Hit and Run: With Spring in our Step

Here's Marquette, whose victory over Syracuse last night made me cry. (Photo: Getty Images)

It’s Monday. How are your brackets looking? Like hell? Thought so.

First of all, a warm welcome to our special guest Ladies… Bracket Brawl participants: Melissa_thistle, Courknee35, Big10Bias and fellow Canuck/friend of the blog Andrew Bucholtz (you will go read his blog The 55-Yard Line now, won’t you?) Our current leader isn’t in our Ladies… group – due to technical difficulties, we had to create another group on ESPN.com so one gal could get her picks in. That gal is Buffalita, leading the pack with 460 points and picking Ohio State to win it all. CuteSports and Raven round out the Top 3 at 440 and 430 points respectively. Any hopes I had of repeating last year’s surprise success have been flushed down the proverbial toilet. I blame Butler.

Best of luck heading into Thursday! Sweet Sixteen will be hopefully be sweet for some of you.

So what else is going on?

NCAA Wrestling Championships: An Assisted Recap

Hello, Darrion Caldwell. Hello, Darrion Caldwell's arms.

Last weekend wasn’t just for NCAA basketball in my family; my parents, brother and sister-in-law all went to St. Louis for the Division I Wrestling championships.  I’m sure Chitown Chick would want me to mention that Iowa won, though they did it without having any individual champions (this ESPN article headline sums up the anticlimactic nature of the Hawkeye win).

My brother was kind enough to give me a summary of the more interesting stories of the weekend — he drew the line at helping me pick out the cute wrestlers, but I can do that on my own.

The arms above belong to  NC State wrestler Darrion Caldwell.  Darrion pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the tournament, defeating Iowa’s Brent Metcalf (who had lost only twice in his college career).  Unfortunately, Darrion got a little carried away with his victory celebration and then this happened …

A Note On Our New Banner

The Ladies… are excited about the Olympics, and judging by your response to the Ryan Lochte Hump Day Hottie, you are excited, too. With that in mind, we didn’t want to wait until August to unveil our Olympic banner. Explanation of who these hotties are and their chances in Beijing are after the jump.

Hump Day Hottie: Wrestling Olympians

I spent this weekend at the U.S. Olympic Trials for wrestling, and there was eye candy everywhere. With less than two months until the Beijing games begin, I feel it is my patriotic duty to share these hotties with you. Remember, you’re not ogling these hotties for your own, selfish purposes. You are ogling these hotties for the good of the country. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Hump Day Hottie: Arizona State Wrestling

UPDATE: WRESTLING HAS BEEN REINSTATED AT ARIZONA STATE! HUZZAH!

As I have mentioned before, wrestling is my favorite sport. (The real stuff, not WWE.) An unfortunate reality in the world of wrestling is that at the college level, the sport is being decimated. 458 programs have been dropped since 1972. As a wrestling fan, I’ve written letters, bought t-shirts and donated money to try to save myriad programs, including Syracuse, Clemson, Slippery Rock, Fresno St. and Eastern Illinois. Oregon just finished their final season (damn you, Nike!) and on Tuesday, Arizona State announced that they were dropping wrestling, effective immediately. (They are also dropping men’s swimming and men’s tennis, citing economic reasons.) This breaks my heart, not just because a storied program is ending, not just because the Pac-10 is quickly dying, but also because of the hotties we’ll be missing out on. With that in mind, I bring to you the hotties of Arizona State wrestling, both present and past.

Heavyweight Quinton Pruett, formerly a Sun Devil. How cruel is the AD at ASU to deny us this?

Wrestling the Bout of His Life

Adam Frey lived the normal life of a college wrestler. He worked out like a madman, worried about making weight, set a goal to win a national championship, and when that didn’t happen, he cheered on his teammate who did. Of course, life had a different plan for Adam, the 141 lb. wrestler for Cornell University. A few days after wrestling at the NCAA Championships, Adam survived a terrible car accident just to find out that he had cancer.

Too cute to be cancer-iffic!

The Other NCAA Tournament

In all the hoopla surrounding the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament brackets (Siena Elite 8, you heard it here first!), there is another bracket that was released last night:  the NCAA Mens Wrestling Tournament, which takes place in St. Louis March 20th-22nd.  Between Iowa, Iowa State and UNI my state has 28 wrestlers competing; Iowa is missing a wrestler at 197 and UNI is missing a heavyweight.  But that’s still a lot of muscles…in spandex…rolling around….*shake* I’m back.  I’m pretty pumped about it, so here are some wrestling hotties:

Rasslin’

The Big Ten Men’s Wrestling Tournament was this weekend and while I could not be there taking awesome pictures like last time, it was exciting nonetheless.

For the conference tourney, each school gets to send one wrestler per weight class for 10 wrestlers each. The Top 7 in each weight class advance to the NCAA tourney in St. Louis in two weeks. (The top 7 seems like a lot to me, but that’s how it’s done.) Iowa is sending 9 of its 10 wrestlers to the National tourney, with only sophomore Chad Beatty not making the cut.

Overall we ended up with one champion in Brent Metcalf, one 2nd place in my wrestling boyfriend Mark Perry, four 3rd places, a 4th place and a 7th place. All in all, that’s kind of a disappointing showing by the Iowa Hawkeyes but it was still good enough to take the team crown with 127 points. Minnesota was 2nd with 112.5.

Old School Winners!

I was very pleased by our reader response, we had 10 great entries. However, the 1st place, grand poobah, head cheese winner is…Chris from The Yemen Deli! He got all 81 points possible! We are also going to award 2nd place prizes to the two submissions that got 79 out of 81 points, The Chief from Hugging Harold Reynolds and JC from…his house! (I do not know if JC has a blog, but if he emails me I’ll gladly link to it). Congratulations to you all and thank you to everyone who took the time to submit an answer. If the 3 winners could email me to discuss their prize (ooooh, it’s a good ‘un!) that’d be great. Also, Clay and Jen get a shout-out for getting very high scores of 76 and 74, respectively.

The Game Plan: A Primer

So I took a break from my thrillicious morning (read: applying for middle management jobs at Tire Kingdom) to check out the The Game Plan, the latest escapee from the Disney DVD vault, starring The “Dwayne Johnson” Rock. Mr. Rock plays Joe Kingman, the QB of the Boston Rebels who loves himself, football, and Elvis—in that order—although his Elvis worship is perhaps based on their mutual nickname, “The King”. The Rebels have plowed through their opponents to reach the playoffs of the Unnamed-For-Copyright-Reasons football league and Joe is a big part of their success, mainly because he refuses to pass to his teammates in favor of running in all of the touchdowns himself.*

It just takes one glance at the suitcase-toting pixie beside him on the DVD case, and we can surmise that things are going to change for Joe**, that he won’t be spending many more evenings alone, watching and re-watching Sportcenter segments about himself (which is how I imagine Terrell Owens spends his free time).

The night after a party involving Russian models and, um, teammates leaving early to get home to their families (Right, like you expected Playmakers), Joe answers a knock at his door and learns that the girl standing in the hall is the result of one of his, um, naked bootlegs. Now before you spew some Tom Brady/Matt Leinart-style snark, allow me to point out that Joe was married to her mother, Sarah, and they were divorced before she knew she’d been quarterback sneaked. And she’s now off providing fresh drinking water to the drought-ravaged children of the Sudan***, so don’t hate.

Old-School WWF

For a chance to win a prizes (or just to show off), we’ve set up some rasslin’ trivia. Yesterday, your intellects were tickled by Clare’s trivia. Today, we’re hopping in our Delorean and going back to old-school wrestling. I grew up watching these guys (Royal Rumbles were my FAVORITE. They were SO exciting.) Since these wrestlers were popular 15-20 years ago, we’re simply going to test your memories in a Name That Wrestler contest.

Email andrealeigh203@gmail.com with your answers. Do not put your answers in the comments. (Because then other people can see them). You have until Thursday at 2 pm EST. Some of these are gimmes, but some are damn obscure. We gotta separate the boys from the men. Or the girls from the women. Or the jezebels from the ladies. You get the idea.

We’ll start off with an easy one…but do you know who the lady is?

Rocking it out with Dwayne Johnson

A few weeks ago, the good people at Disney contacted us to tell us Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s movie The Game Plan was coming out on DVD today and did we want to do a little something about it?

In about five minutes, our afternoon email round robin took a decidedly “OMG THE ROCK!! SQUEEEEEEE!!” tone. So today and tomorrow, we’re grooming our eyebrows and sharpening our People’s elbows to bring you Rocky goodness in review, flashback and quiz form.

And you can win stuff! That’s right! We have real, honest to blog prizes to give away.

Smell what the Ladies… are cooking after the jump.

Weekend Whimsy

Here’s a fun little video I came across.  High school wrestler Brent Foxhoven out of Archbishop Bergan High School in Nebraska gets caught by one leg in a match and does what any normal person would totally do in that position:  a back flip.  Now, I don’t know how much I buy the idea that he got his opponent right where he wanted him or that he’s been practicing this move.  But it’s pretty sweet nonetheless.

2008 National Duals

For the first time since 1996 the University of Iowa won the National Duals. At this meet, there were D-I, D-II, D-III, NAIA, NJCAA, and NCWA schools for a total of 80 teams. On Saturday, they had 18 mats going all day. Since I wangled myself a press pass, I got to be right down in the action. It was sensory overload. I have never in my life been around so many completely jacked guys. I’ve also never felt more Brobdingnagian. Wrestlers tend to run on the…short side. Wading through the crowds, I was like Godzilla attacking Toyko. Tiny muscular men were bouncing off me every which way. I’m pretty sure there are still a couple 125-lb wrestlers stuck to my shoe.

Bringing the Heat – Detroit Tigers: Bonus Granderson Interview and Player Yearbook Photos Included!

It is almost not fair. We have been doing this MLB “Bringing the Heat” series all summer long; team by team, hottie by hottie, forearm by forearm, smile by smile, glute by glute, and I would wager that none – none – of the other teams even come close to stacking up to how hot the Detroit Tigers’ roster is on and off the field.

Our readers have been emailing all summer waiting for this post. They knew that here at Ladies…, not only were we going to find the best looking guys on the team, but we were going make sure to serve it up with something a little special. Well, how about a couple helpings of something special?

In a Ladies… first, an interview with Detroit center fielder and fellow blogger, Curtis Granderson. Followed by a full on smorgasboard of the finest looking Tigers in the land. And for dessert? How about some of cutest yearbook photos of Sean “The Mayor” Casey you will ever see?

I thought you’d be interested.

Batting first, as always, Mr. Granderson.