Larry Brown Sports

Larry Brown Sports got the chance to visit with Utah Jazz rookie forward Gordon Hayward on Tuesday. Last year Hayward led five-seed Butler to the NCAA Tournament Championship Game against Duke as a sophomore. Hayward, who says he eats Subway on gamedays, is offering to buy 5,555 meatball pepperoni subs for Subway customers if a five-seed can win it all this March Madness. The odds are against the fives, but we visited with Hayward to hear his thoughts on who could get it done, how his rookie season is going, the changes with the Jazz, and whether he’s cooperating with the rookie hazing. We really started getting warmed up towards the end of the interview so make sure you read the whole way through.

LBS: I know you’re repping the five seeds for Subway, which one do you think has the best chance to advance?

GH: I played Kansas State last year and they’re very long and athletic, and they have a great guard in Jacob Pullen who can lead them down the stretch. That’s the five I think that has the best chance.

LBS: You were really able to build your draft stock in the tournament. Take me back to last year when you were thinking about entering the draft. How tough of a decision was that for you?

GH: It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make. Coming from a program like Butler where they do things the right way, there’s great people there, it’s 20 minutes from my house and I had my friends and family there, so it was a very difficult decision.

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Former UNLV All-American and NBA All-Star Larry Johnson was the inspiration for the famous Grand Ma Ma character Converse marketed. Starring in the commercials that promoted “React Juice,” Grand Ma Ma was easily one of the most successful sneaker campaigns the NBA has seen. Years after Johnson’s NBA career came to an end, the Grand Ma Ma character is still beloved by basketball fans. Larry has used it promote a new line of Sweet Teas his beverage company is producing. Folks on the East Coast can begin to look for Grand Ma Ma’s Southern Sweet Tea on the shelves, and before long the hope is to have it in stores across the country.

Larry Brown Sports was lucky enough to talk with the former UNLV, Hornets, and Knicks star and we covered a wide range of subjects including the National Championship Game against Duke, his association with Converse and how a slight from Nike began that relationship, his feelings on coaching, and much more.

Larry Brown Sports: Recently Paul Silas said that Michael Jordan could still score 20 points a game in the NBA, what about you, how’s your game?

LJ: No, I can’t get two rebounds or score any points now. I left it all on the court when I played, my back is so bad.

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LBS had the pleasure of speaking with legendary bull rider and co-founder of Professional Bull Riding, Ty Murray, during Super Bowl week. We talked to the King of the Cowboys about his experiences with Super Bowls, bringing the PBR to Cowboys Stadium, and how impressed he is with Jerry’s big screen HD TV. You’ll be surprised to hear in which cities the PBR is most popular (hint: it’s not cities in Texas). I asked Murray if he was surprised with how well the PBR has done and how much its grown, and we talked about prize money and how it’s made some sports less competitive. He also said compared to bull riders, football players are wussies.

But what really got Ty chapped was the lack of coverage of PBR on the four-letter network. PBR is televised on rival networks NBC and Versus, but he still feels it should be on SportsCenter with all the other sports. I know I wouldn’t mind seeing a few bull riding highlights mixed in.

Here’s a sample of what Ty had to say, and you can listen to our interview below.

“We’re not going to rest until you turn on SportsCenter and can see something on a regular basis that has to do with the world of Professional Bull Riding. The fact that the ESPYs don’t even consider us in the ESPYs, I feel like that’s something that has to be changed. I don’t know how you can claim to understand sports and what’s involved in athletics and not see us in that realm. You’re trying to take something that’s physically and athletically speaking very hard, but you couple in the fact that it’s the most dangerous sport, from an athlete’s perspective, that really makes something that’s difficult already even more difficult when you factor in how dangerous it is.”

To hear more from Ty, listen to our interview below:

Interview Part I
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Interview Part II
[audio:http://larrybrownsports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/tymurray-part-b.mp3|titles=tymurray part b]

LBS had the pleasure of speaking with two-time gold medalist and eight-time Olympic medalist speed skater Apolo Ohno Thursday. Ohno is in the Fort Worth area for Subway and announced he will be competing in the upcoming NYC Marathon, accepting Jared’s challenge. We talked about a number of subjects including preparing for the marathon, preparing for the Olympics, and of course we had to ask him his thoughts on the Michael Phelps bong pictures that came out two years ago.

Ohno has a busy upcoming schedule — he’s in Ft. Worth, going to New York, Las Vegas, and then he has a few other stops on the West Coast all in the next few days. He said he’ll be rooting for the Steelers on Sunday because of his trainer, John Schaeffer, who’s a Steelers fan. During our conversation, what stood out most to me about Ohno were his values of hard work and being a proper role model.

I was curious how much being an Olympian was the product of talent and how much came from working hard. Ohno told me it’s a combination of both, saying “talent can get you on the right track, but it doesn’t mean you’re doing it the right way.”

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Oney Guillen is best known as the son of outspoken White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillen. Oney was drafted by the organization in ’07, played two seasons, and then began working in the team’s scouting department last season. He was looking forward to his second season in the team’s front office until a twitter controversy arose, leading to his resignation on Friday.

Talking with Oney on Saturday, you could sense his frustration in what he called a contradiction with the White Sox organization, “You want to keep stuff private but you approve a reality show for the team. You say you want to keep stuff in-house but you agree to do a reality show. It’s contradictory, don’t you think?”

Oney was confused because he never felt he was critical about the organization on his twitter account and because he had been posting tweets for over a month without the team telling him to stop. While he did concede that the organization probably wouldn’t want him to influence decisions with his tweets (he made several positive remarks about Andruw Jones and even advocated for re-signing A.J. Pierzynski), he was disappointed that they never approached him to talk about the issue.

“I didn’t tweet anything bad at all,” Guillen lamented. “I only heard stuff through the grapevine. If they had asked me to close down the account I would have but they never said anything.” Oney said he felt there was a double-standard because other members within the organization have twitter accounts and that didn’t seem to be a problem. He felt he was being watched under a microscope because of who his dad was, not because of what he was writing.

Tension seemed to have been brewing within the White Sox organization the past few months. First, the team grumbled when Ozzie Guillen signed up for a twitter account. Then, when Ozzie had plans to expand his thoughts onto a website, the team nixed the plans. Oney’s resignation seemed to be the culmination of mounting problems that could last into the season, but it’s his final words that will ring true for most Sox fans, “Why are we worrying about what a 24-year-old kid is twittering instead of winning games?”

Opening day is only two weeks away and suddenly a reality show doesn’t look like the best of ideas for a club that’s already engaged in a soap opera.

Typically I like to keep things pretty sports-centric around here, but since like 20% of the country watches Dancing with the Stars when it’s on TV, I figure some of you have to be one of those one-in-five watching (unless we all make up the other shmoes watching SportsCenter). Anyway, I had the pleasure of speaking with Karina Smirnoff, one of the best dancers in the world. She just made FHM’s 100 Sexiest list, and she’s dating A.C. Slater from Saved by the Bell. Karina’s in the middle of her fourth season on the show and has been partnered with boxing star Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the past. I asked her what it was like for Floyd to take orders from a woman, how tough this whole dancing thing really is, and how much funny business goes on behind the scenes. Our interview follows, and make sure to vote for Karina Monday night and Tuesday morning (text 3405). And if you’re not going to vote, just remind your wife, girlfriend, and kids to do so. Besides, do you really want Jason Taylor or Kristi Yamaguchi whatever to win? Didn’t think so. OK, check out the interview …

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One of the best writers and bloggers out there, if not busiest, is Michael David Smith. Smith writes regularly for FanHouse, Pro Football Talk, the New York Sun, Football Outsiders and FoxSports.com. He has also written about football for the New York Times, the Orange County Register, Deadspin, The New Republic Online and ESPN the Magazine, and he appears regularly on WSCR radio in Chicago. He has contributed to several books, including the annual Pro Football Prospectus. His weekly feature, Every Play Counts, was described by the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix as “packing more game analysis into a single column than many beat writers display over a full season,” and in August SI.com named him one of its 10 notable sports media people of the month. Smith is a graduate of the University of Illinois and lives in Chicago with his wife, a lawyer. Somehow I was lucky enough to pull MDS away from one of his several gigs to answer some questions about himself and his thoughts on the industry. Our interview follows.

1. Take us through your career path. When did you start writing about sports and how and when did you get hooked up with all your current gigs?

I started writing at the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois, during my freshman year there, 1995. I hardly ever wrote about sports, though: The football team was horrible, the basketball team was mediocre and I was more into writing news and feature stories. I worked there all four years I was in college and was the editor in chief my senior year, and it was a great experience.

Although I wasn’t on the sports staff at the student paper, I did, during my junior year, start sending around a weekly e-mail to my friends about my thoughts on the NFL. I really don’t know what inspired me to do that, and I’m sure a large portion of my friends just deleted the e-mail every week without reading it, but some people told me they really liked it, and I knew writing about the NFL was something I wanted to do. At that time, though, I thought it would require the traditional journalism career path: You take a job at a small paper covering high school sports or something, and you work your way up. I didn’t find that particularly appealing.

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