XXL: MUST-SEE TV

Olympics

The end is near. Four more nights of Olympics fantasyland before it’s back to the cold, hard reality of preseason football and wherever your baseball team currently sits in the standings.

Tonight the NBC prime-time show (8 p.m.) features the men’s 400m and an all-American showdown between LaShawn Merritt and Athens gold-medalist Jeremy Wariner. At 10 p.m. on NBC is the women’s 10m platform diving final, where the Chinese look to go for 7-for-7 in the Beijing diving events (note to self: never challenge a Chinese person to a diving contest). And at 11 p.m. on NBC, Americans Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers try to make it an American beach volleyball sweep in Beijing in the men’s beach volleyball final. CNBC has three gold-medal wrestling matches starting at 5 p.m. and at midnight CNBC brings live coverage of the South Korea/Japan baseball semifinal.

OLYMPICS TIVO ALERT

NBC covers the Redeem Team’s semifinal tomorrow morning live (10:15 a.m.) as the Americans take on Athens gold-medalist Argentina for the right to advance to the gold-medal game on Sunday.

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In a shock to all of the New York sneaker heads who think they are super special -- myself being one of them -- Nike Sportswear has added the full array of NIKEiD Studio "exclusive" options to their NIKEiD online shop.

All of the options that I posted earlier this week are now available on the Nike Sportswear site, and, the mighty Air Force 1 has been added to the online roster of All-Stars as well. Air Force 1s are priced at the supreme level of $225, Air Max 90s run a cool $150, Dunk His hit for $140, the Cortez is $110, Dunk Low is $120, and the Rejuven8 is $125.

I guess this means that even if you live in Charlotte, you can cop yourself a fresh pair of your own NIKEiDs. (Editor's note: Ouch, my pride!)

To check out the NIKEiD options, visit Nike Sportswear

A unique sort of sports book was released in hardback this week, John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. It’s the story of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and the way in which Nelson Mandela, then the recently elected South African President, conspired to bring the tournament to South Africa and rally his constituents, both white and black, around the home nation’s underdog team -- the eventual champion Springboks -- as a means to healing the deep racial wounds of apartheid.

Carlin’s title alludes to the fact that rugby in South Africa predominantly was viewed as a sport of the ruling white elite, its obsession in fact, such that placing so much stock in a rugby tournament (not to mention famously handing over the trophy in a Springboks’ uniform) was a clear bit of political gamesmanship by Mandela. He was a leader using the power of sport to both court and placate the emotions of the still-powerful and powerfully disaffected white South African populace.

At a time in which we are all being bombarded by a totalitarian sports-political propaganda machine in Beijing that is making us (some of us anyway) a little uncomfortable, it’s perhaps useful to remember that even the most admirable leaders posed with the most difficult problems have wielded the spectacle of an international sporting event to their own political ends. “Don’t address their brains,” reads the book’s epigraph. “Address their hearts.” A quote from Mandela himself that concisely sums up the situation.

Playing the Enemy is in bookstores now, if, you know, you’re one of those Luddites who still goes to bookstores. If not, you can just click here to peruse the goods.

For sports fans, sometimes it's just not good enough to wear boring, authorized team gear. Unique tees like this, or this, are to slightly nerdy athletic fanatics what great Ramones or Smiths shirts are to music snobs. On a regular basis, we'll showcase the best of new, old, and rare sports-related t-shirts around the web. If you have a submission, send it to FirstCuts@sportingnews.com

With the Redeem Team all set to square off in the semifinals Friday morning against Argentina, and the gold medal looking like a lock as LeBron James predicted, there's little drama left for the AND1 international tour of NBA superstars. This has my mind drifting back to the original Dream Teams. (Full disclosure: I, sadly I might add, owned a Shawn Kemp Team USA jersey back in the day). It was fortuitous, then, that I came upon a trio of shirts at by Akomplice featuring NBA icons of the past that wore the red, white, and blue (and gold).

You might remember Scottie Pippen as MJ's sidekick, but if you were a casual fan during the Bulls/Knicks rivalry, you probably remember him more for jawing with Spike Lee. Trash talking is always more entertaining than actual basketball, at least when you're a Cavs fan and you wish pure hell on the Bulls. Number 23 gets his own design as well, looking pretty hanging in midair as only he could, and Magic and Bird square off and ammo-up on the "Choices" layout.

Love them all, especially the Pippen scheme, but when you talk about the Dream Teams, there's really only one t-shirt that bears mentioning. If anyone stumbles upon it on a Salvation Army rack, consider yourself lucky.

I'm still sort of playing catch-up right now in the world of sports games (come on, game companies, let's space this stuff out!), but I've got another one to add to the list. NHL 2K9's demo from 2K Sports is available for download on both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.

In other NHL 2K9 news, a trailer was released for the Nintendo Wii version of the game earlier this week. Sports games have been so hit or miss to this point, I'm not sure how the precise passing that is required in hockey will do. It seems like we're still in a feeling out period while everyone waits for Wii Motion Plus.

NHL 2K9 will be available for the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Sept. 9. Impressions from the Xbox 360 demo to come early next week.

eBay is full of hidden games, particularly when it comes to sports-related items. David Arnott brings you the best oddities.

In the Floridian hinterland between Braves Country and Marlins Territory, there's been an uprising. The Tampa Bay Rays are a young juggernaut, crashing through their competition on their way to the American League playoffs. For the baseball public, this insurrection ranks somewhere near Brady Anderson's 50 home runs on the improbability scale.

You see, there was no guarantee the dark days would ever end, especially back in 2002, when the Devil Rays went 55-106. Most of the players that saw Major League action for Tampa's home nine that season were too old or too mediocre to inspire any hope for the future.

An expansion team in a retirement community with a hockey arena for a ballyard is starting three steps back to begin with, so stocking the organization with substandard prospects must have been demoralizing for anyone thinking about investing emotion and money into the new team. Greg Vaughn personified the team's place in the MLB ecosystem, but there were three other players who personified what little hope the team had of surviving.

Look at Jared Sandberg and Toby Hall. Each is afflicted with a strain of ill-advised facial hair common to professional baseball players. In the minors, Sandberg hit reasonably well, but never truly broke through. After playing Major League ball in only parts of three seasons, he was done. On his way out, though, Sandberg gained a little notoriety when he mentioned the Devil Rays should not honor Satan with their name.

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There are a lot of self-righteous gamers on the web who take great joy in finding any glitch in any video game, then taking shaky cam footage and posting it to YouTube.

The "Jesus Shot" in Tiger Woods 08 was pretty popular with nearly 70,000 views, but EA took that mistake and turned it into their latest ad campaign.
Hey, at least EA has a sense of humor about it. Somehow, I'm sure someone will just be offended by the Jesus imagery. I mean really, who would do something like that? /sarcasm

(H/T to You Been Blinded)