Why do hundreds of people come to Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln every year to watch rats climb ropes?  Because it’s the Xtreme Rat Challenge, of course!  Only A Game’s Martin Wells attended this year, and he brought his camera.

Bowl Mania with Dan Wetzel
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The College Football Bowl Season is in full swing, and that means we’re well on our way to finding out just how badly the B.C.S. system got it wrong this year.  Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports offers his analysis.

Xtreme Rat Challenge
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Each year, hundreds of people come to Nebraska Wesleyan University to see the event which was called the “Rat Olympics” until the USOC objected a few years ago, and which the psychology department feels is a valuable learning tool for its students.  Martin Wells has the story from Lincoln, Nebraska.
View Martin’s XRC Photo Gallery

Commentary
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As we move from 2008 into 2009, many people find themselves looking forward. Commentator Bill Littlefield, on the other hand, looks backward and thinks about what might have been.

NFL Playoffs and More with Charlie Pierce
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Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce discuss; NFL playoff predictions, aging athletes, and the wrong way to stop a drunk driver.

It is late summer, 2007.

I take the luxury flight to Las Vegas…the one reserved for high rollers bound to lose vast amounts, the absence of which they will consider unremarkable.

I stroll into the strip’s most opulent sports book. I suppose it has red flock wallpaper. In the background, I hear the gentle hum of televised horse racing. I can tell it is a class joint, because the wailing of losers is muffled.

Having remortgaged my house, cashed in my life insurance, rifled my children’s college funds, and pawned my watch, my pockets are bulging with large bills. Still, I manage a nonchalance that suggests that I know exactly what I’m doing. I remind myself a little of James Bond as played by Sean Connery.

A padded door toward the back of the room opens silently. Having recognized a potentially important client through his surveillance system, the manager of the book-making establishment advances toward me with his right hand extended. His fingers are encumbered by rings even bigger than the ones given to men who win the Super Bowl.  I catch the man’s hand in both of mine just before he would have tipped over on to the plush carpeting.

“Thank you,” he says. And then, “How can we be of service?”

We step into his paneled office, where I begin piling cash on his enormous mahogany desk.

His eyes grow wide.

“I want to bet this on a two-part proposition,” I tell him. “For the first time since the NFL began playing sixteen regular season games, one team will go undefeated.”
 
The manager tells me the odds he can give me on this  development. They are exceptionally attractive.

“But wait,” I tell him. “There’s more.”

His wide eyes begin to shine.

“In the next season, for the first time ever, another team will go 0-16.”

The odds that this parlay will hit are, of course, preposterous. The man with the wide, shining eyes rapidly calculates that if he takes my bet and loses, he will be working for me. He dabs his forehead with a white handkerchief, but he takes the money. How can he lose?

Fast forward two NFL seasons. During one, the New England Patriots go 16-0. During the next, the Detroit Lions go 0-16. The headlines tell of falling markets, evaporating retirement funds, fortunes lost in a Ponzi scheme. This news does not lay a glove on me.

Each edition of this annual collection reflects the tastes of the guest editor. William Nack, who chose the winners for the 2008 volume from the seventy or so candidates submitted to him by series editor Glenn Stout, went for several stories featuring athletes who survived grim situations, some of them life-threatening. Then, feeling that he should lighten things up a little, Nack tucked in an allegedly funny golf story by his pal, Dan Jenkins…an entry that hadn’t been on Stout’s list.

Among the more compelling stories in The Best American Sports Writing, 2008 is the one chronicling Franz Lidz’s encounter with the decidedly diminished George Steinbrenner, who is now apparently the boss of nothing. Paul Solotaroff’s sad account of how badly lots of damaged former NFL players are faring will strike some readers as old news, but it’s the sort of news with which writers should keep hammering the NFL and the players union until they start taking responsibility for the carnage.

The Portland Trailblazers are having a great season.  Their arena is full and they’re poised to make the playoffs for the first time since 2003.  Only A Game’s Sadie Babits recently caught up with the Blazers and their fans, and she brought her camera.

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This week on Only A Game, the best stories of 2008!

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Bill talks with John B. Weinstein & Carsey Yee, who offered some pronunciation tips before the 2008 Beijing Games.

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OAG’s Karen Given travels to Westerly, RI to learn about a competition involving the identification of all things living.

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Bill attends a track meet held at one of the nation’s most respected schools for the blind.

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OAG’s Charlie Schroeder attends the American Library Association’s 2008 National Conference in Anaheim, and reports on one of the funniest competitions we’ve discovered in 15 years of covering funny sports.

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After swimmer Michael Phelps earned just about all the fame there is to earn at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, we wondered what it would be like if Phelps were to turn to a career in movies.

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Bill talks with author Charles Leerhsen about his biography of one of the most famous athletes this country has ever produced, trotter Dan Patch.

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Only A Game’s Doug Tribou heads outs for coastal Maine to see why it is that normally laconic Mainers are taking to supercharged lobster boats.

Bill Littlefield recently met some of the Boston Bruins’ most loyal season ticket holders and brought back photos for us to enjoy.

A mid-December day in downtown Boston with a high temperature in the upper 20’s? No problem! More than 500 intrepid runners braved the cold in their bathing suits and finest holiday accessories for the 9th annual Santa Speedo Run. The fundraiser collected more than $175, 000 for "Cradles to Crayons," a charity that provides clothes, toys, and school supplies to children in need. Only A Game’s Doug Tribou was there and took these photos.  

During the New Year, women’s professional soccer will try again. This time the league is actually called Women’s Professional Soccer, or WPS, and since those engaged in restarting the enterprise apparently didn’t entrust their resources to Bernard Madoff, the league says the deal is still on.
 
Last week, WPS announced that PUMA had signed on as a founding partner. This week features a combine for hopefuls in Florida. Next month, the WPS teams will draft players from Brazil and various other nations to augment the members of the U.S. National Team already allocated.

The league’s administrators maintain that they’ve learned caution from the failure of the new league’s predecessor, the WUSA, which lasted just three seasons, and Kristine Lilly, the most durable and determined soccer player of either gender in any era, will play for Boston. She will be a draw anywhere.

On the negative side, Lilly’s former teammates, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Julie “Loudy” Foudy and the rest of the cast that filled the Rose Bowl in 1999 are long retired.
 
Though it can’t have been on purpose, the league will begin play with just seven teams. Eight would have been tidier. So would six.
 
Has ever a sports enterprise tried to launch under less promising circumstances? Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL have all cut their staffs. This week, having assured their fans that it wouldn’t, the Arena Football League threw itself for the ultimate loss and closed up shop. The universities that will host some of the WPS teams have announced hiring freezes, so maybe they’ll spend the money to water the soccer field, maybe not. Notwithstanding how insensitive children can be, the fan base of the WPS may be too distracted wondering if their parents will be able to afford prep courses for the SAT’s, let alone tuition bills, to clamor for a season’s ticket to see the women’s games.

Full disclosure: I was a fan of the WUSA. When it looked as if I might have the opportunity to become the P.A.
announcer at Boston Breakers games, I almost considered giving up my day job and going on the dole to take the gig. So I’m rooting for the new league as reporters can’t but commentators can. I’m for the underdog, and if the WPS does prevail, the result could be one of the brightest – if more unlikely - sports stories of 2009.

When you’ve finished reading The First Tip-Off, you may find yourself wondering how the NBA has managed to survive, let alone thrive.

In 1946, several intrepid businessmen and a collection of World War II veterans with nothing better to do began a basketball league. The BAA was marginally more organized than the various short-lived ventures that had paid basketball players in the past, but the new league still had the sort of problems likely to trouble any seat-of-the-pants start-up. Most of the teams played on temporary floors laid over the ice in hockey arenas, meaning that it was either very cold on the court, or that the floor was very wet, depending on the temperature that night. In some of the towns where BAA games transpired, the writers had no experience watching (let alone writing about) basketball. Several of them wondered in their stories why players who committed fouls weren’t sent to the penalty box, thus forcing their teams to operate with four players for two minutes.

One of the more colorful characters in the league’s first year was Red Auerbach, who coached the Washington Capitals. Auerbach would later achieve glory as the coach and then general manager of the Boston Celtics during many of their championship years. According to Charley Rosen, who wrote The First Tip-Off, Auerbach learned early in the ’46-’47 season that the officials, some of whom were betting on games, could be intimidated. Thereafter he “felt justified in stomping, shouting, and spitting at and cursing the refs whenever a call went against the Caps.”

Hence people who prefer to regard Red Auerbach as an avuncular fellow should not read the parts of this book in which he appears.