Why is that even if you say something so obviously supported by any reasonable measure there is always someone out there to distort what you say and disagree with you. All I said was that it was a very close call between the two of them as for the greatest ever. You can manipulate the stats any way you want but they will always come out as showing that the two of them in their primes were head and shoulders above everyone else and were very close to each other. Additionally, the one factor which is not reflected in their individual stats is the quality of their teammates. Gretzky's teammates were so good that they won a stanley cup without him. It could not reasonably be argued that the Pens without Mario were even close to being championship quality. Put Gretzky on those Penguin teams and he simply does not rack up those awesome assist numbers. Having said that I still can't argue with 99 as the greatest ever. He probably was but it's very very close.

This Reebok sham is really worthy of wider publicity and you should be applauded for "outing" them. They should be shamed into giving the million bucks.

I don't like any of these contributions that are tied to performance, ya know the $1,000 for every Home Run or whatever, but at least there you know that some money will be donated. If companies want to give to charity I have a suggestion. do what the rest of us do when we want to donate to charity, which is right a check for the amount you actually want to give. It is unseemly the way charitable contributions are used to garner publicity.

On the PapaJohns piece, as a legal matter I'm not sure there restriction to those commonly thought of as "quarterbacks" actually would hold up. It would seem to depend on how the rule book actually defines a quarterback. Can't anybody on the team actually play quarterback on any particular play? If Hines Ward throws a pass on a particular play isn't he actually the quarterback on that play? While this might seem esoteric, recall that the Green Bay running back who avoided a safety by throwing the ball away fell within the purview of the intentional grounding rules.

I agree with King to a point that poor people are priced out of the sports market but I get the feeling that much of these complaints stem from the ever-prevalent sentimentalism for the days of the 70s when all the sports we watched was free, even though there wasn't all that much of it.

The big shift took place in the early 80s (at least in my part of the country, the NY area) and since then the situation has been pretty stable. If you look at the amount of sports that is available on free TV it seems as if it's pretty close to what it was about 20, though not 30, years ago. You still get your two or three NFL games on Sunday, your college football, college basketball, a little network hockey, a little network basketball and all the big golf tournaments. It's true that the pro bowlers tour and horse racing has been shifted to cable, but I'm sorry to say that who is going to win the Hambletonian hasn't been a concern of mine for many years. The era of 100+ games of free baseball was gone in the 70s and now most markets get somewhere between 20-40 free games a year of their hometeam, it seems to me. If this changes, that will be unfortunate but I think free baseball will always be available to some degree and a cheap seat is still about the price of a movie, which is about what it has always been, so I don't think there is any real cause for alarm.

In other words, at this point, what is happening is that more sports is being made availbale on cable, but not at the expense of free TV. This latest installment is a perfect example. Why should someone who doesn't have cable complain that the NFL is making some games available to those who can pay for it rather than not make them available to anybody (except for the dish people), as they do now. The growth of cable has been the single best thing to happen to sports in my lifetime (other than the 1986 Mets). I'm thrilled that I can now watch the home games of the Knicks and Rangers, which I never could as a kid, and can watch many more college football and basketball games than before. And the best part is that none of this comes at the expense of the people from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, who for all I know probably still aren't wired for cable, since they can tune in and watch about the same things as they did in 1985.

To respond to the letter in defense of the Aggies trademark, the main issue in the case is whether the phrase "12 man" has any source identification left. In other words, in a game of word association when you hear 12th man do you say Texas A&M or Aggies. I think most people don't, or if you're a big college football fan you would say that it originated with the Aggies but now it is used generically. Similar to how a knowledgable person might know that "elevator" was once a trademark of the Otis company. There are many cases involving so-caled "lost" trademarks, such as elevator, escalator, and thermos just to name a few. This is likely to fall into that category