Greg Couch Posts

HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. -- You park your car, walk in the side door of the Hoffman Estates Community Center in suburban Chicago, and the first thing you see is some gray-haired, slightly hunched guy standing under a sign that says, "Senior Center. 50+ club."

Chris Chelios is not aging well.

What? Oh, wait, that wasn't Chelios. Chelios was around the corner, a mere 47 years old, still 26 months from 50+ eligibility, not playing checkers, but instead playing in a hockey scrimmage with the Chicago Wolves minor league hockey team.

PITTSBURGH -- When you go to a Pittsburgh Steelers game, you absorb the vibe. You live it. You expect a day of face-stomping, mouth-smashing and butt-kicking, and you walk away with the satisfying feeling that you've just beaten someone up. It's all about identity.

So it was a little disturbing to see 65,000 people leave Heinz Field Sunday all limping, hunched over, bleeding and holding their arms to their sides. The Steelers are supposed to be the team providing the stomping, smashing and kicking, not the face, the mouth and the butt.

And the last team you would expect to be pummeling the defending Super Bowl champs? Not just beating them, but pounding them? The Cincinnati Bengals.

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PITTSBURGH -- It's over. There is nothing left. Charlie Weis is done at Notre Dame.

The International Tennis Federation has completed its two-month "investigation'' into Serena Williams' f-bomb-laced, threatening tirade toward a line judge on worldwide TV at the U.S. Open. Her "punishment'' should come Monday or Tuesday.

I would give just about anything to see the notes from this "investigation.'' The quote-marks show that this was just a theoretical thing, anyway. As in, it took two months to find "justice.''

This whole thing has been a sham. Will Williams be suspended from the next major, the Australian Open in January?

"I don't think [an Australian Open ban] would make much sense, because it would penalize the people handing out the punishment,'' ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti said. "For the grand slam committee to exclude her from a grand slam doesn't seem likely.

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The head of the World Anti-Doping Agency acknowledged that it's too late to punish Andre Agassi for his failed drug test from 1997, darned statute of limitations. But WADA said it still wants some punishment, anyway. Maybe for Agassi's lies to doping officials, which he admits in his book? Maybe for perjury?

Doubtful. But I knew tennis would get its pound of flesh, anyway, as Agassi has embarrassed the sport's governing bodies. What I didn't know was how fast they would get that flesh.

Or that they would take it from Yanina Wickmayer.

She was banned Thursday for a year for a doping offense. It wasn't for failing a test, or apparently even for missing one, though details still aren't out. It was because she failed to report three times to doping officials over the past 18 months where she would be.

Here we go again. How many stories like this are we going to get?

Stories of senseless tennis violence. And what do you get when this happens?

Ray Moore and George Morell know. Moore was wrestled to the ground by a cop, a knee in his back while he was cuffed, apparently bleeding. Both were arrested, and spent the bulk of the day in jail.

"There were five cop cars there,'' said Donna Morell, George's wife. "Five. My husband and Ray were in different cells all day, in solitary.''

Surely, they deserved it.

"They're in their 80s, you know,'' she said.

You're being handled, played, manipulated. I am, too.

Where is Andre Agassi? Why hasn't he come out in the past 72 hours to tell us that drugs weren't the greatest thing to happen to him, no matter what his book excerpts seem to say? Why has this man who has done so many great things with his school for disadvantaged kids, let the message just hang out there?

Drugs fun. Hate tennis. Bad relationship with Dad.

If he wanted to clear his soul, to confess to his sins, then why did he need be paid $5 million to do it.

She threatened a player, didn't try most of the year, famously threatened a line judge and was thrown out of a match.

The other thing Serena Williams did in 2009 was this:

She won the year-end No. 1 ranking. It became official Wednesday in Doha, Qatar, at the WTA Championships when Dinara Safina, the current No. 1 Williams was trying to overcome, withdrew from the tournament with a bad back. It guaranteed that Williams would finish the year No. 1 for the first time since 2002.

Two more things: She deserves it.

And it's the best thing for tennis.

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Image is everything. That what's Andre Agassi told us from the start. It has been the headline to his career, his life.

He went from the punk kid, all image and no substance, to the grown man philanthropist, creating, running and also raising funds for a charter school for disadvantaged kids.

He grew up so well, cleaned up so nicely, and won a humanitarian award in September at the U.S. Open. Now he comes back with this:

Agassi writes in his autobiography that he regularly used crystal meth on tour in 1997 when he was 27 years old. He failed the tennis tour's drug test, and then lied his way out of it by saying he had accidentally taken a drink from a glass of his assistant who, he said, used to spike his own drinks with the drug.

Why, Andre? Why did you do it? Why did you feel the need to say it? What happens to your image now?

YPSILANTI, Mich. -- Stan Parrish wins again. He won in 1986, and now he won again Saturday.

In between? Well, no. No wins as a head coach. But on Saturday, Parrish, the head coach at Ball State put an end, briefly at least, to 23 years and six days of head coaching pain.

Ball State 29, Eastern Michigan 27.

That's the last two years of Reagan, two Bushes, one Clinton and closing in on a year of Obama without leading a team to victory.