Time to start outing athletes? I don't think so, LZ

In all the years I've been a sports reporter, I've rarely had a good reason to ask an athlete, coach or administrator this question:

"Who are you shtupping?"

Apparently, LZ Granderson thinks we should start asking those hard questions of sports figures who might be gay. Granderson, who writes for ESPN The Magazine and is one of the few out gay sportswriters in the business, believes it's time reporters treat gay athletes the same as straight athletes and write about their private lives:

The negative writers of Nascar

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. used to be only a racecar driver. Whether he realizes it or not, that changed the day he became romantically involved with a celebrity. When Danica Patrick announced in January that they were a couple, that made Stenhouse a bit of a celebrity, too.

Which is why it was news -- racing news and celebrity news -- when Stenhouse was part of an on-track incident at Charlotte Motor Speedway that led to a crash between Patrick and defending Cup champion Brad Keselowski during the Coca-Cola 600 on May 26. The story was picked up by national entertainment news outlets E! News and Us Weekly, prompting Stenhouse to blame the Nascar media for creating a firestorm.

Michael Jordan gets one right

Four years ago, I wrote that Michael Jordan couldn't save basketball in Charlotte. His track record for building a team was dismal and he showed little desire to use his celebrity to charm the disinterested and angry masses.

Four years later, Jordan is responsible for the 2011-12 team that posted the worst winning percentage in the history of the N.B.A., followed by this past season's version that produced the second-worst record in the league.

If you're going to lose, you better at least be likeable in the community. But the Bobcats haven't been able to pull that off, either. There are no beloved stars on the roster. There is no history to fall back on, at least, no history to this franchise that anyone cares to revisit. There isn't much to like, as the empty seats make clear.

So Jordan has done the only thing he could do to make this team embraceable in the community again: He has decided to rename the franchise the Hornets. For the few who don't know, that's the name of the former N.B.A. franchise here before it moved to New Orleans in 2002.

Some will no doubt look to the bottom line and question whether it is a cost-effective move for the franchise. Yes, it will be an expensive proposition. But Jordan really doesn't have much choice at this point.

Would you want your daughter to play for Mulkey?

This is what parents and potential recruits should know about Baylor women's basketball coach Kim Mulkey: The players are less important than the program and less important than Mulkey. At least that much was apparent in former player Brittney Griner's recent interview with ESPN The Magazine and espnW.com.

According to Griner, she made clear she was a lesbian when originally recruited by Mulkey to play there.

"I was like, 'I'm gay. I hope that's not a problem,' " Griner said she told Mulkey at the time, "and she told me that it wasn't."

The three things I did not write about Nascar

There has been a lot of reaction to my column from Tuesday on Nascar's silence regarding Jason Collins, some of it supportive and some of it ugly. That's OK. My hope with my blog is to start a discussion. In that regard, I feel as if I succeeded.

As one respected national reporter wrote to me this morning, "it clearly struck a chord, and that's the job of any great columnist, right? If you're not stoking emotions, you're not doing your job." I was also heartened to receive a thumbs up on facebook from Robert Lipsyte, the author and longtime columnist and writer for The New York Times who was recently named the new ombudsman for ESPN.

I am happy to defend my words, but too many people are inserting their own meaning into those words and asking me to defend their interpretation of my column. I can't possibly do that.

So I want to point out three things I did not write:

Nascar's silence on Jason Collins says it all

Monday was a groundbreaking day for all sports, not just basketball, when N.B.A. player Jason Collins became the first professional athlete in a major team sport to come out as gay. It was a moment that many had been preparing for and anticipating for a while, a door that finally opened and began a process that will make it easier for others to come out in all sports someday.

And it wasn't hard to see the immediate impact of that opening sentence in the Sports Illustrated column authored by Collins: "I'm a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I'm black. And I'm gay."

President Barack Obama personally called Collins and First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted about it; President Bill Clinton put out a statement. Athletes and others in the N.B.A. and N.F.L., Major League Baseball and tennis, among others, were quick to show their support as well with tweets and official statements from Kobe Bryant to the Boston Red Sox, who invited Collins to throw out the first pitch at a game at Fenway Park.

What was missing from this national conversation? Nascar.

Don Cherry should be banned from the locker room

I've had my share of battles with coaches and athletes over the years, from Scotty Bowman and Keith Primeau in Detroit to Carolina Panthers wide receiver Steve Smith. If you're a sports reporter long enough, and you ask tough questions or write stories that challenge the status quo, that's going to happen.

But as far as I know, the disagreements have never been about my mere presence in a locker room. Except once.

So when I heard the outrageous-just-to-be-outrageous hockey broadcaster Don Cherry had said on Saturday night that women don't belong in a locker room, I couldn't help but think of the only athlete in all the decades I've been in this business who made the locker room an ugly issue.

The day I went over a cliff

I wrote this last year after hiking through the Utah wilderness with Nick Smith of Seldom Seen Adventures. It is already posted on his site, but I wanted to repost a version of it here for those who might be interested in traveling off the beaten path:

When I hired Nick Smith to create an adventure, I never expected him to push me off of a cliff.

Then again, I didn’t know what to expect when I discovered SeldomSeenAdventures.net while planning a trip to southwest Utah in April. I knew I wanted to see the extraordinarily beautiful Zion National Park and Mars-like Bryce Canyon while I was there. Trail maps could guide me through easily enough.

Still, I wanted to see something more of Utah than that. But as a novice hiker with little sense of direction and no appreciable survival skills — unless you count crossing the streets of New York City — I had no interest in getting lost in a remote canyon somewhere. So I needed a guide who knew the area to take me there. After reading through SeldomSeenAdventures.net, I chose Nick. My only instruction to him: I wanted to see something I would never encounter on those much traveled hikes through the national parks. And I wanted to live to tell it.

The rest was up to Nick.

This is my f*cking blog!

Count me among the masses relieved to read that the F.C.C. would not come down hard on David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox for that little speech he gave before Saturday's game.

With the lockdown over, the second alleged Boston Marathon bomber captured and the games allowed to go on once again, Ortiz addressed the crowd at Fenway Park and told them, "This jersey that we wear today, it doesn't say 'Red Sox,' it says 'Boston.' We want to thank you Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, the whole police department for the great job they did this past week. This is our f*cking city."

After all Boston had been through in the last week, Ortiz gave them a reason to finally smile and laugh again.

And maybe, for once, Big Brother understood how important that was to the people there. Because the F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, actually posted on Twitter Saturday afternoon,