One had told him he couldn't do the Hoyas' games, it wouldn't have had him for any games.

Awful Announcing has the Friday coverage maps for CBS.

Looks like NY market gets:

Davidson-Gonzaga

San Diego-UConn

Mount St. Mary's-North Carolina

Villanova-Clemson

The bloggers tried to storm the gates at the Lakers-Mavs game despite Mark Cuban's ban on such people.

It didn't work.

Here is the L.A. Times' version (look toward bottom).

Here is True Hoops' version.

I'm starting to wonder when teams and leagues are going to catch on to the fact I'm a blogger masquerading as a newspaper columnist now and keep me away from their locker rooms.

Locker rooms are incredibly overrated, by the way.

Thursday slate of NCAA Tournament games in NY market, according to the coverage charts posted on Awful Announcing:

Temple-Michigan State

Oral Roberts-Pittsburgh

Belmont-Duke

George Mason-Notre Dame

CBSSports.com announced it has used up its initial allotment of 500,000 VIP passes for "March Madness on Demand" and released another 250,000 available until 5:30 this afternoon.

You don't need VIP registration to participate, but it eases entry into the system during busy times.

CBS is expecting another record-breaking year of video streams, with every game in the tournament available for the first time.

Thursday figures to be the busiest day, because many fans will not be working on Good Friday.

Cornell-Stanford won't be on in New York, so the computer or DirecTV's out-of-market service will be your only options for seeing the big game.

Or you could hop a plane to California and rent a hotel room.

Bob Knight had brunch Tuesday.

With a sportswriter. A female sportswriter. Who has criticized him in the past.

No, really.

Coming tomorrow:

Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner share cucumber sandwiches and a bottle of Chablis during a picnic lunch in Sunken Meadow State Park.

I'm more of a Dr. Brown's Diet Cream guy, but our friends at Coke Zero have come up with a very strange, very cool toy to fill out NCAA brackets.

It's called "Bracket-O-Matic."

I'm pretty sure it has no practical value, but I just played around with it and somehow accidentally manipulated the categories to get Cornell to beat Winthrop in the championship game.

So maybe it does have practical value after all.

Speaking of which . . . check this out, via Deadspin.

(UPDATE: The friendly p.r. people in charge of this sent a PDF file that explains the methodology. I'd paraphrase it here if I understood it. But I haven't taken a math class since 11th grade at Northport High.)

The tornado-delayed SEC Championship Game Sunday will be seen on ESPN2 at 3:30, not on CBS at 1 as originally scheduled.

CBS will be busy with the Big Ten finale at 3:30. Although the SEC game will be shown on ESPN2, it will be produced by CBS.

CBS will expand its "Road to the Final Four'' show to fill the entire noon to 3:30 p.m. time slot with highlights and analysis of conference tournament action.

If CBS wants a live game to fill some of that time, it could always show the special playoff between Cornell and Dartmouth at 2 p.m. for the Ivy League women's title at Columbia.

Just a thought.

Hard to believe it's been 25 years since Lorenzo Charles was in the right place at the right time.

Notice how Gary Bender and Billy Packer stay quiet for a long time after the winning basket, a practice common today in such circumstances but not as much so back then.

Also check out Thurl Bailey's hideous Final Four hat in his post-game interview.

Modern merchandisers never would allow a hat like that to appear on the head of an athlete who just won the big one.

Doctors in Oregon are running an unusual promotion tied to the NCAA basketball tournament.

I'd prefer you read about it yourself than force me to go into the gory details here.

Let's just say the nets won't be the only thing being snipped during the Big Dance.

Going to write a newspaper column now.

Enjoy the 2001 Santa Clara-Gonzaga game on ESPN Classic at 4 p.m.

It appears my relentless hyping of Will Ferrell and "Semi-Pro" last week was of relatively little use.

The movie was No. 1 at the box office for the weekend, but the experts were unimpressed by its overall take.

Yeah, I know everyone is sick of "Semi-Pro" already because of my many newspaper and blog stories on Will Ferrell.

But check out this excellent piece on ABA unis and logos that was inspired by the movie's opening.

You just can't beat the Oakland Oaks' dribbling acorn.

(I attended Game 7 of the 1976 Nets-Spurs playoff showdown, by the way. Great series.)

This is what I found most interesting about my Tuesday visit with Will Ferrell:

During the news conference I attended with about 25 other reporters, he was cracking deadpan jokes left and right, as you would expect from him.

But once he was off stage and talking one-on-one, he was able to turn off his performance switch and become a regular person.

Example:

Ferrell recently received the James Joyce Award in Dublin. Here is what he told an Irish reporter about his familiarity with Joyce:

"I've always been a fan of his films, 'Titanic,' 'The Terminator' and all those. They’re always too long, though. They just took a wild stab to see if I would even respond and it turned out I was going to be over there anyway so I said, 'Sure, I’ll come over.' They were thrilled regardless of the fact there was no reason I should receive that award."

Click below for more wisecracks.

I included in my Friday newspaper column about Will Ferrell a brief version of his story about the day he had the revelation that he was more suited to comedy than journalism.

Click below for the complete account from our conversation Tuesday afternoon.

One reason sports movies are a difficult sell for studios is the perception that women will not go to see them in large numbers.

Here is what Will Ferrell, who has starred in four sports comedies in the past four years, including "Semi-Pro," which came out today, had to say about that:

"The people I hear talk about it, there’s comments like, well, it’s sports, will we get the women in to see the movie? This that and the other. But I never think about that stuff. If it seems funny and interesting, aside from the fact I’ve done all these sports movies, I kind of just go forward and hope that it will stand on its own two feet in terms of just being considered a funny movie. I think we calibrated the movie enough to wear it’s not so basketball heavy that if you don’t know anything about basketball or hate basketball you won’t be turned off by the movie."

The middle-aged actors involved in the making of the movie "Semi-Pro" said they suffered no significant injuries during the filming.

Said Will Ferrell: "We had a two-week training camp and I was playing a little before that. I was in fairly decent running shape prior to that. So I was OK, I was all right, I was never too winded or anything like that."

I asked him about being widely filmed and photographed in tight-fitting, old-style basketball duds.

"That’s how form fitting that equipment was," he said. "It wasn’t a goal to look svelte. In photos that I looked at from that era, while the guys had athletic bodies they weren’t the bodies of today, where they were ripped. A lot of guys in the general casting for all the teams, if you were too muscular they didn’t cast you, because it was a different type of body then."

Will Ferrell's new movie, "Semi-Pro," is rated R, which it earned the old-fashioned way - with naughty words and a naughty, simulated s-e-x scene.

Doesn't that limit the potential audience, though?

I asked director Kent Alterman about that the other day, and he joked, "We went for an NC-17 rating, but didn't get it. We fell short."

But seriously, folks, he said the reason for not going for a PG-13 rating was to remain true to the era and the ABA culture.

"How can you have a movie about pro basketball players and not have cursing?" he said.

I asked Ferrell about this as well. Here is what he said:

"I was ecstatic to do an R-rated movie again. The last one I’d done was 'Old School,' and the next one I have is R-rated, too, 'Step Brothers.' PG-13 is kind of fun because you have to live within those confines, but some projects are just R-rated, and this was R-rated. I think there has been kind of a new infusion of R-rated comedies that have done well enough so studios aren’t as nervous about doing them."

If I had been writing a review of "Semi-Pro" for Friday's newspaper, rather than a feature/column on Will Ferrell, I would have given it two stars.

Big fans of Ferrell likely will enjoy it to a point, but it does not exactly break any new ground, nor is it as cleverly written or sharply observed as "Talladega Nights."

Turns out Newsday's own Gene Seymour had basically the same impression I did, and he's a movie reviewing professional!

Here is his review for Friday's paper.

Just another lazy, late February evening of TV sports:

ESPN: Kansas at Iowa State

SNY: UNC-Wilmington at VCU

YES: Texas Tech at Texas A&M

FSNY: Cincinnati at Pittsburgh

Uncle!

Save us, Johan.

Loyal WatchDog reader CJ Papa sent this video of himself playing against the Harlem Globetrotters at the Coliseum.

The Generals just haven't been the same since they started getting desperate and hiring journalists to fill out their roster.

CJ did much better than I would have. He hit the rim several times.

Here's a cool link to YouTube featuring the shooting acumen of an L.A. Clippers cheerleader.

Sure, I could have posted a revealing picture of a Clippers cheerleader. But I'm going with a modest shot of a pensive Clippers fan to prove to Glauber I'm above cheap stunts to help with page views.

Speaking of the Clippers, I caught Mike Breen's pre-game interview with the injured Elton Brand on MSG Wednesday night. Breen practically hugged the guy while gushing about what a solid citizen and excellent ambassador for the NBA he is.

Breen resisted the temptation to add . . . "Unlike some people I know.''

OK, that's it. I'll check later this afternoon. Enjoy the endless sports talk radio discussion of last night's Rangers-Devils game. There's nothing left to say about A-Rod. Right?

Things took at least one startling, disturbing turn in Newsday's blog world in my absence with the news that Knicks beat writer Alan Hahn and Jessica Simpson now are an item.

Wow. Good for Alan, but I've made eye contact with numerous celebrities over the years - not including Ms. Simpson.

A few months back I felt a connection with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though the mood was dampened by the fact we were talking about horse racing and her husband was standing behind her and she was many months pregnant.

I once talked to Alyssa Milano, but it was on the phone, so no eye contact.

Come to think of it, that's about it, I guess. I have focused on eye contact many times when interviewing naked athletes, but that's different.

After the Cowboys-Giants game Sunday night, I did have a nice chat with Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan after he hugged Michael Strahan.

We talked about what we always talk about: the Giants and shofar blowing.

Our eyes definitely met.

On Monday I waged a silent protest against living and working in Baseball City:

I temporarily sought shelter from the Torre/Girardi/Donnie Baseball/A-Rod/Boras/Hank Steinbrenner Wars at a luncheon in the big city with TNT studio analysts Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith.

Sir Charles' mouth was in fine working order, about 30 hours before TNT's much-praised NBA studio show debuted for 2007-08.

Click below for some thoughts from Barkley on a variety of topics.

LeBron James has created quite a stir in Cleveland by openly rooting for the Yankees during the ALDS.

Flying under the radar has been a prominent New York sports figure who has gone in the opposite direction.

Mark Chernoff, WFAN's operations director, has a strong rooting interest in the Indians. Why? Because his son, Mike, is the team's director of baseball operations.

He's one of those Ivy League (Princeton) wunderkinds who has made a ridiculously fast rise up the baseball executive ranks. Seems like he knows what he's doing so far.

LeBron James is rooting for the Yankees over the Indians, as SportsWatch reported Friday.

Not surprisingly, famously cranky Bob Feller is unamused. But a prominent Cleveland columnist is OK with it. Read about that here.

It's so weird that there will be a New York team involved in the playoffs this week.

It's so weird that it's not the Mets.

I was in Bryant Park May 30 when the Yankees game was shown on a big screen in an annual event. They were down 14 1/2 games going into that one, which they won.

I wrote a column for that Friday's newspaper wondering what the heck the YES Network was going to do in August and September with nothing but meaningless games to show.

YES executives declined to discuss the matter with me at the time because it was a long season and hey, you never know.

You never do.