Wide World of Balls - So Phelps Is a Jock

We understand, you missed the Olympics and baseball and some very sad football news, mostly because of Lollapalooza. Just because you don’t have time for sports, doesn’t mean you can’t listen to hours and hours of Red Hot Chili Peppers live, does it? It doesn’t. Still, don’t sweat it. VICE has the latest nuggets from this past week covered. If it’s not in here, it’s at a poetry slam.

Olympics:
- Michael Phelps has retired from Olympic competition as the most decorated athlete in the history of the games, beating some old commie woman who used to wrestle or something. Everyone likes to shit on Phelps for being a square, but what do they expect? He’s an Olympian! He lives at the pool. What, do you want him to curate an All Tomorrow’s Parties? Jesus, get over yourselves.

-The US Olympic basketball team had a scare by almost losing to Lithuania on Saturday. Luckily, LeBron James saved the day and they won. It’s a good thing America loves LeBron, right?

- A bunch of badminton teams threw their round-robin games so that they’d receive more favorable seeds when important action started. This isn’t a big deal—basketball teams do it all the time—but it was a bad look, and fans were booing and so on and so forth. The IOC freaked the fuck out and bounced those teams from competition. Good riddance! Will this happen again when Brazil and Spain play in men’s hoops? Winner plays the US, and no one wants that.

- Some dude opened a brothel so he could pay for his Olympic training.

- Missy Franklin, US swimmer and high school student, has passed up millions and millions of dollars in endorsements so she can retain her amateur status and swim competitively in college. This is a stupid idea. What if she slips on a banana peel? She’ll never see a check that big in her life if she gets injured. Franklin says she’s looking forward to the college recruiting process, which is something only a 16-year-old would say, though to be fair, she probably won’t injure herself in college. Still, there’s a chance.

Baseball:
- Mike Trout is basically the best player in baseball right now, and if not right now, then maybe ever? OK, not ever, but he rules and is pretty much the fastest player in the big leagues, which is awesome since he’s built like a tank. He’s on pace to win the MVP and Rookie of the Year, which hasn’t been done in a hot minute.

- The Phillies are terrible this year, though have a shot to be good in 2013. For some reason—I’ll get to that in a sec—they placed Cliff Lee, one of their better starters, on waivers. The reason is because basically every player in baseball is placed on waivers. Teams can claim those players, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

- The Pirates are good! That’s insane. They have maybe the best player in baseball. Basically, cats and dogs living together.

NFL:
- Sad news here with Andy Reid’s 29-year-old son found dead on Sunday. Reid, longtime coach of the Eagles, a notoriously perplexing and simultaneously under- and over-performing and constantly-retooling team, was in recent years subject to calls for retirement and what-have-you from idiots because his kids were in the news for getting arrested and doing bad stuff. You’d think a kid dying would seemingly put football to the backburner, but that’s not how things work.

- Warren Sapp, not better known as QBKilla, is bankrupt, and is selling his Air Jordans. Dark.

@samreiss_