The Linkz of the Week are your weekly walk through the world of sportswriting. Have a link? Think it's the best thing ever? No? Don't be so hard on yourself, I'm sure it's not that bad. It is that bad? Oh well, send it to me anyway at tdonegan@gwu.edu and I'll probably post it.

1. “Yo, how much you bench?”

 Not as much as this guy. The Tennesseean is reporting that Jacques McClendon, a Junior offensive linemen for the Tennessee Volunteers absolutely destroyed his team’s record by bench pressing 645 pounds. That’s like 3 1/2 of me or one of these mutant monsters.  Unbelievable. His next challenge? Yoga—to improve flexibility. Isn't that precious. 

2. Tom Verducci REALLY Loves What That Tom Verducci Guy Has To Say About Baseball

SI asked some of their top writers to name their top 5 baseball articles that have graced Sports Illustrated’s pages over the years. And, of course, four of Tom Verducci’s top five were written by—who else?—Tom Verducci. None of the other writers picked a single piece they themselves had written. Way to go, Tom.

3. Bob Ryan Cleans Out the Old Desk Drawer That Is His Mind (courtesy to Boston Sports Media Watch)

Bob Ryan had a great piece in the Globe the other day he calls an “emptying out the desk drawer of the sports mind,” that is basically just a snapshot into his views on a number of issues around the sports world. A few excerpts:

^{Can't decide between "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded," and "It gets late early out there" as my favorite Yogi-ism, but the former does have the benefit of being perfectly understandable to anyone, not just sports fans familiar with left field in (The Original) Yankee Stadium.”}

^{Item: Anheuser-Busch has been bought out by Belgian behemoth InBev. Are you ready for Stella Artois Stadium?}

^{Terry Francona should go win No. 3 and then quit before we're forced to write his obit. This man is simply not healthy.}

4. Darius Miles Puts Acting Career On Hold, Could Play In Green

Ian Thomsen writes a great Inside the NBA column-esque thing for SI.com and he has a really good piece on Darius Miles, the former high school standout and Clippers first-round-pick who injured his knee two years ago and had his injury deemed “career-ending” by the NBA. Well he is back and healthy and working out for your beloved Celtics. He has a lot of baggage but no moreso than a lot of NBA players (To think, Caron Butler spent six months in prison). He’s spent two years getting healthy and rehabbing when he could’ve been sitting on his ass collecting close to 10 million a year that the Blazers guaranteed him.

He’s a bargain-basement grab for anyone who is willing to take a flyer on him and I think two years coupled with the strong team mentality the Celtics have built could be enough to turn his career around if he stays healthy. There’s not a lot of options for the Cs at SF and none more talented than Miles.

Besides, if I have to see him in another movie like The Perfect Score, I might lose it.

5. Former Olympic Runner Leaves Difficult Legacy in Kenya

Absolutely phenomenal piece by Wright Thompson for ESPN.com’s E-Ticket about Kenyan runner Lucas Sang who was a hero to his country and celebrated throughout his area who was killed during recent tribal violence. Details are conflicting, some say he was leading a raiding party that burned houses and villages, others say he was just going out to collect diesel and was caught by a mob. Still, the story is well told by Thompson and it opens a window to a violent world:

^{“If you know a man's goodness, you can have faith in it. But this? Fans once lined the streets of Nairobi to welcome Sang home from the Olympics. How can such a man get hacked to death in a cornfield? By people who once cheered as he ran past? Brother Colm cannot understand what happened to his long-time friend.}

^{"Reason didn't prevail," he says, in his living room high in the mountains above Eldoret. "Everybody just turned into other people."}

6. "Finally 17" Celtics T-Shirt

All Souled Out, a custom footwear and apparel company, has released this t-shirt celebrating the Celtics title. It’s a pretty sick take on the NBA Finals logo and I’m pretty sure is guilty of some sort of trademark infringement, but who cares? David Stern is screwing Seattle and made us pay for Reggie Lewis after he died, I don’t care if somebody makes a buck off of him.

7. Josh Beckett Likes to Play Catch (courtesy Scott’s Shots)

A nice piece for ESPN The Magazine by Matthew Waxman who learned that Beckett has worked with Division III Trinity College’s starting catcher Zach Fregosi during the All-Star Break and during the offseason when he’s trying to get some extra throws in. The piece details how Beckett’s is just one of the guys with the catcher and his college teammates.

8. Examining Where the Protester and the Athlete Parted Ways

Another piece from ESPN The Magazine, this one about what the legacy of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the athletes who raised two black-gloved fists for the world to see at the Olympics 40 years ago. It’s a thought-provoking piece and it makes me wonder how people can watch the Olympics and say it should be “just about the events.”

The Olympics are a celebration of everything that binds us together as human beings; it’s about pushing the limits of our species and what we can accomplish. The Olympics are all about challenging the boundaries in ourselves and our society. If protest that tries to bring a higher quality of life to people worldwide doesn’t belong at the Olympics, where does it belong?

9. Classic Link of the Week: “The Silent Season of a Hero” by Gay Talese, Esquire, 1966

It’s not everyday you get to read a piece that changed sportswriting forever. I first read this piece about Joe DiMaggio in the anthology The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by Glenn Stout and the late David Halberstam. Halberstam raves about this piece in the book, about the time he first picked it up and realized that this longer format type of sports writing (intentional separation there) was on “another level” from what everyone else in the business was doing.

10. Link of the Week: Double Amputee Will Not Run For South Africa at Olympics

You may wonder why I made this my link of the week. I’m not trying to rub in the fact that the sprinter, Oscar Pistorius, nicknamed the “Blade Runner” for his carbon fiber legs, failed to qualify for the Olympics in the 400 meter relay. I’m posting this because he wasn’t disqualified for his disability. This is a man who had both feet and part of his shins removed as a baby and, 20 years later, missed being on his country’s Olympic team by seven tenths of a second.

I don’t think he’s the most talented runner they had and there are certainly questions about the difficulty of running on his carbon fiber legs, but the simple fact that he was disqualified for nothing more than his ability to go 400 meters on two legs says a hell of a lot about where we are as a people.