Into the weekend: Materazzi is back

Recovering from the birthday hooley at JABS Mansion, I'm afraid the blog has been a bit spotty the last couple days (picking cheesies out of the carpet and scraping Orange Crush off the walls is a little time consuming).
So we're going straight into the weekend here, after watching all of about 30 seconds of this morning's Ryder Cup coverage on TSN -- "The Ryder Cup is underway!" said the excited announcer. Tiger put his tee shot into the water. Colin Montgomerie strode up next, looking more and more like good old Keith Appleyard, the crowd went nuts ...

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

The glamour, the excitement, the shoes: It's the Ryder Cup.

And off that bit of excitement, that's enough golf, thank you. On to some links and the usual other stuff before the fumigators arrive:

One last look. Marco Materazzi, and his suddenly bulletproof, buttproof chest, has a new shoe commercial out in Italy.

One last read. The Guardian's Richard Williams has seen the Zidane movie that JABS has been all over, and likes it just as much. It opens in the UK next week:

Any conventional film about Zidane would include the astonishing 20-yard volley that won Real the European Cup final on its return to Hampden in 2003, plus the two he scored with his head in the 1998 World Cup final. It would examine, through the use of super-slo-mo, the technical tricks that were particular to him, such as the roulette, in which he deceived a defender by turning his body through 360 degrees, dragging the ball forward with the sole of his boot while in mid-pirouette, facing the way he had come. It would analyse the gift of balance that enabled this heavy-set man to move with such lightness and grace. It would investigate his childhood among north African immigrants in a poor quarter of Marseille; it would catalogue the transfers that took him from Cannes to Bordeaux as a teenager, then to Juventus of Turin and finally to Madrid.
This new film does none of these things.

That's undoubtedly why the guy in the Zidane shirt was among the few walkouts during last Friday's screening at the Varsity (oh, and one more link regarding a release of the film here in NA from one of the co-directors: "This film could certainly play on pay-per-view TV. But we're hoping for theatrical." Let's hope.)

One more film note. Katie Holmes to play Posh in a new Becks biopic? (Thanks to The Offside.)

Weekend assignment. Another tough question tackling the prickliest issues of the day, but that's what we do. Picking up where J.E. Skeets at The Basketball Jones left off, is Pryzbilla the highest Scrabble-scoring name in pro sports today?
UPDATE: Eagle-eyed reader John Richardson sends in this handy dandy score generator and an early entry that rolls into the lead: Wozniewski.

Sports around town. The OHL season is back on, and Brampton and St. Mike's play their home openers tonight. And on Sunday morning all over the place, it's the Scotiaback Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

Watching. Toronto at Calgary, Saturday, 7 p.m., CBC. Forget Ricky Williams. I wanna see Pinball in Coppley and Malcolm in Canali (good catch, Boatmen Blog).

Punters' corner. Ready or not, here's your recreational-purposes-only picks. After a second straight 2-3 week, it's time for a shakeup. I've brought in my dawg Jinks to make the choices, either kibble (visitors) or cookies (home):

BUFFALO (-5 1/2) over Jets. The dawg is nuts.
Cincinnati (+1 1/2) over PITTSBURGH. The dawg is hungry!
Jacksonville (+7) over INDY. The dawg is calming down, a little.
Chicago (-3) over MINNESOTA. Jinks barked on this one. Best bet, that.
N.Y. Giants (+3 1/2) over SEATTLE. This is pushing it. I'd never make this pick. Two in a row on the road? Plaxico would have something to say about that.

 

Comments

[Julian]

I guess Nike was trying to be ironic by having Materazzi stand up to trucks and football players when we all saw him crumple like a folding chair almost before Zizou made contact.

POW! Right in the spaghetti basket!

As an aside, any idea where/when we will be able to see that Zidane film? I heard that a German filmmaker made a similar film about George Best.

p.s. Seattle is overrated. Good pick.

[cy]

If I hear anything about the film coming over here, you'll be the first to know. The Best film you mentioned, Julian, is called Football as Never Before - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065753/ - it was shown in Berlin during the World Cup, but I never saw it.
And I'll pass along to Jinks your support for his Giants pick.